![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The USA and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have been waging war against the Taliban in Afghanistan for more than a decade, with territorial gains by coalition forces often proving to be ephemeral. This paper traces the origins and evolution of the current Afghan insurgency and explores the framing of the Taliban movement's discourse on Twitter and other interactive websites. The paper postulates that Taliban activists are utilizing social media to disseminate their views and frame their movement in the phraseology of militant Islamism, traditional Pashtun folklore, anti-imperialism, social justice, and universal human rights. Taliban militants are attempting to align their discursive frames with various transnational ideologies that resonate not only with prospective recruits and supporters in Central and South Asia and the Middle East, but also potentially receptive audiences in the West. Such frame alignments are essential components in the micro-mobilization of movement participants. Taliban activists apparently recognize that there are important symbols, narratives, and channels already in existence that can facilitate the growth of their insurgency, while effectively discrediting coalition forces. This paper examines frame alignments and other insurgent-mobilization communication strategies by conducting a content analysis of recent tweets and blogs written by Taliban cyber-activists.
Notes on contributor
David Drissel is a professor of social sciences at Iowa Central Community College in Fort Dodge, Iowa, with over 20 years of teaching experience. He earned his Master’s of Arts degree in political science with a concentration in comparative politics and international relations at Auburn University. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in international development at the University of Southern Mississippi. During the past decade, he has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles, essays, and chapters in various academic journals and books. As a two-time Fulbright Scholar, Oxford Roundtable alumnus, and avid world traveler, he has conducted major research projects in China, Czech-Slovak Republics, Northern Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, and several other countries. Much of his research focuses on social media, social movements, collective identities, religious extremism, transnational youth subcultures, and computer-mediated communication.
Notes
1 As of June 2014, there have been 2331 US troops killed, 453 British military fatalities, and 666 other coalition-partner deaths, for a total of 3450 coalition troops killed in Afghanistan.
2 For additional information on the radicalization and online mobilization of younger Muslims in the West, see Winter (Citation2007) and Drissel (Citation2011).
3 For more on the concept of global framing, see Tarrow (Citation2005).
4 See Berg (Citation2009, p. 356) for more information on coding frames and related research methods.
5 Steger (Citation2009), for instance, identifies three primary though contradictory variants of globalization: market globalism, justice globalism, and jihadist globalism.
6 For millennia, Afghanistan has been “the gateway for invaders spilling out of Iran or central Asia and into India”, including such notables of antiquity as Cyrus the Great, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane (Barfield, Citation2010, p. 1). During the nineteenth century, the British–Russian competition over Afghanistan was known as the “Great Game” which involved two rival imperial powers maneuvering for control of this hazardous land (Rashid, Citation2008).
7 As one scholar gushed at the time, “Operation Enduring Freedom has been very impressive. It may wind up being more notable in the annals of American military history than anything since Douglas MacArthur's invasion at Inchon in Korea half a century ago” (O'Hanlon, Citation2009, p. 262).
8 FATA is a semi-autonomous region consisting of seven tribal “agencies” and six “frontier regions.”.
9 Complicating matters, Karzai and his staunchest supporters are from the Duranni Pashtun tribal confederation, which generates deep suspicion from rival Pashtun tribes and clans, most notably the Ghilzai confederation (Johnson, Citation2007, p. 324).
10 Paradoxically, the main battle zone in the global war on terror shifted during this period from Afghanistan to Iraq, even though radical Islamist terrorists had been virtually nonexistent in Iraq until the U.S.-led invasion commenced in 2003 (Stepanova, Citation2004, p. 130).
11 According to reports, there were 136 Afghan suicide attacks in 2006, constituting a six-fold increase over 2005 (Foxley, Citation2007, p. 16).
12 Mullah Dadullah, a former (now deceased) Taliban commander, states the following in a 2006 interview: “Now we are going to change our tactics, using a new weapon we did not have in the past, to target U.S. and allied forces … We will create a big problem for them” (Johnson, Citation2007, p. 338).
13 The Durrani (located in the southern and southwestern part of the country) and the Ghilzai (located in east and southeast) are the two major Pashtun tribal confederations, which often compete with each other for political power and privilege (Barfield, Citation2010, pp. 59–60).
14 The Pashtuns do not recognize the so-called Durand line (named for a nineteenth-century British diplomat), which ostensibly divides the two countries (Snow, Citation2011, p. 308).
15 The ratio of peacekeeping forces and other soldiers to the population in Afghanistan was “significantly smaller” than in the vast majority of peacekeeping missions in the modern era. Specifically, there were only 0.18 troops per thousand people in Afghanistan, as of 2002. In comparison, Bosnia had 18.6 peacekeepers per thousand, while Kosovo had 20 peacekeepers per thousand people. “The result is a troop-to-population density fifty times smaller” than Kosovo (Dobbins et al., Citation2003, p. 136).
16 For instance, the ANA did not receive sufficient funding from the Afghan government for the first several years of the post-Taliban era, due allegedly to the programmatic proclivities of then-Minister of Defense Fahim Khan – a Tajik and former Northern Alliance commander. Reportedly, Khan “proved reluctant to divert money or equipment from the primarily Tajik forces who fought the Taliban under his command” (Dobbins et al., Citation2003, p. 137).
17 As Murthy (Citation2013) explains,
Twitter allows users to maintain a public web-based asynchronous ‘conversation’ through the use of 140-character messages (the length of text messages) sent from mobile phones, mobile Internet devices, or through various websites … These messages on Twitter (termed ‘tweets’) are automatically posted and are publicly accessible on the user's profile page on the Twitter website. (pp. 1–2)
18 According to the Department of Defense (Citation2007), the information environment of the Internet is a “critical dimension” for insurgencies, and that “insurgents attempt to shape it to their advantage” (p. 1).
20 For more information on the Taliban's use of Twitter, see Londoño (Citation2011).
21 As was noted previously, this research project retrieved all of its online data from Taliban websites and Twitter accounts during the period of February–June 2012. All of the tweets cited in this paper were posted by the Taliban during this four-month period; although excerpts from blogs and other commentary cited in this paper were posted on shahamat-english.com during the larger time frame of January 2010–June 2012, but retrieved online by this researcher from February to June 2012.
22 The Arabic word jihad translates roughly as “struggle” or “striving” and is often classified by Muslims as either internal (“the greater jihad”) or external (“the lesser jihad”). In this respect, there is a competitive Islamic discourse about jihad, with militant fundamentalists often emphasizing the need for an external “holy war” against non-Muslim kuffars (unbelievers), while other Muslims are more apt to portray jihad primarily as a personal strategy for overcoming evil. In reality, both definitions have some theological validity, as Bunt (Citation2003) notes, “(Jihad) accommodates peaceful ‘striving’ and effort in the name of Islam, as well as militaristic activities” (p. 26).