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Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - 7:13 AM
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There's an interesting article on Taliban chants in the new issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies by Thomas Johnson and Ahmed Waheed of the Naval Postgraduate School. It's kind of Pashtun rap. Some have even been posted on the YouTube, they say.
One, which reminds me of Peter Tosh's old Downpressor, kicks off this way:
Oh Western dragon! Where will you go when we shut all the ways?
Oh Western dragon! Where will you go when we shut all the ways?
Oh Western dragon! You have an opportunity to run away now.
Hurry and get out of Kabul so that you don't regret when you are captured.
There's also some surprising content: In this one, which I take as a response to American counterinsurgency efforts, the Taliban also take on fire worshippers.
The enemies have come in the shape of friends. They look like human beings but they are wild animals. The act of disuniting people stays in their blood and their messages are look like flowers but they are full of poison. They have come under the banner of the friends but they are murderers.
The enemies have come in the shape of friends. They look like human beings
but they are wild animals. I have always made the destiny of this country. I
have brought happiness and beauty to my country. They have come under the
name of sympathy but they are muggers. They have come under the name of
sympathy but they are muggers.The enemies have come in a shape of friends. They look like human beings but
they are wild animals. They are Jewish but half of them are idolaters. They are
fire worshippers who came from East and West.
When we have intelligence officers who routinely listen to this sort of thing, we will actually be able to operate in Afghanistan with effectiveness.
You said, "When we have intelligence officers who routinely listen to this sort of thing, we will actually be able to operate in Afghanistan with effectiveness."
Wow, the "solutions" to American effictiveness in AFG are getting stranger by the day...
How's this: when we have intelligence officers who can successfully advise senior military leaders who in turn can convince civilian leadership that bankrupting our children's and grandchildren's and great grandchildren's futures chasing chimeras in Afghanistan is a fool's errand, THEN we can operate in Afghanistan with effectiveness.
COIN is a stuffed owl.
Excuse me, I have to see the errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill...
is the "uh, no" reponse. Strikes me as the blog equivalent of Army generals saying, "Oh, and by the way." In both cases, it was cute the first couple of hundred times.
Best,
Tom
Does this mean we are winning the cultural battle?
When the enemy creates rap songs, does this mean that we are winning? Personally, I don't consider rap to be music or song, but if the Taliban are making rap songs, it is a telling statement about what their audience is listening to and who they are targeting in their messages.
But that's more an analogy than a definition. The authors argue persuasively that these chants are well within the Pashtun tradition, which is laden with poetry and song.
Best,
Tom
I should have read the link first. They aren't rap songs so much as a form of religious chants. Still, they tell us who the intended audience is.
Fire worshippers were among Islam's oldest enemies.
I don't see a code for victory or effective tactical advantage here, unless the US gets into the music game. Even then, I suspect the US won't be as successful. Afghans who listen to Radio America or Radio Azad ain't doing it for the catchy phrases and entertainment value.
I'm not particularly surprised that the Talibs view their enemies as inhuman beasts in human form bearing honeyed words, claiming empathy but operating on baser motives. That's pretty typical rhetoric. The US has been hard at work on a countermessage, I'm guessing.
The key to these musical forms of subversion's success, including that of the late Mr. Tosh (who might have been amused that fans of his can be found in Bablyon's power structure), is that they aren't entirely fictious. Jamaicans didn't idolize Bobby Marley et al simply because of his musical skills (or because they were motivated by a suburban brat's faux-cosmpolitan/faux-rebellious/narcissitic need to find an identity slumming impulse). The music didn't bull crap, it spoke truth to power. Well, it didn't bull crap, other than the whole made up Rasta misogynistic, free Mason based, drug-addled mythologizing, b.s.,
'...(US) officers who routinely listen to...' Pashtun Rap?
Tom, granted that messaging and morale is part of the intel sylllabus, along with the Pashtun order of battle. But our line officers have to study Dari just to listen to the Tajik officers of the ANA, who we are 'transitioning' the war CC effort to.
Listen to the Pentagon tune: "Our mission is transition." And we're not above payola to make sure that one saturates the bandwidth.
"Operating effectively" probably starts with top down situational awareness, in congress and the press, as well as the puzzle palace. I'd bet dimes to dollars that our non-coms and LT's got it in Iraq, and are get 'what it is' in Pashtun-land. Their (frequently non-) Pashtun translators come with outsider accents, personal needs and local sectarian agendas.
US armed forces will eventually achieve Pashtun competence in another 10 years, when the refugees/children from this war enlist, to take advantage of that path to US citizenship. The same way we gained organic assets in a half dozen SE Central Asian languages. These wars do follow us home, as the French and Brits know so well.
