On Thursday 8 March 2018 the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS) held a discussion on the book entitled “Taliban’s Narratives: The Use and Power of Stories in the Afghanistan Conflict". Written by Professor Thomas Johnson. This book analyzes stories, narratives and propaganda technics used by the Taliban and the United Stated after 2001.
AISS Researcher Omar Sadr presented his review on the book. According to him, the book draws on culture to interpret and decode Taliban’s Information Operation (IO) and narratives. He added that the book is valuable as it enriches our knowledge of Taliban’s IO, code of conduct and communication strategies.
Liaqat Ali Ameri, a PhD candidate of War Studies at King’s College London spoke on strategic culture and strategic narratives. According to him, strategic culture refers a set of settled policy ideas about security and strategy affairs that are shared by established and emergent national security communities. Strategic culture studies, as he made it, seeks to examine the impacts of these ideas on the way a nation and organisation wage war.
He also talked about strategic narratives. He reffered to it as an interpretive structure through which actions in the realm of warfare become meaningful by using rational, emotional, ethical and historical appeals to the target audiences. Simply put, strategic narratives offers answers to fundamental why, what and how questions concerning a given conflict and thus provides an interpretative structure through which war can be understood and justified. The event ended with a Q&A session.