Baktash is right: the one thing southern Afghanistan needs right now is not another propaganda channel. As he so ably puts it, “I would like to ask from the Britain government officials that do you think when people do not have enough food, medicine, water, shoes and cloths for their childrens, they listen to your Twenty million dollar radio station.”
Well, exactly. They think their main problem is IO. It’s one problem, but only one among many—and they don’t seem to get that fixing all those other problems (access to food, water, medicine, education) is itself an IO victory. More on this idea here.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
For information on reproducing this article, see our Terms of Use
{ 1 comment }
Could you not just write things out, instead of talking in acronyms, as if you actually were some buzz-haircut grunt? IO, I have only discovered after a quick google, is Information Operations _ a jargon crap-speak term for blow-smoke-up-the-ass military analysts apparently in too much of a hurry to talk proper English.
Though apologies, of course, if I have just wandered into closed club for cyber-armchair generals (CAG) and bored soldiers online (BSO)?