Albany Blog

Having just read the twitter guide from the UK Government, I’m reminded of how frustrated teenagers feel when their parents adopt something they feel is their domain.

So twitter has been embraced by the establishment stretching an explanation of how to use twitter to 20 pages (!); is this not a little irritating? (..no less than 2 and no more than 10 tweets per day..unless you’re re-tweeting..) Certainly, many commercial companies now incorporate micro blogging into their publicity and marketing campaigns, perhaps they also have produced reams of guidelines for their staff on ‘how to use’, but surely common sense takes over with Sun Microsystems simple but effective approach of ‘don’t do anything stupid’?

But that Twitter has been deconstructed so carefully for use by government departments suggests that it is now (finally) okay to tweet. Once the preserve of celebrities stuck in lifts, it’s now an acceptable tool of communication in the execution of ‘Public Diplomacy’; twitter has truly come of age! Although a survey on LinkedIn recently concluded that in the US, ‘advertisers believe much more highly in the importance of Twitter than the average consumer, of the 2,025 U.S. adults surveyed, 69% said they didn’t know enough about Twitter to comment on the service.’ Contrast this with Congress near obsession with it!

But surely when the UN Secretary General, the US President and organisations such as the UK Cabinet Office and the FCO ‘tweet’, Public Diplomacy 2.0 has definitely arrived. Yes, it’s a daft name for a micro blog and yes I still feel slightly awkward ‘tweeting’, (I wonder if Ban and Barak still do?) but like a lot of digital diplomacy, it’s very simple and highly effective. To have to engage in no more than 140 characters is a test in itself. Users are faced with the daily challenge of having to compress their thoughts into a tight sentence that both articulates their point but also reflects their character. Because, never forget that one of the unspoken rules of tweeting is to ‘be human’. How do you achieve that in Digital Diplomacy? The “twitterati”, that self appointed soul of this communications medium, fiercely oppose the notion of their medium being hijacked by the Corporate and ‘them’: the system. In their eyes, to de-humanise twitter is to turn it into another corporate toy or a public service information platform; something to avoided!

So how will the establishment cope, how can digital diplomacy be effective in so few words? Could it be the reach and speed of the message, and not so much the content itself? Is it the fact that it’s participating in the conversation, trying to fill that informational space that was once the preserve of the media? It may not be the right message – or even the one we want to hear – but at least it is participating and targeting a demographic of society that is furiously communicating on-line.

Whatever the results of the Government’s guidelines, it can’t be faulted for not trying at digital diplomacy. Be it a domestic or international audience, politics is about communications and all politics is local, it now happens to be 140 characters and on-line..!

Paul Gibbins is Albany’s Senior Project Manager. 

A few days ago South-Central Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government desperately asked its neighbours to send troops to help prevent the capital, Mogadishu, from falling to Al-Shabab forces. The SOS came after a series of attacks killing the minister of security and head of police. The brief hope the appointment of a new government last January offered is quickly vanishing in the same violence that has haunted the country for the past 18 years.

But why is Somalia, whose political turmoil is accompanied by one of the worst humanitarian crisis in recent history, is still largely absent from international media? Why Darfur continues to capture the attention of ordinary people, foreign offices and Hollywood celebrities, despite a dramatic drop of violence in the region, and the raising killings in Somalia pass largely unnoticed?  One obvious answer lies in the reluctance of big powers to engage with yet another crisis in the Islamic world. Another, more subtle, reason has to be found in the way the humanitarian and political mayhem in Somalia have been framed so far.

In the past years, together with a team of international and local researchers, I have been conducting research on the perception of the conflict in Darfur among Darfuris as well as in the international media. The results can be found here (http://www.stanhopecentre.org/2007/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=146&Itemid=1)/ .  This research has helped provide insight on how the narratives constructed around the conflict have dramatically affected the willingness and capacity of the international community to respond to the crisis. I will use these findings, coupled with the sharp insights of Mahmood Mamdani’s recent work on the Darfur crisis and the role of the Save Darfur Coalition, to understand if and how the emergency in Somalia can be framed in a way that has the power to attract the attention it needs.

Since 2005 the Save Darfur Coalition, a group of faith based organizations and NGOs, has advocated a greater involvement of the US and other governments in the conflict in the Western region of Sudan. The coalition has been very successful in gaining international attention.  It has, however, come at the expense of a counter-productive framing the conflict and its actors. This narrative has created victims and villains, forgetting that in too many cases the victims are in the villains’ camp. It has given the opportunity for inexperienced and self-righteous individuals to behave like heroes, just because they were siding with those that were said to be the “good guys”. At the same time, this strategy has been exceptionally capable in putting Darfur on the global map. For Somalia, the challenge that presents itself is: are there ways to construct a narrative of a conflict, as to attract greater attention towards it, without creating a simple story of villains, victims and heroes?

Three aspects of the international media’s coverage of the Darfur crisis suggest possible insights for Somalia.