"Are you going to take my family with you, back to America" is an existential imperative for our combat translators, who walk the line with our infantry. 15 or 50 months of trolling for mines, then discovering they've been lied to about immigration, that makes them as flak-happy as you or I would get.
Pundits used to say that war is how Americans learn geography. It's also how we teach English to brown brother, and acquire new linguistic assets, as our 'instant kharma' projects fail.
...of the article you link to, I read this:
"[The chants] are _virtually impossible_ for the United States and NATO to counter because of Western sensitivities concerning religious themes that dominate the Taliban narrative space, not to mention the lack of Western linguistic capabilities, including the understanding and mastering the poetic nature of local dialects" (emphasis added).
I confess I haven't read the artlcle; $34 for such an arcane subject is too rich for my blood. But this concluding sentence of the abstract seems to dismiss, or at a minimum, gravely doubt, western exploitability of this medium. "Virtually impossible" doesn't mean utterly and completely impossible, I suppose.
There's a lot of "shouldha wouldha couldha" talk amongst COINsters re: AFG. The idea of boning up on taranas so as to divine their potential strategic import strikes me as yet more such talk. And a colossal, rearranging-the-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic waste of time.
And someone's prickly this moring, I might add.
"We gotta get out of this place!"
I have always been an advocate of the traditional and preservation of the old traditional chanting of my Mother's people. However, time evolves and to reach a younger generation chanting needs to draw the listener into active participation, which the Taliban surely understand?
However, perhaps it isn't so much our own intelligence officers don't also understand this as it is they have their own chant, albiet dated, that is at odds with winning hearts and minds:
"We gotta get out of this place!
If it's the last thing we ever do ...
We gotta get out of this place,
'cause girl, there's a better life ... for me and you."
The band that sung that song were Animals too.
One man's idiot is another man's hero
Rep. Peter King, isn't he the guy that raised money for the Provo’s and said it’s OK for the IRA to blow up Post Office's in Belfast or buses in Londonderry because it wasn't an attack on America and therefore is not terrorism?
However, something happened in the guy’s head for he did help act as conduit between Washington and his kneecapping heroes in order to help arrange the ‘unofficial’ surrender of the IRA. So at least for that I give him a tip of my hat and will be happy buy him a liter of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey if ever I run into him (no I don’t mean with my car).
Signs of the times, one man's nut is another man's....
statesman or woman.
The country is going insane, or many of our fellow citizens are, just a few examples...
There are rallies in Orange Co, CA to prevent evil Muslims from having charity fundraisers for needy in the US, mind you.
Hillary Clinton gave a speech about free speech while an old man was manhandled out of the room for standing with his back to her. However one feels about McGovern's truther theories, a video shows the man was doing nothing wrong. Widely noted on the blogosphere, ignored in more "conventional sources"
Dick Morris thinks that all highschoolers must be drug tested (reconfirming my notion that Clintonian officials are a sleazy bunch of authoritarians)
Americans, and their play catch-up leaders, are in solidarity with movements on the other side of the world, with individuals about whom they know little. What will be the reaction if and when these movements dont fulfill Western expectations or if the price of oil continues to go up? I suspect fear, indignation, and demonization.
King and his grandstanding (and potentially very damaging) hearings are cynical in the extreme. When I lived in Belfast and was in that world it was always amusing to see Adams and his folks; people who considered themselves progressive and lefites - hobnobbing with an avowed right winger like King.
King was a typical of some Irish-Americans when it came to the IRA. Romantic and not quite clear on the concept. Pretty hypocritical too.
I don't want to get into the morality of what the IRA or its adversaries did; the situation there was pretty awful all the way round and nobody has much to be proud of, at least in regard to how they fought their low-intensity war.
The up side is that they did work it out and nobody on either side (except a couple of whack jobs) wants to go back or will go back.
That said, King's claim that he was one of the main players in "bringing peace" to N. Ireland has even less resonance than Hillary Clinton's claim during the 2008 campaign. He didn't really hurt the effort but he had very little to do with the peace process either.
Wonder how badly COIN would have fared in N. Ireland? (LOL).
I'm a little behind on my Pashtu
After a brief interlude into Hangul for my tour in Korea, balancing Serbo-Croat and Albanian for my Balkan rotation, polishing some Spanglish for our SOUTHCOM contingencies and spending four years or so trying to figure out Arabic, I'm a little behind on my Pashtu... Yes, I'm the cynical Intel officer in the room. I'm wondering whether I should look into Mandarin or Farsi next...
What you need is an Intel officer who knows how to get the best out of his/her linguists, Foreign Area Officers and other resources to delve into this matter... this is what the "Afghan Hands" project is all about. While I'd love to say that after 16 years of service I'm an expert in any one area, I'm smart enough to know my limitations and how to leverage the subject matter experts when I need to.
