Issues + Insights Fall 2008
- Tactics: Lessons from Mumbai - are you ready for the shift to crisis leadership?
- Strategy: Lessons from the Taliban - is your organization communicating to win?
- TCG News
Tactics: Mumbai tactics demand dynamic crisis leadership
As this issue of I+I goes to “press”, security forces are still battling terrorists in Mumbai, India. At least 100 people have been killed and more than 300 others injured.
The attacks in Mumbai on November 26, 2008 herald a new chapter in terrorism that organizational leaders everywhere should note.
Early reports suggest there were coordinated attacks on at least seven different targets in Mumbai. These targets included two luxurious hotels popular with tourists, a popular tourist café, a major rail transportation terminal in the heart of the city, a hospital, and the offices of a Jewish cultural centre. Some reports said people with American and British passports were being targeted.
Reports suggest the terrorists operated in small, well-coordinated groups armed with automatic weapons and grenades. One report suggested a group approached its target by boat. After storming the hotel, hostages were taken and the terrorists maintained a continuing battle with police forces through the night.
Tactics have changed
While coordinated, multi-site attacks are typical of the Al Qaeda network, these attacks raise the bar to a new level and introduce a new risk for anti-terrorism planners. Suicide bombers were arguably the last major quantum shift in tactics employed by terrorists and this shift, too, will demand changes in security and crisis management plans world-wide.
The attack, earlier this year on the Serena Hotel in Kabul may have provided an inkling of the kind of tactics used yesterday in Mumbai. At the Serena, a coordinate team of attackers used rocket propelled grenades and automatic weapons to overcome security positions located outside the hotel entrance. They then stormed inside where two gunmen strafed targets of opportunity with AK-47 assault rifles while a third blew himself up with a body-borne improvised explosive device. In the mayhem that followed, the two inside gunmen dropped their kit and tried to escape by rushing out with panicked hotel guests.
The Serena attack was well-coordinated, but lacked good intelligence. The attackers appeared unaware of the internal layout of the hotel and missed opportunities to increase the number of victims they created. It was, in the words of one security consultant friend of mine “spray and pray” at anyone who moved.
A critical lesson learned from the Serena attack for hotel guests faced with a terrorist attack was: don’t move, don’t draw attention, remain hidden and let the gunmen find easier, more obvious targets.
In Mumbai, however, the terrorists have escalated the Serena tactic to a new level. Clearly, attackers came prepared to stay longer. By drawing the attack out into a hostage-taking scenario, they will magnify the public spectacle and gather broader, world-wide attention to their attack.
External defenses not enough
With the advent of suicide bombers, most hotels and public offices in places like Baghdad, Kabul and even Cairo have hardened their perimeter security defenses in two ways. They’ve created blast-resistant perimeter walls to protect inside compounds from large blasts on the street, and they’ve created vehicle barriers to prevent unauthorized vehicles (potentially carrying large bombs) from entering their compounds.
But, what the Serena attack demonstrated and the Mumbai attacks yesterday prove, is that bomb-resistant perimeter defenses do not eliminate the threat of forceful entry. In fact, I have been to few places in Kabul or elsewhere where a small force of trained soldiers could not shoot their way in. Defense against such attacks require a different approach – a more military and less police-like or security-guard approach.
The threat of dynamic attack – an attack with a trained, moving assault team that adjusts to the situation on the ground in order to achieve its objective – demands a dynamic defense. Perimeter defenses must be hard against suicide bombers, but must also be positioned to identify a dynamic attack at the earliest opportunity, by challenging potential attackers as far from the protected area as possible. One the attack is identified, a dynamic response based on a well-armed, well-trained Quick Reaction Force is essential. And, this QRF must be positioned inside the protected area and respond from within. Meanwhile, it would be nice to have a way to communicate and coordinate the movement of innocent people out of the way to safe areas.
All of this is, of course, difficult to achieve and expensive to implement. However, the gruesome attacks in Mumbai suggest that dynamic defense will become the minimum standard for corporate defense in a high-threat area.
