Taliban Winning the PR War. What Planet Am I On?
"We don’t negotiate with terrorists" has long been the mantra of western countries, and there’s a good reason for that position. When you enter into negotiations, you officially recognize that the other side’s tactics are effective.
So what lessons do we learn from the Taliban’s legitimacy, gaining steam with every news report that talks about them as a political, rather than military, force to be reckoned with in Afghanistan?
I am not a foreign policy expert (IANAFPE), but I don’t think you have to be an expert to see what’s giving them power.
They are supporting economic development and local jobs. In other words, they’re pro-heroin. In a country that has almost no exports, no cash crops, no economic infrastructure to speak of, they are solidly aligned with "warlords" and tribal leaders who grow and export much of the world’s illegal heroin supply.
I emphasize "illegal" because there’s a very lucrative business in supplying opiates to the pharmaceutical industry, during a world-wide shortage of legal opiates.
(This is how companies lose their way. Their executives stop thinking from the point of view of their customers, and they start thinking about what executive jet would look best in the company colors.)
The allies working to bring military and economic stability to Afghanistan have been blinded from the beginning by adherence to a "drug war" policy that tries to stamp out the supply of illicit drugs, instead of dealing with the problem of addiction in our society. They’re not thinking like Aghanis. They’re thinking like ideological policy wonks.
The war for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people was lost the minute troops started burning poppy fields.
The Taliban aren’t winning a PR war. That war was capitulated a long time ago, when the decision was made to try to destroy Afghanistan’s only profitable crop rather than seeking a way to enable the legitimate harvesting and export of opiates.
(Is your organization trying to figure out how to explain why customers should love its products? How about making products your customers will love, instead. It saves a lot on marketing.)
Instead of explaining to Afghans why the poppy destruction policy is a good idea, maybe the allies could take their blinders off long enough to see the reality of life in Afghanistan. Life is tough. Travel is difficult. Safety involves protection from the local militia or "warlord". In the face of starvation, poppies look pretty good.
If using tanks, automatic weapons, air strikes and flame throwers in drug-growing areas was the way to gain the trust of people, the Canadian army would be launching military assaults all over British Columbia, where the largest cash crop is marijuana.
They’d be insane to even think about it. So why are they surprised the strategy isn’t working in Afghanistan?
Sometimes public relations has nothing to do with spin, and everything to do with reality.
iStock photo by Natalia Klenova.
Tags: war, afghanistan, drugs, poppies, crops, development, public relations, strategy, military, business, trade, international
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POSTED IN: Advocacy, Audiences, Communication Tactics, Ethics, Executive Mindset, PR, Persuasion, Strategic Thinking
7 opinions for Taliban Winning the PR War. What Planet Am I On?
Mal
Sep 13, 2007 at 12:23 am
Actually, under the Taliban illegal opium production in Afghanistan was brought to a screeching halt. Virtually all the opium production was squashed, and imports to the US were non existent.
not until after the US invaded Afghanistan did we start getting a flood on the streets of heroin in the US. In new quantities and strengths as anyone working in recovery can attest. This new flood is not being brought back in the duffel bags of our returning soldiers, There are not enough returning soldiers to account for the market quantities and price drops.
Miranda
Sep 13, 2007 at 6:12 am
Your points are sound when applied to other aspects of the PR battle in the “War on Terror.” It is interesting to point out that until we invaded a country that posed no imminent threat to us, we were on the winning side of that PR war.
Mark Herpel
Sep 13, 2007 at 6:48 am
Good post, that country is the largest supplier of heroin in the world and has been for many years. Its a very difficult situation to control. No easy solutions for this problem. Your reasoning is very sound and you hit the nail on the head…’work this poppy field and you can feed your family for a week or don’t and starve’.
Mark
Eric Eggertson
Sep 13, 2007 at 7:20 am
Thanks for the comments. I know any statement about the situation involves simplifying a complex situation, but there doesn’t seem to have been any consideration about options for the Afghan economy, so the whole thing seems to have been doomed from the start.
Which sucks. I have no love for the Taliban. On human rights, they rate as a poor twelfth choice to improve the quality of life for the average Afghani.
Mal: I don’t doubt there’s some movement of drugs by soldiers, but the Taliban have made a 180 degree turn on opium, and are very involved in supporting poppie production now.
Mark
Sep 13, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Yes, “until we invaded a country that posed no imminent threat to us, we were on the winning side of that PR war” is very interesting…
I think I see it differently. The “threat” didn’t exist until the WTC and thousands of lives disappeared into a horrible pile on the asphalt of NYC. I have a difficult time seeing how we were winning any “PR war” prior to that. How many of us were truly paying any real attention to the atrocities occurring in Afghanistan before that, seriously.
Once the buildings fell and innocent lives were lost, there was no “PR war,” not when you even had the PLO discrediting the perpetrators.
Then we have a country harboring the now fugitive, self-admitted war monger, jihadist scumbag Osama Bin Laden and that country wasn’t an imminent threat to us? I don’t see it that way. They refused to hand that bastard over. Had they handed him over (or allowed us to capture him), then I might consider they weren’t a threat to us but it didn’t happen that way.
I like your take on this heroin deal Eric but there also seems to me that there really is no economic benefit at all for the US in Afghanistan, not like the oil interests in Iraq. I don’t think we really give a damn about Afghanistan. Or about the drug war - that’s been a mockery for decades now.
Richard Becker
Sep 14, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Great piece Eric, as it points to reality.
Currently, we are spending significant amounts of money to create footprints all over the world. We like to believe that they are positive footprints as they will one day lead to appreciative people who will snub their noses at warlords and turn to us instead. Unfortunately, sometimes our presence only fuels the notion that we’re are interesting in building an empire of appreciative people.
Isolationism doesn’t work either. And that’s reality.
All my best,
Rich
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