Turn that frown into a melancholic nod, Tom.
I'm not sure you give our Intelligence Officers enough credit. There are people who understand and listen to this sort of thing for fun all the time, especially within the linguist communities. During my time in the intelligence community I worked with quite a few people who had extraordinarily deep and nuanced understandings of the people and cultures of Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem, however, is that the person that is interested in engaging this sort of material and drawing uncomfortable conclusions from it isn't the sort of person that actively works their way up the career ladder, especially in the military. The civilian agencies do a better job of encouraging and making use of those sort of eccentric personalities, but most of them still labor in obscurity. The people are most definitely there, Tom, but the system wasn't built for them.
...maybe even crack a short smile.
I feel compelled to add that the report you cited itself came from a DoD institution: The Naval Postgraduate School out in Monterey, CA. Indeed, the military's language training center, the Defense Language Institute, is just a few minutes up the hill from NPS.
meh - Taliban Rap has nothing on Geto Boys. We Win.
When we have intelligence officers who routinely listen to this sort of thing, we will actually be able to operate in Afghanistan with effectiveness.
Uh, I don't think more insightful intel makes a shitty (or non-existent) strategy & self-defeating sets of goals, 'more effective'. OK, yeah, we could execute our misguided and shitty strategy "better". I will play Hank Paulson here and point out, "Better ain't Good".
In my reading, our efforts in Afghanistan are ultimately futile because we can't force Talibs/Haqqanis/Mehsudis to terms; they can just continue to utilize their safe zones, and wage a low-level perpetual conflict against coalition forces. We're propping up a government that will not survive our exit, and maintaining a temporary status quo that isn't even particularly good on its own; all 'improvements' seem to mean are often, "making the status quo less bad" - not changing the ultimate dynamics of the issue, or changing the inevitable breakdown that will occur when we depart
A question I'd like to see seriously debated by military people as well as political/regional analysts: why is really so impossible to consider actually taking the war into Waziristan/Baluchistan, dragging the Quetta sura out into the streets? Can pakistan's attitude vis a vis the US really get so much *worse*? Is it Teh Nukes?
Even if it were a group of people who in the end all actually agreed, "never gonna happen", I'd at least like to see an airing of the issues and people at least role-playing some scenarios (politically impossible or otherwise) which could arguably result in a change of the nature of the conflict, and potentially lead to a more favorable long term result.
I think LITTLEMANTATE may have a point about the fire worshippers being a reference to Zoroastrianism. However, I'm unclear where that leads, some of the possibilities I see:
some of the Green Movement in Iran have adopted Zoroastrian symbolism but that doesn't seem to apply;
it might be an a reference to Iranians in general, but I can't see that connection either;
what seems most likely to me is that it is a reference to traditional Afghan Islamic practices that still incorporate festivals such Newroz and Charshanbe Suri (celebrations the Taliban tried to eliminate when they ruled) that have their roots in Zoroastrianism - and the Taliban is trying to portray this form of Islam as foreign-based and/or un-Islamic.
But why "east and west"? Reference to Iran and to India?
Best,
Tom
Greg, I wouldn't read it that way
I could be wrong, but I suspect your average Talib has little or no knowledge of the Zoroastrian aspects of Iranian nationalism, or Soviet encouraged Tajik nationalism, for that matter. Although I agree that they view preIslamic traditional practices with hostility. That said, I'm no expert on Talib educational standards. They could be teaching these boys this stuff.
The fire worshipper as enemy is more of a general Eastern/Turko-Persianate Islamic motif, rather than specifically Afghan. It is true that the last jihads against pagan holdouts in Nuristan weren't that long ago, still near enough to be part of oral history, but I'm not sure that this is the source of the motif, there is simply too much in the way of general Islamic hostility towards "fire worshippers." My impression is that anti-fire worshipper rhetoric is similar to Christian rants against "Canaanites" (enemy du jour) or "Sodomites" (not always limited to homophobia).
So you think it is just a generic term for infidels? Makes sense.
I could be way off, and, quite frankly, might be giving too much credit to the Taliban here....but I think this could be a reference to both Iran and India.
Both are active-Iran and India have both established strong presence in Afghanistan. Neither are particularly liked by the Taliban. And both countries have traditions of fire worship. Fire worship is a very important part of Hindu ritual-but as a I said, I might be giving the Taliban to much credit for actually knowing that.
We always underestimate our adversaries and render them inferior because they don't subscribe to our way of thinking. Give some credit to the propaganda machine the Taliban are employing; they know full well their history and the Zarthusht, Buddhist and Hindu religions that came before Islam to their territories. By the way, the Pashtuns have long forgotten their Zoroastrian roots and they do not celebrate Nowruz and other pre Islamic traditions.
