During the Persian Gulf War, many Iraqi soldiers surrendered clutching U.S.-dropped leaflets that offered safe passage. "There were special [Iraqi] teams organized to shoot anyone that was found to be in possession of our leaflets," Treadwell says. But he and other commanders of the Afghan psyop war are hesitant to make claims about the effectiveness of their propaganda in promoting surrenders, saying they haven't yet been able to make assessments.
The leafleting over Kandahar, one of the last Taliban strongholds to yield to U.S.-backed forces, included a broadside depicting Mullah Mohammed Omar as a "kuchi," a dog of nomads, chained at the heel of bin Laden. "Who really runs the Taliban?" it asks. Apparently it hit a nerve.
"If the Taliban are complaining because we dropped this in Kandahar, which they have been, we're kind of happy – because they're upset about it," says David C. Champagne, a PhD research analyst with the Army psyop group. "If you have a reaction to it, it means you've been affected one way or another."
In Afghanistan, with a population of 26 million, some 18 million leaflets have been distributed – often via fiberglass "leaflet bombs" that explode in midair. "We have leaflets that are dropping like snowflakes in December in Chicago," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld noted earlier in the campaign.
Many messages produced here are benign, trying to reinforce the point that Americans are nice people anti-terrorist, not anti-Muslim. "To the honorable people of Afghanistan, may you have a Happy Eid," Champagne roughly translates from the Pashto as presses roll behind him. "May your fasting your sacrifice, be acceptable to God."
This is essentially a greeting card to mark Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. It depicts a date palm and a bowl of dates – a traditional food for celebrating the end of the month-long fasting period.
"Obviously the target audience is the civilian population of Afghanistan, showing our friendship," explains Maj. Ric Rohm, another battalion commander. "All of our products fit into a plan."
At the start of a campaign, the psyop-ers decide which media will be most useful in getting across their message, "very similar to how a marketing firm would try to do their business," says Rohm. In Afghanistan, that ruled out television – the Taliban had banned it.
But many Afghans owned radios, so the psyop-ers began drafting scripts and musical programming for the "Commando Solo" aircraft circling the region, broadcasting 10 hours a day. The leaflets relied on simple messages and graphics because of the population's low literacy rate, but Champagne, who served in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan decades ago, quickly points out, that doesn't mean "they're not intelligent."
Messages must be approved by the brass at Central Command and comport with the overarching info-war strategy laid out by the White House. Critiques and wrongheaded suggestions abound. One official objected to a leaflet showing Afghanistan as a chessboard with bin Laden orchestrating Taliban pawns – until the experts here explained that chess is immensely popular in the region and the image would instantly connect.
Potential linguistic and cultural gaffes lurk in every operation. In Somalia in 1992, prior to a U.N. humanitarian effort, a hastily printed psyop leaflet contained a spelling error. Instead of announcing help from the "United Nations," it came out "Slave Nations."