First. Numbers. In the case of the reporting on the conflict in Darfur, a striking feature was the persistence and consistence of the number of casualties. In our research we analyzed the local and international press and in almost every article about Darfur on the BBC or CNN, even those about recent events, there was a background note with the number of casualties. This is a way to hammer a common and recursive narrative into the head of the reader.

The number of casualties did change over time, but it did it through a sharp and dramatic increase and not incrementally. Until 2007 the official figure commonly cited by the news was 200,000. Staring from 2008 this figure suddenly jumped to 300,000 despite that there were no major clashes in Darfur. Following Mamdani’s argument, the reason of this increase has to be found in the ‘politics of attention’ rather than in the real dynamics of the conflict.   So-called ‘experts’ such as those gravitating around the Save Darfur coalition consistently fed the news media with easy numbers and put pressure on international bodies to use their figures.

In contrast, a brief examination of reports on Somalia (sampling around 200 pieces between May 2008 and May 2009 on google news) I could not find any consistence and clarity among the reported numbers of casualties and displacements. There obviously was coverage of the number of deaths during singular events, and in many cases they were high and striking, 119, 45, 34, but there was hardly ever the background note we could encounter in Darfur. To an occasional reader what was going on in Somalia could be easily interpreted as just a dramatic event in a chaotic region of the world. And thus, nothing to act upon.

A lesson is, simple numbers, repeated with consistence and persistence, are a way to alert readers that the whole story goes beyond the single episodes. This story has to be repeated over and over again, always the same, to reach its tipping point. In the era where blogs constantly increase while foreign correspondents disappear, having the ‘right’ numbers circulating in the blogosphere may make the difference.

A second, and much more problematic, aspect of constructing a narrative depends on how the actors in the conflict are framed. The Save Darfur Coalition decided to play the racism card framing the war as one between Arab Muslims and African Muslims. It created a polarization that was easy to interpret, especially by American audiences that already used to the “war on terror” rhetoric where the Arabs are seen as the enemy. Mamdani, as well as Alex DeWaal, illustrated how this division was more fabricated than real.  Just as large, consistently repeated numbers are important for garnering attention, this dichotomy has also allowed the conflict to be framed as a “genocide”.  This word has been successful in creating a sense of urgency.

I am not arguing for the use of this or similarly powerful words, especially when they camouflage reality for the benefit of a partisan campaign. At the same time, however, I think it is vital to be aware of the mechanisms that are used to construct specific narratives. And it is legitimate to ask if it is possible to produce some that do not fall under the paradox of criminalizing people as to be able to help them.

This task is much more daunting than using simple and recurrent numbers. But there are cases when framing an issue with different words without dramatizing it too heavily has still produced a remarkable change. An example is offered by the campaign against Female Genital Mutilation. For a long time this practice was known only in medical circles as female circumcision or infibulation. Circumcision evoked the image of ancestral practices that could not be judged in the name of an apparently legitimate cultural relativism.  But in 1974 a new campaign begun to re-name the practice “mutilation”, creating a new image in the mind of the people the campaign was targeting. An image strong enough to justify the right to intervene and stop FGM, independently from the latitude where the mutilation was taking place.

Somalia does not yet have a powerful narrative. But if it did, what should it look like? If possible, the narrative would come from those affected by the conflict and would not be built over the heads of those who have been the its victims, but through their personal stories. A narrative that, if possible, has the courage of moving beyond black and white. The US president Barack Obama has demonstrated a commitment to a more nuanced foreign policy. Somalia could greatly benefit from it in the future. Any narrative should take into consideration the effects that it will produce in the future, if it succeeds. In Darfur today it is still difficult to assist the Arab nomads, because for many humanitarian organizations they still are regarded as the aggressors or ‘bad guys’.

A final point concerns the narratives that are not constructed, but emerge through the sufferance displayed by images. What is also known as the CNN effect and had in the Somali crisis of the early 1990s one of the most notable examples. It was images of dying children that in 1992 shocked Western public opinion and convinced the US and the UN to intervene in Somalia to stop the famine and the war that caused it. It was images of an American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 to force president Clinton to withdraw the American contingent from the country. These events exemplify the power of images and world wide coverage, with little context and understanding, to reach audiences’ attention as well as their hearts and pockets. As the example of Somalia illustrates, however, this power is difficult to control, makes foreign policy less thoughtful than what it already is, and condemn local populations to rely to a worrying extent on foreign perceptions. 

Any future UN intervention will certainly be made in these shadows but an early recognition of the importance of appropriately framing the conflict and engaging with the local and international media will have far-reaching and long-lasting implications.

Iginio Gagliardone, Centre for Global Communications Studies.

The author 'talking to the taliban'!

Obama’s Afghanistan strategy review is the West’s last chance to get it right in that troubled country, but will it work? His emphasis on governance and development is the right one – although heaven knows we have heard the rhetoric about a “comprehensive approach” before. What is new is his announcement that the US is ready to talk to “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban. This could be the beginnings of a “Plan B” – because if the strategy accompanying the troop surge fails, the US may one day be forced to talk to Mullah Omar himself, not just the “reconcilables.” And don’t all counter-insurgencies end eventually with dialogue, negotiation, compromise?

