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A War on Truth?
by Andrew Gilligan - October 11
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When they said it was going to be a different kind of war, they may also have had the war of information in mind. With no independent journalists on the ground it is arguable that the temptation to mislead the public is even greater in this war than in any of its predecessors.
For the last 200 years foreigners have been coming to Peshawar to press their ears up against the all too often closed wall of Afghanistan. It's not difficult to see why. There’s plenty of Afghan frontier atmosphere here - smugglers’ bazaars, donkey carts in the streets, all that sort of thing.
But there's not such a good supply of reliable information. Con men claiming to have connections with the Mujahedeen are around every corner. In the 1980s the CIA famously wasted a fortune here backing the wrong horse in the fight against the Russians and now, with the total closure of Afghanistan to Westerners, the scope for misinformation by both sides in this conflict has never been greater.
We saw this, in a small way, with the story of the first civilian casualty of the bombing to make the difficult journey from Afghanistan. It's a trip that involves negotiating a closed border, usually by bribing the Pakistani guards. So not many have yet made it. There's no doubt that Mohammed Raza, from a village near Jalalabad, suffered a neck injury from flying shrapnel. I saw Mr Raza and I talked to the doctors treating him. But the stories of the relatives who brought him across the border to the hospital in Peshawar differed rather drastically.
Ali Ahmed, Mr Raza's cousin, told us that he'd been one of 40 people injured in his village alone including many children. Three people he said had been killed in the same attack. They tried to take him to the hospital in Jalalabad but the scene was "catastrophic", with panic stricken women and children and no medicine to be had. The streets of Jalalabad, said Mr Ahmed, were full of frightened people and normal life was on hold.
Mohamed Samadi, Mr Raza's uncle, made the same journey but for him it seemed to be an entirely different trip. "Nobody else had been injured in Mohammed Raza's village", said Mr Samadi, "apart from some very minor cuts and bruises". The streets of Jalalabad were calm and everything was going on exactly as normal. "Is this the best the Americans can do?" Mr Samadi asked, "we went all through 10 years with the Russians and it was much worse than this." A clue to Mr Samadi's political allegiance might come in his praise for the Taliban authorities’ handling of the situation.
The Taliban aren't really into spin-doctoring as such, but pro-Taliban factions in Peshawar, do appear to be trying to control the information flow. When we tried to interview some fruit traders who'd come across the border, we were chased away by Taliban sympathisers. Yet the near invisibility of the war in Afghanistan will work to the advantage of the US military alliance too. Peter Almond was formerly Defence Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and is now Chairman of the Defence Correspondents' Association. He says the absence of western journalists from the combat zone gives both sides the opportunity to draw whatever picture of events serve their purposes best. "This is one of the first, if not the first time, that the media hasn't had anybody on the other side. There were people in Baghdad, in Belgrade, who could be taken to attack sites. But in this conflict we have to get all our information from the Pentagon and the MoD. There is no way that we can independently report."
Almond says that Ministry of Defence officials try to avoid lying to journalists - "They don't want to be caught out telling untruths...but as a senior officer has told me, 'my objective is to win and if it means lying to you, I'll do it.'"
Even in wars which weren't so hidden from view, there have been consistent attempts to mislead. On the first day of the Kosovo airstrikes an RAF spokesman told reporters that the operation had "run on rails." It soon turned out that the RAF had failed to drop a single bomb. During the Falklands War, the then Permanent Secretary of the MoD, Sir Frank Cooper, told journalists that there would not be a D-Day style landing. Two days later there was. Most famously, General Norman Schwarzkopf, persuaded the international press - and the Iraqis - that his retaking of Kuwait would come from the sea, thus distracting the enemy from his real plans and probably saving many lives, both allied and Iraqi.
The military analyst Colonel Mike Dewar makes the distinction between lies of embarrassment (such as "run on rails") and lies of deception designed to confuse the enemy, which he says are a classic and vital part of any military campaign. "So a few journalists get their stories wrong. What is that against saving possibly hundreds or thousands of lives?" he says.
The man with the job of mediating between the military's demands and those of the press is Martin Howard, the MoD's Director General of Corporate Communications. I put it to him that in a largely secret, special forces war, such as we now expect to take place in Afghanistan, the MoD need not tell us about anything it does not want to - including failed operations and British deaths. Howard insisted that Britain would be honest about casualties and failures "subject to reasons of operational security." A rather important caveat. "If there's no reason to keep it from you, we won't keep it from you," he said The problem is that many in the military will have no difficulty thinking of reasons to keep things from us.
The test of all this will come when military mistakes are made, and from Washington at least, the spin has already begun: an artful, half-suggestion by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that this week's death of the 4 UN workers in Kabul was caused by Taliban anti aircraft fire falling back to earth. Militarily that is almost preposterous. There may not be donkey carts and carpet salesmen in the Pentagon briefing rooms, but they can be every bit as much the scene of con-artistry as the bazaars of Peshawar.
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