- For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive
of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a "city of 80,000
people" as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part
of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built
up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important
than other district centres in Helmand.
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- It turns out, however, that the picture of Marja presented
by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one
of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire
war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point
in the conflict.
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- Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a
few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much
of the southern Helmand River Valley.
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- "It's not urban at all," an official of the
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified,
admitted on Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".
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- "It's a collection of village farms, with typical
family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably
prosperous by Afghan standards.
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- Richard B. Scott, who worked in Marja as an adviser on
irrigation for the U.S. Agency for International Development as recently
as 2005, agrees that Marja has nothing that could be mistaken as being
urban. It is an "agricultural district" with a "scattered
series of farmers' markets," Scott said in a telephone interview.
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- The ISAF official said the only population numbering
tens of thousands associated with Marja is spread across many villages
and almost 200 square kilometres, or about 125 square miles.
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- Marja has never even been incorporated, according to
the official, but there are now plans to formalise its status as an actual
"district" of Helmand Province.
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- The official admitted that the confusion about Marja's
population was facilitated by the fact that the name has been used both
for the relatively large agricultural area and for a specific location
where farmers have gathered for markets.
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- However, the name Marja "was most closely associated"
with the more specific location, where there are also a mosque and a few
shops.
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- That very limited area was the apparent objective of
"Operation Moshtarak", to which 7,500 U.S., NATO and Afghan troops
were committed amid the most intense publicity given any battle since the
beginning of the war.
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- So how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000
people get started?
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- The idea was passed on to the news media by the U.S.
Marines in southern Helmand. The earliest references in news stories to
Marja as a city with a large population have a common origin in a briefing
given Feb. 2 by officials at Camp Leatherneck, the U.S. Marine base there.
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- The Associated Press published an article the same day
quoting "Marine commanders" as saying that they expected 400
to 1,000 insurgents to be "holed up" in the "southern Afghan
town of 80,000 people." That language evoked an image of house to
house urban street fighting.
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- The same story said Marja was "the biggest town
under Taliban control" and called it the "linchpin of the militants'
logistical and opium-smuggling network". It gave the figure of 125,000
for the population living in "the town and surrounding villages".
ABC news followed with a story the next day referring to the "city
of Marja" and claiming that the city and the surrounding area "are
more heavily populated, urban and dense than other places the Marines have
so far been able to clear and hold."
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- The rest of the news media fell into line with that image
of the bustling, urbanised Marja in subsequent stories, often using "town"
and "city" interchangeably. Time magazine wrote about the "town
of 80,000" Feb. 9, and the Washington Post did the same Feb. 11.
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- As "Operation Moshtarak" began, U.S. military
spokesmen were portraying Marja as an urbanised population centre. On Feb.
14, on the second day of the offensive, Marine spokesman Lt. Josh Diddams
said the Marines were "in the majority of the city at this point."
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- He also used language that conjured images of urban fighting,
referring to the insurgents holding some "neighbourhoods".
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- A few days into the offensive, some reporters began to
refer to a "region", but only created confusion rather than clearing
the matter up. CNN managed to refer to Marja twice as a "region"
and once as "the city" in the same Feb. 15 article, without any
explanation for the apparent contradiction.
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- The Associated Press further confused the issue in a
Feb. 21 story, referring to "three markets in town - which covers
80 square miles."
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- A "town" with an area of 80 square miles would
be bigger than such U.S. cities as Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and Cleveland.
But AP failed to notice that something was seriously wrong with that reference.
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- Long after other media had stopped characterising Marja
as a city, the New York Times was still referring to Marja as "a city
of 80,000", in a Feb. 26 dispatch with a Marja dateline.
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- The decision to hype up Marja as the objective of "Operation
Moshtarak" by planting the false impression that it is a good-sized
city would not have been made independently by the Marines at Camp Leatherneck.
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- A central task of "information operations"
in counterinsurgency wars is "establishing the COIN [counterinsurgency]
narrative", according to the Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual as
revised under Gen. David Petraeus in 2006.
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- That task is usually done by "higher headquarters"
rather than in the field, as the manual notes.
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- The COIN manual asserts that news media "directly
influence the attitude of key audiences toward counterinsurgents, their
operations and the opposing insurgency." The manual refers to "a
war of perceptionsconducted continuously using the news media."
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- Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of ISAF, was clearly
preparing to wage such a war in advance of the Marja operation. In remarks
made just before the offensive began, McChrystal invoked the language of
the counterinsurgency manual, saying, "This is all a war of perceptions."
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- The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision
to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress U.S.
public opinion with the effectiveness of the U.S. military in Afghanistan
by showing that it could achieve a "large and loud victory."
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- The false impression that Marja was a significant city
was an essential part of that message.
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- Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist
with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy.
The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance
of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
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