The other new element introduced in Mumbai is also an old element: time. Recent attacks have been split-second explosions or short-duration assaults. The Mumbai attackers appear to have fully intended to drag on the show. This demands different behaviour from victims trapped inside buildings with attackers and demands different skills and tactics from security forces. It also puts a significant burden on hotels, restaurants, or other organizations targeted by such attacks. It certainly changes their crisis management philosophies.
Under a Mumbai scenario, a terrorist attack may not be a quick, terrifying event that is over in a blink – where crisis management is focused on the aftermath. After Mumbai, best in class organizations must have the ability to manage through a high-intensity crisis that will last for some time. While best in class organizations should have already had such capacity, the fact is that few actually do.
What is needed now, more than ever before, is a shift in attitude from crisis management to crisis leadership. Crisis Leadership is more than applying pre-canned crisis management solutions developed before the storm. Crisis Leadership is about understanding a rapidly-evolving situation, adapting on the fly and leading people to exceptional performance.
How do your corporate security practices stack up? Do you have a dynamic defense in place or do you rely on static guard positions and hardened perimeters for your protection? Are you ready to lead your organization through its next crisis?
Strategy: Lessons from the Taliban -- Is your organization communicating to win?
Few things are certain in Afghanistan. One thing I’m reasonably sure of however: the Taliban is winning the propaganda war hands-down.
Handicapped by an outmoded and wrong-headed approach to communication, NATO is being left in the dust behind an increasingly professional insurgency that has mastered the art of strategic communication. Left unchecked, the result will be a loss that threatens the very existence of NATO and condemns millions of Afghan men, women and children to generations of poverty, oppression and suffering. From this horrific mess, future threats will inevitably arise to threaten the lives and prosperity of our own children.
I was recently asked by senior staff at NATO HQ for my thoughts on how they were doing from a communication perspective. My answer, in a nutshell, was: “Great, if you’re a peacetime government civil service department. Terrible if you’re an alliance at war.”
Right now, NATO’s public communication is being driven by a public-service philosophy – the same approach adopted by military, police and government “public information officers” in western democracies. In other words, the role of public communication is to “disclose unclassified information in a spirit of democratic openness, and to respond to public queries as fully and transparently as possible.”
While this is great grist for Public Relations 101 textbooks at community colleges across the western world, it’s a recipe for failure in the real world. And, when there’s a war on, the consequences of failure are horrific.
The Taliban, on the other hand, are adopting a professional marketer’s approach to communication – an approach proven on the capitalistic battlefields of our very own free markets. I have long advocated for an approach to communication based on what I call “The Seven Keys to Strategic Influence.” Unfortunately, the Taliban appear to have learned these lessons all to well.
First, the insurgents have a crystal clear objective: they want to “own” Afghanistan for their own purposes.
Second, they know exactly who they have to influence in order to achieve this objective: the people and government of Afghanistan; international troops, the governments who send them and the people who control those governments; etc.
Third, they know exactly what they want from each of these “stakeholders”: they want the people to stop supporting their opponents, they want the people to stay out of their way as they move to conquer the country, they want the government to stop making effective decisions that may impede their progress; they want international troops to quit the battlefields and return home, leaving the country unprotected.
Fourth, they understand what they need to do, give or create in order to make each of these stakeholders want to do what they want them to do: the people must be too terrified to interfere with insurgent activities or to support the government or international forces; international democracies must be so sickened by events in Afghanistan that they demand the immediate withdrawal of their expeditionary forces.
Fifth, they know exactly how to do this: by terrorizing local populations directly, by destroying any potential benefits created for them by the government, by making it impossible to believe that the government and international supporters will win; by killing international troops and civilian aid workers, by capturing media attention with horrific, inhuman attacks and eating up potential “band width” that might be used to discuss international successes in Afghanistan, they plan to so dishearten voters in contributory nations until they demand a withdrawal of their troops.
Sixth, they have a clear definition of success at every level of their campaign: ultimately, recapturing control of the state resources of Afghanistan is the goal. Intermediary goals include garnering headlines in western press and increasing the level of “punditry” devoted to condemning the campaign in Afghanistan.
Seventh, they know how to measure successes in real-time and adjust their tactics to make sure they can continuously improve their efforts. They measure the ebb and flow of media coverage of different types of attacks and atrocities and know when to shift tactics so bored journalists can have something new and grisly to talk about.
