McChrystal Amps Up the Propaganda: Spinning Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan, (excerpts) By GARETH PORTER, from: Counterpunch.com

McChrystal Amps Up the Propaganda
Spinning Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan

By GARETH PORTER

At his confirmation hearings two weeks ago, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said reducing civilian deaths from air strikes in Afghanistan was "strategically decisive" and declared his "willingness to operate in ways that minimise casualties or damage, even when it makes our task more difficult."

Some McChrystal supporters hope he will rein in the main source of civilian casualties: Special Operations Forces (SOF) units that carry out targeted strikes against suspected "Taliban" on the basis of doubtful intelligence and raids that require air strikes when they get into trouble.

But there are growing indications that his command is preparing to deal with the issue primarily by seeking to shift the blame to the Taliban through more and better propaganda operations and by using more high-tech drone intelligence aircraft to increase battlefield surveillance rather than by curbing the main direct cause of civilian casualties.

U.S. officials at a NATO conference in Brussels last Friday were telling reporters that "public relations" are now considered "crucial" to "turning the tide" in Afghanistan, according to an AFP story on Jun 12.

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus also referred to the importance of taking the propaganda offensive in a presentation to the pro-military think tank Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) Jun. 11. "When you’re dealing the press," he said, "when you’re dealing the tribal leaders, when you’re dealing with host nations... you got to beat the bad guys to the headlines."

The new emphasis on more aggressive public relations appears to respond to demands from U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan to wrest control of the issue of civilian casualties from the Taliban. In a discussion of that issue at the same conference, Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, said, "We’ve got to be careful about who controls the narrative on civilian casualties."

U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan "see the enemy seeking to take airstrikes off the table" by exaggerating civilian casualties, Barno said. He objected to making civilian casualties an indicator of success or failure, as a CNAS paper has recommended.

The U.S. command in Afghanistan has already tried, in fact, to apply "information war" techniques in effort to control the narrative on the issue. The command has argued both that the Taliban were responsible for the massive civilians casualties in a U.S. airstrike on May 4 that killed 147 civilians, including 90 women and children, and that the number of civilian deaths claimed has been vastly exaggerated, despite detailed evidence from village residents supporting the casualty figures.

Col. Greg Julian, the command’s spokesman, said in late May that a "weapon-sight" video would show that the Taliban were to blame. However, Nancy A. Youssef reported Jun. 15 in McClatchy newspapers that the video in question shows that no one had checked to see if women and children were in the building before it was bombed, according to two U.S. military officials.