The Taranas/Chants are patriotic songs and a call to their brethren to wake up and rise against the infidels, both foreign and domestic.
Afghanistan's eastern enemies referenced in their chants refer to the Mongols and Gengiz Khan or Changez Khan and of course there are many western references going back to Alexander the Macedonian, the British, Russians and now the Americans. The narrative in most of these chants allude to foreign invasions and how the Afghans defeated these alien invaders.
Grandpa, tell me that story story about ole Mahmud of Ghazna
JNSINAIKO,
Fire worshipper is a general term for infidels. It had special resonance for Muslims in the Persian speaking east because of the Muslim wars with Zoroastrianism and its spinoffs like Mazdakism. According to these lyrics, it appears to have expanded in its meaning. Christians, Jews, and Buddhists, for example, would have not been considered fire worshippers a thousand years ago.
It is part of a general tradition of jihad, missionary activities, and heroic ghazis. The Talibs as Pashtuns, and the Pashtuns, partake of a much larger regional tradition here. In my earlier post I didn't mention that it is old, predating Colonial times, although wars with Western powers gave it a shot in the arm. I will say, btw, I think that the Jewish reference is probably new, a little gift from Al Qaida et al.
Saisguy and Beelzebub,
I agree with B that the Taliban, or individuals, are aware of their history and mythologized oral history regarding Islamic interaction with Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and Hindus in the area. Handed down knowledge of Mahmud of Ghazni or legends about Buddhists does not, however, teach one about modern Iranian Nationalism's appeal to its preIslamic past. B, I'm going out on a limb here, but I suspect your average Waziri yokel wasn't aware of the significance of the Shah to rename his dynasty Pahlavi. Iranians=Shiites, for these boys, not Zoroastrians. And Pashtuns as Zoroastrians? Most of what I have read indicates that they probably were Hindus of a sort before their conversion, the Budhists having ceased to be a significant presence by the time of the Islamic invasions.
You may have a point, however, about the Taliban educational system teaching these guys about their past, adding another layer to the ongoing ghazi tradition.
The Taleban have the "luxury" of being natives, the same religion as the non fighting natives, and the religion that allows them to behead, execute, stone, and bomb anyone at will and still somehow gain public sympathy.
The Coalition forces are not muslim, have to win the hearts of the Taleban's family members from the Taleban, allow press access which makes the civilian deaths they do more discussed an reported on than the beheading the Taleban carry out.
The Taleban get to fight to win, we get to fight the Morale/Media PC war.
In Algeria the French encountered a similar situation with a religious counter insurgency... they brutally repressed it and the villages that supported the insurgents and stopped it. Then more popped up...
I think what Professor Johnson is pointing to is not necessarily to focus on the content of the individual songs, but to understand how these songs resonate in the general Afghan worldview. Taliban songs, chants and night letters all tap into imagery that is meaningful to the way Afghans look at the world.
Tom's point that we should be looking at this stuff is right on. If you compare our IO with Taliban IO, you see that these guys are miles ahead of us in promoting our "narrative" to the population's psyche. That's the "battlefield" we need to win on, not in Marjah or whatever other strategic backwater we decide we need to hold in Afghanistan.
Knowing 'Pashtun hard-core rap' does NOT lead to success
Listening to the ‘Pashtun hard-core rap’ is NOT going lead to success of US Afghan mission as long as US has Pakistan as an ally.
Adm. Mullen had following to say to the foreign news media on 1/13/2011 about America’s primary ally in its fight against terrorism: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again it, [Pakistan] is the epicenter of terrorism in the world right now. It is absolutely critical that the safe havens in Pakistan get shut down. We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without that. It’s not just Haqqani Network anymore, or Al Qaeda or TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan), the Afghan Taliban, or LET (Lashkar-e-Tayyeba), it’s all of them working together.”
And previous US ambassador Anne Patterson to Pakistan, wrote in a secret review in 2009 that ‘Pakistan's Army and ISI are covertly sponsoring four militant groups - Haqqani‘s HQN, Mullah Omar‘s QST, Al Qaeda and LeT - and will not abandon them for any amount of US money, as diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show.
Duplicitous Pakistan has poor U. S. over the barrel of a gun. US can NOT use its aid leverage to force Pakistan to stop supporting terrorist groups who kill US/NATO troops in Afghanistan day in and day out because US needs Pakistan’s help in ferrying supplies to those very US/NATO troops.
The roots of the ‘current Afghan tragedy’ are in Washington where Bush administration decided to allow Musharraf to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz in November, 2001. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan (now relocated to Karachi by Pakistani ISI to protect them from possible US drone attacks) and Haqqani network (HQN) in North Waziristan from where Mullah Omar’s QST and Haqqani’s HQN have been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.
With an ally like Pakistan, US mission has been destined to fail from the very beginning.
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