The Taliban have authorized spokespeople available to journalists 24/7 by telephone. They are always available to provide a quote or information. Unlike their NATO opponents, however, Taliban spokespeople are not constrained by facts. They often lie and distort information.
While they regularly use untruths, they do not do so haphazardly. They skillfully blend facts with untruths in a recipe designed for a specific purpose: to influence one or more targeted groups of stakeholders: western voters, local villagers, NATO officials, media reporters, government functionaries, etc.
It is an increasingly effective tactic, largely unanswered by NATO.
Where the Taliban are sharply focused on influencing decisions and behaviour, NATO remains fixated on providing factual answers and releasing accurate information.
What’s wrong with the NATO approach?
Simply put, it’s not enough.
NATO is focused on winning the battle on the ground in Afghanistan and it’s doing a reasonable job of that, given the constraints it is working within. The Taliban have recognized they cannot beat the combined might of western forces on the ground. So, like good strategists, they’ve shifted the fight to a different battlefield: the living rooms of western democracies.
Why hasn’t NATO responded? Likely for a number of reasons, and as an outsider, I don’t have any inside knowledge. However, my guess is the reasons include some or all of the following.
First, NATO relies heavily on military and civil-service trained “public information officers” who are not equipped or trained to take a proactive approach to strategic communication. In fact, they are not trained to take a strategic approach to communication, period. Even if they were, NATO commanders do not understand the problem or recognize the need. More on what they should do later.
Second, a huge number of NATO’s political resources are likely focused on rapid expansion of the alliance and integration of new member states. No doubt, this consumes an enormous amount of bandwidth and resources within the organization that is, therefore, simply not available for the task at hand in Afghanistan.
Finally, it seems to me that NATO may well be engaged in an internal battle for its very existence. Many member states, including some of the largest and oldest members, remain at odds over the very purpose of the alliance itself. Some argue it’s purely a military alliance. Others say it’s primarily a political creature and always has been. This must create internal “friction” that impedes the alliance’s ability to move purposefully in any direction, let alone towards winning the war in Afghanistan.
In fact, Afghanistan has become a showcase for these internal disagreements as member states take very different approaches to the conflict: contributing or not contributing troops, placing restrictive covenants on the use of their forces, etc. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, public musings that Afghanistan may shatter the alliance may now themselves threaten to shatter the alliance.
All of this conspires to prevent the alliance from responding efficiently to the strategic shifts in the Afghanistan war. Even where they recognize that a shift is necessary, the internal frictions and competing agendas within the alliance may well have robbed it of the bandwidth and resources necessary to create a coherent top-level strategy to defeat the Taliban.
The whole must be bigger than the sum of its parts
The other problem for NATO is that, whether it’s a political alliance or a military one, it simply does not control enough of the essential levers in play to create the conditions for victory in Afghanistan. To its credit, NATO has begun to recognize this.
In any crisis, there is a need to situate critical events into a broader context, oftentimes by reframing the issue. Remember, the aim is not simply to disseminate information. Rather, the strategic communication objective is always to influence stakeholders to support a positive outcome. Always. It is worth pointing out with utmost clarity that this does not mean deceiving stakeholders. Rather, it’s all about shaping stakeholder perceptions, decisions and behaviours with facts.
If, for example, we see an image of two white men wrestling a black man to the ground, we form an immediate perception. If that same image is reframed, by pulling back, to show a large scale riot with hundreds of black agitators attacking a small group of white farmers as they over-run their farm, we form a much different first impression.
NATO’s task in Afghanistan is to influence key stakeholders to achieve success. To do this, they must re-frame the issue in a broader context that is both accurate and facilitates success by leading stakeholders to the conclusions, decisions and behaviours necessary for NATO to succeed. Right now, many stakeholders are focused on the tightly cropped picture of military action against the insurgents and the concomitant impact that this has on the civilian population. NATO must broaden and reframe the context to include both the development and democracy achievements happening in Afghanistan as well as the broader threat to the civilian population from a successful insurgency.
The great challenge for NATO, however, is that it does not own these successes, and the broader long-term threats of the insurgency do not fall cleanly within the rubric of military action.