The case for a deal with the Taliban leadership – the so-called Quetta shura – is based on Realpolitik. Historically, they have never been a direct threat to the West. Whatever one thinks of their ideology and methods – and these can certainly be brutal – they have never exported terrorism themselves, nor expressed any aspiration beyond the establishment of their version of an Islamic utopia within their own borders. The Realpolitik solution is actually quite simple, therefore: a ceasefire, followed by reconciliation and political power-sharing for the Taliban, in return for a promise to keep Al Qaida out and prevent Afghanistan from reverting to a base for terrorism. In other words, we will leave you alone if you leave us alone.

There is no reason that such a deal should not stick, so long as it is properly handled. I have sat down with the Taliban often enough in the last twelve years to know that the standard Western view of them as a band of intractable zealots, bent on a fight to the death with the hated infidel, is wrong. Their revolution is a work in progress. They often disagree even among themselves about the direction of their future regime, and they are not always too proud to change their minds. I have found that not all Taliban are against girls’ education, for instance. Many are deeply uneasy about their war effort’s reliance on the poppy trade.

A tradition of slow, intellectual deliberation is central to Pashtun culture, and it is the same with the Taliban, a fundamentally Pashtun movement. Many Westerners find the shura system ponderous, with its seemingly endless, tea-fuelled arguments in cushion-filled rooms. Business is always mixed with hospitality, and discussions can certainly meander, but in the end it is not a bad way of reaching a consensus. What is certain is that Pashtuns genuinely love a good debate, especially with foreigners, to whom they are seldom exposed – and that represents a great opportunity for Westerners seeking dialogue.

My last encounter with the Taliban was in Wardak province, south-west of Kabul.
I spent most of a night talking to the province’s senior commander and a dozen of his lieutenants in a safe-house, a remote farmstead backed by snow-clad mountains. The meeting, arranged by a trusted intermediary and sanctioned by Taliban HQ in Quetta, certainly had an edge to it: most of these men were newly returned from the frontline in Helmand where they had been killing my countrymen. But I was protected by malmastia, the tradition of hospitality to strangers, which is a pillar of Pashtun wali, the cast-iron code of conduct that governs the Pashtun tribe. Come to their door with a gun, and they will try to kill you; come as a guest, and they will die for you if necessary.

The stumbling block to negotiations now, I learned then, is the ongoing American troop surge. “Troops out first” remains the Taliban’s pre-condition for any talks. The point of their insurgency, the commander said, was not to win, but to resist: “We are against war. It creates nothing but widows and destruction. But Jihad is different. It is our moral obligation to resist you foreigners… At Judgement Day, Allah will not ask, ‘What did you do for your country?’ He will ask, ‘Did you fight for your religion?’”

I argued that our troops were needed to protect the foreign engineers and agricultural experts who had come to help secure Afghanistan’s economic development, but the Taliban shook their heads.
“Are you saying that it would be different if we had come here unarmed?”
“But of course! In that case you would have been our guests, just as you are our guest now. If your engineers had come to us and explained what they were trying to do, we would have protected them with our lives.”

The idea is not so ridiculous. After all, the Taliban have co-operated with the West before, including with America. In December 1997, for example, a black-turbaned delegation travelled – with full State Department approval – to Sugarland, Texas, to discuss the construction of a trans-Afghan gas pipeline with the energy firm Unocal. The Talibs dined at the palatial home of a Unocal vice-president, Martin Miller, where they were fascinated by his Christmas tree (and, especially, the meaning of the star on top of it). They visited Houston’s zoo and the Nasa space centre, and shopped happily at the Super Target discount store. There was even a rumour that they had played in Miller’s garden with a Frisbee.

When Al Qaida attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, relations hardened and the US demanded the handing over of bin Laden. The Taliban balked at that. Their Foreign Minister, Mullah Hassan, said that to do so would be like “giving up one of the pillars of Islam.” Bin Laden, of course, was their “guest.”

Even so, the Talibs did not dismiss the idea outright. Some of the ulama, Afghanistan’s senior clerics, were actually in favour of handing over bin Laden; and US-Taliban meetings on the subject continued sporadically right up until the summer of 2001.

It was arguably President Clinton, not the Taliban, who closed off the avenue of fruitful dialogue when on 20 August 1998 he ordered Operation Infinite Reach, a cruise missile attack on Al Qaida training camps. From then on, the Taliban felt obliged by Pashtun wali to defend their guest with their lives.

With a little more patience – and perhaps, one suspects, a greater understanding of Pashtun tradition – the US could have had bin Laden on a plate in 1998, 9/11 might never have happened, and everything would now be different. It has taken too long to resume dialogue with the Taliban, but at least it has begun again now.

James Fergusson’s book, A Million Bullets – The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan, is published by Bantam Press £16.99