Taliban softens image to win local favour: NATO officials

KABUL - The Taliban has adopted a new strategy to counter the anti-insurgency mission through a propaganda campaign, overhauling its brutal image to win support of the locals in Afghanistan, NATO officials said.

As part of its sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image and win favour of locals, the Taliban’s spiritual leader Mullah Muhammad Omar has issued a new code of conduct for the insurgents in the country.

The dictates include bans on suicide bombings against civilians, burning down schools, or cutting off ears, lips and tongues.

As the Taliban deepen their presence in more of Afghanistan, they are in greater need of popular support and are recasting themselves increasingly as a local liberation movement, independent of Al Qaeda, capitalising on the mounting frustration of Afghans with their own government and the presence of foreign troops, The New York Times quoted some NATO officials as saying Thursday.

According to villagers, the code had begun to change the way some midlevel Taliban commanders and their followers behaved on the ground. A couple of the most brutal commanders have even been removed by Mullah Omar.

The Taliban’s public relations operation is also increasingly efficient at putting out its message and often works faster than NATO’s.

“The Afghan adaptation to counterinsurgency makes them much more dangerous,” said a senior NATO intelligence official here. “Their overarching goals probably haven’t changed much since 2001, but when we arrived with a new counterinsurgency strategy, they responded with one of their own”.

American and Afghan analysts see the Taliban’s effort as part of a broad initiative that employs every tool they can muster, including the internet technology they once denounced as un-Islamic. Now they use word of mouth, mobile short messaging service and internet videos to get their message out.

“The reason they changed their tactics is that they want to prepare for a long-term fight, and for that they need support from the people; they need local sources of income. So, they learned not to repeat their previous mistakes,” said Wahid Mujda, a former Taliban official.

Bruce Riedel, who led President Obama’s review of the administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, described the information war as critical. “You have to respond in the propaganda war in a very quick time cycle; you can’t put out a statement saying, ‘We’re looking for all the facts before we comment’”.

The new public relations campaign combined with relatively less cruel behaviour may have stemmed some of the anger at the insurgency, which tribal leaders in the south said had begun to rally people against the Taliban.

The effort to change the Taliban’s image began last May when Mullah Omar disseminated his new code of conduct. The Times obtained a copy of the document through a Taliban spokesman. A version of the new code was authenticated last summer after a copy was seized during a raid and its contents corroborated through human intelligence, a senior NATO official said.