A baby step towards addressing this fundamental problem was the creation of a “Senior Civilian Representative” (SCR) of NATO in Kabul. Despite internal frictions between member states who disagree with the “NATO as political body” model, the organization is trying to put a civilian face on its activities in Afghanistan. This is a good, indeed essential, thing.
A number of things need to happen in Afghanistan in order for its government to achieve victory. One could do worse than to assume these things are, by and large, the antitheses of the seven keys being followed by the Taliban. The government needs to be effective, the people need to feel secure and be willing to participate and support anti-Taliban activities, etc. In order for this to happen, there must be security – and NATO is well-equipped to play a role in making this happen.
However, in order for security to be sustainable, development, democracy and justice must also happen. NATO recognizes this with the creation of its SCR in Afghanistan. However, NATO has no effective vehicles to contribute to these essential pillars of sustainable success. Rather, these pillars will be developed and sustained by other organizations: the UN, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, private sector investment, etc.
For NATO to succeed, these other organizations must also succeed. The primary role of NATO’s SCR must be, therefore, to influence these external organizations and to develop a coherent, consensual strategy amongst them for the development of Afghanistan.
There is a lot of work to do on this front. NATO is not welcomed by many of these organizations and is not respected by the UN. While this distrust is no doubt mutual, it is not productive. Recent claims by the UN Development Program in Afghanistan to have “investigated” civilian deaths as a result of a U.S. air strike near Herat are a case in point. Having recently worked closely with UNDP in Afghanistan, I am at a loss to understand who from that organization would be qualified to conduct such an investigation, or how it might be done as quickly as its “results” were released to the media.
Air strikes that injure civilians are anathema to good counter-insurgency doctrine and NATO must do something to eliminate them. However, inter-agency cockfights between the UN and NATO do equal damage to the prospects of success in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Taliban rub their hands with glee… There is no better ally than a dysfunctional enemy.
In addition to building a cooperative atmosphere between NATO and other inter-governmental organizations in Afghanistan, the SCR must also seize control of the alliance’s public communications. Military communicators are taught to answer honestly and focus on facts and figures. That’s essential to effective strategic communications… but it’s by no means enough.
The SCR must own the communication agenda for NATO, and there must be an agenda. It must focus on factual information and responsive answers, but there must also be a purpose for its communication. Communication is not simply the transfer of information from one person to another. Communication is the way in which people influence one another. All NATO communication, therefore, must be sharply focused on influencing decisions and behaviours among stakeholder groups.
This Strategic Influence approach to communication is not taught in military public information classes. In fact, it’s not taught in civil service communication classes either. It is, however, a core element in political communication and private sector marketing and corporate communication – as practiced by the best of the best. It’s not well-practiced by most practitioners in any of these groups, however, so NATO will have to reach out and acquire the best possible assistance it can afford.
With the trillion-dollar cost of the war and the incalculable cost of failure looming on the horizon, however, it is hard to believe that the alliance could afford not to do it right.
Lessons Learned. How does your organization approach communication? Does it take an enabling approach – focused only on answering questions from the public and disclosing reportable information? Or, does it take a strategically proactive approach – focused on shaping the environment and influencing stakeholder decisions and behaviours? Which would be more effective in helping your organization achieve its strategic objectives?
Some would argue the strategic influence approach is a Machiavellian approach intent on deception and malice. What do you think? Is influence necessarily malicious? What if the strategic objectives you are trying to achieve are wholesome? Consider a mother’s interest in shaping the perceptions and influencing the behaviour of her children? Are all mothers malicious?
Mark Towhey (3rd from left) with Commander of the Afghan Border Police General Abdul Rahman (4th from left) and H.E. Charlotte Adrien, Ambassador of the European Union to Tajikistan (2nd from right) at Shegnan, Afghanistan. Also pictured Capt. Musa Rahimi (l), ABP, Officers Pablo Castillo (2nd from l) and Christian Tuschik (r) of the European Union Police Mission in Afghanistan.
Here a 'stan, there a 'stan!
In between exciting client assignments, Mark continues to work frequently in Afghanistan and Tajikistan helping to design and implement a training program for Afghan Border Police. If you're interested in what he's up to, check out his blog: CoffeeWithMarkTowhey.com
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