On Propaganda & The IDF's "PR" Problem

More From James

Howdy,

As a former commander (boring!), I’m happy to let SNCOs do all the work and make me look good in the process—isn’t that the point? Blame them for all problems and claim their good ideas as your own so you can be promoted to the next rank! Occifer 101, people.

You don’t want me to work for a living, do you? It’s too late for that.

I give you some more interesting thoughts from my brother, James.

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As a young military member cultivating Human Intelligence (HUMINT) sources and non-kinetically targeting Taliban commanders in Afghanistan in 2008, I learned many lessons. Nothing is more important than “people tell you information for 1 of 2 reasons: to inform or influence you.” Today, that lesson is more important than ever in the age of social media-based disinformation platforms. The world populace’s inability to discern between the two has been on no greater display than what we see post-Oct 7th.

Propaganda has been used for thousands of years to influence swaths of people by shaping their worldview to one more favorable of your desired end state. There are military specialties dedicated to this discipline. However, the popularity of social media has made placement and access less of a factor, especially considering that a 2018 MIT study found that disinformation travels faster than fact and is 70% more likely to be “retweeted” than its truth-based alternative.

Whether it’s Russian troll farms peddling disinformation in an attempt to influence Western politics or Iran’s (and their proxies and sympathizers) antisemitic narrative, disinformation has had an incredible impact because of social media’s “placement and access.”

How is this reflected in Israel’s war to destroy Hamas? And more importantly, how is it different from the Taliban’s propaganda in the US’s protracted conflict in Afghanistan, which has many parallels to Israel’s ongoing conflict?

In my experience in Afghanistan, I got to see the Taliban’s propaganda in action. One of our Civil Affairs teams conducted a village influence Key Leader Engagement (KLE) in a remote village where we had previously been the first Americans the villagers had ever seen. We were met with goodwill by the village elder when he found out we were Americans because, as he put it, he had shot down many Russian helicopters with American-supplied Stinger missiles during the mujahideen days. We experienced positive rapport every time we entered that village until, one day, we didn’t. Our CA team entered the village, and the locals immediately rebuked us. When they asked what was going on, they were told that we (Americans) had conducted a night raid on their village, taking their elder into custody, and our male soldiers had searched buildings where women and girls were sleeping. When the CA team returned from their mission, the team leader wrote a scathing debrief, accusing our sister unit of violating US policy and poisoning the well of goodwill we were attempting to build upon.

However, our sister unit did not take part in the night raid. The Afghan government had conducted the raid based on intelligence that a Taliban leader was in the village, and they had arrested multiple villagers, including the reported Taliban commander. And when the Taliban got wise of the raid, they immediately went into propaganda mode, taking advantage of the grievances of the locals and aiming their frustration at the US rather than themselves. As the MIT study found about social media’s pace of disinformation distribution, the Taliban beat us to the punch, sowing their desired narrative before the truth could be told. This wasn’t an isolated event, either. In fact, in the final days of my first tour in Afghanistan, I authored a 16-page intelligence report, our “Final Assessment,” which correlated the capture/kills of Taliban commanders, Taliban influence campaigns, and our contracting terrain of positive relations and influence with the villagers. I examined the linkages between those three topics in space and time. I opined that the Taliban was beating us at influence operations because they had better placement and access and could tell lies before we could investigate and find the truth. 

But, unlike Hamas and its Iranian “puppet masters,” the Taliban’s influence campaigns were solely directed at the Afghan populace in an attempt to sever the relationships that we were building to subvert their insurgency.  Iran’s anti-Zionist bloc is waging a global disinformation campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel and especially their response to the Oct 7th terrorist attack where Hamas committed truly unthinkable evil against Israelis. And social media is their platform. Unlike the Taliban, who made Friday prayers at the local mosques their venue to sow disinformation, Hamas sympathizers have used Social Media and have benefited most significantly from TikTok’s content engine, which targets users with content they are most likely to engage with using some incredibly advanced multi-dimensional similarity mapping algorithms that I could nerd out about on for hours, but let’s just say when Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg discovered the TikTok technique he acknowledged that Facebook had missed the mark in their own content and would need to adapt to the TikTok model.

The contrast between the Taliban’s disinformation campaigns local aims vs Iran’s and Hamas’ global ones also explains why, despite the lengths to which the IDF has gone to lessen the civilian impacts of their war to destroy Hamas, their approach is being viewed with more critical examination than the US’s approaches in the 20 years we spent making some of the very same mistakes in Afghanistan. And it reminds me of that lesson from my first tour in Afghanistan. The ones who speak the first narrative about these events are most often seeking to influence, and those who take a deliberate approach to investigate and analyze for facts vs fiction are most often seeking to inform. And we’d all do right to try and keep that in mind as we search for truth in our modern age of social media-based disinformation-filled infosphere.

Until Next Time