[News] The Siege of the Fictional City of Marja

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/
March 8, 2010


A War of Perception and Misinformation


The Siege of the Fictional City of Marja

By GARETH PORTER

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.

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.

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.

"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".

"It's a collection of village farms, with typical 
family compounds," said the official, adding that 
the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

However, the name Marja "was most closely 
associated" with the more specific location, 
where there are also a mosque and a few shops.

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.

So how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 people get started?

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.

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.

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."

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.

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."

He also used language that conjured images of 
urban fighting, referring to the insurgents holding some "neighbourhoods".

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.

The Associated Press further confused the issue 
in a Feb. 21 story, referring to "three markets 
in town - which covers 80 square miles
."

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.

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.

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.

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.

That task is usually done by "higher 
headquarters" rather than in the field, as the manual notes.

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 perceptions
conducted continuously using the news media."

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."

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."

The false impression that Marja was a significant 
city was an essential part of that message.

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, 
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>Perils 
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to 
War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.




Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

www.Freedomarchives.org  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20100308/949ac9aa/attachment.htm>