Xinhua reported earlier today that a protest in Helmand Province’s Garmsir District included NATO forces firing on demonstrators. (I can’t find the actual report, but here’s a Xinhua follow-up.) The story is starting to spread across the Internet. So ISAF’s media branch emailed this flat denial of the story out to reporters just minutes ago:

ISAF forces did not open fire on civilians in Garmsir District as claimed in a report from the Chinese wire service Xinhua.

As noted in our previous press release, during today’s protest an insurgent sniper shot an Afghan official who was within Forward Operating Base (FOB) Dehili. ISAF service members identified the insurgent sniper, shot and killed him. There were no other injuries or shots fired by ISAF forces.

Local ISAF task force leadership in Garmsir District have been invited to participate with the District Governor and Chief of Police in a shura tomorrow.

Yesterday a poll came out reflecting a surprising Afghan comfort with foreign forces. Clearly NATO wants to husband that apparent support.

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a surprisingly vigorous advocate of social media — he’s on Twitter a lot and is currently holding a YouTube town hall meeting — cuts through a stale debate in the new issue of Joint Forces Quarterly (PDF). His basic argument is that public diplomacy/strategic communications is both overthought and underthought at the same time: overthought in the sense of endless PowerPoints and staff lessons about how to spread an effective message and underthought in the sense of basic insights escaping those bull sessions. For instance:

I would argue that most strategic communications problems are not communications problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or we don’t deliver on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are …

To put it simply, we need to worry less about how to communicate our actions than about what our actions communicate.

Mullen’s answer is to spend time and effort at building relationships — actual, interest-to-interest personal and policy relationships — with the cohorts that U.S. actions seek to influence. But that statement doesn’t imply an answer for what happens when the United States wants to influence a population cohort that doesn’t want an American presence. Mullen, for instance, shuttles to Pakistan frequently, and deals with Pakistani civilian and military elites more than almost any U.S. official. But those officials are out of touch with the large majorities of Pakistanis who hate the United States as much as the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The admiral is scheduled to appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 15 for his renomination hearing to serve another term as chairman. Maybe he’ll be asked to draw out the implications of his argument then.

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Anyway: What do you think about a contest like this? I don’t know what to make of it.

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Late last year, the State Department teamed with Facebook and HowCast to sponsor a New York summit called the Alliance of Youth Movements, where young people from countries like Lebanon, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey and Saudi Arabia discussed how to use social media to enhance their organizing and activism. The summit led, naturally, to the establishment of an online hub for stored activist-tool knowledge. (In a conspicuous coincidence, there’s a video up on the homepage about how to circumvent government-established Internet censorship.) According to Jim Glassman, the former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, the summit and the hub were the result of a trip Cohen took to Colombia, where he encountered youth groups protesting the violence of the terrorist group known as the FARC. Returning to State, he pitched Glassman on contextualizing the youth activism within a broader pet idea of the then-undersecretaries, about how to foster a “countermovement to violent extremism” with minimal U.S. involvement. “We certainly never would have gotten the Alliance of Youth Movements off the ground without Jared,” Glassman says, calling Cohen “a young, extremely talented public servant” who has extensive familiarity and good contacts within the technology community.

Nor is this likely to be Cohen’s last foray into State’s strategic-communications efforts. As Laura Rozen recently reported, Cohen is doing work for Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke spent a recent round of congressional hearings wondering how it could be that the Taliban is able to freely issue radio broadcasts in western Pakistan, without its communications jammed or otherwise disrupted. Maybe counterprogramming extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be Cohen’s next low-key assignment.”He’s really someone to keep an eye on,” Glassman said, in any event.

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What does McHale believe? Her first speech in office is delivered to CNAS’ conference, and it’s about public diplomacy’s place within the national security pantheon. (CNAS’s Kristin Lord notes that no undersecretary for public diplomacy has ever delivered an inaugural speech to a national-security audience.)

McHale calls “innovative” public diplomacy “part of smart power” — as makes sense for one of Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton’s deputies — and gives the standard line about technology enabling more thorough opportunities for distributing American messages. She quotes Defense Secretary Bob Gates on the need for credible messages, as judged by foreign publics. She also mentions al-Qaeda’s use of “old and new” media to spread its propaganda. “This is not a propaganda contest, this is a relationship race,” McHale says, “and we need to get back into the game.” I don’t really know what that means.

“Move beyond messaging,” McHale urges. “Listen more, lecture less … We need to explain our positions and policies up front.” She urges increased cultural and educational exchange programs. She’s happy that State Department officials texted and blogged the Obama Cairo speech around the world and hosted speech-watches and visited mosques “putting a local face” on the speech. “Local voices and local aspirations must drive these vessels.”

While she’s saying all this, a bunch of Tweetpeople note across my feed that this is a speech full of jargon and little substance. Instant “relationship building,” as McHale says. Those relationships will “counter extremists,” she says. Not the extremists who dislike the speech …

OK, she mentions the Pentagon’s role in public diplomacy. Says the Defense Department’s involvement has “bolstered” State’s understanding, and tells a story about Defense-State partnership on Nigerian anti-HIV/AIDS work. “We cannot build a civilian capacity [for public diplomacy] … without adequate resources, and at the State Department we just don’t have one.” But it’s not just money: “a strong emphasis on achieving real results” will mark her tenure, putting public diplomacy and “sound research” into policy debates. McHale wants to launch pilot programs to see what works. “The bottom line is results matter,” she says.

On Afghanistan and Pakistan: enhanced public diplomacy is “a key component” of the new strategy. “We will have to tailor our approach… valley by valley, village by village.” New strategy from McHale will support “democratic institutions and civil society.” Part of the task is to reassure Afghans and Pakistans that the U.S. has their interests in mind. She talks about “cell phone penetration” in both countries, and talks about texting as a mechanism to help persons displaced by the Swat fighting.

But there’s nothing about, for instance, U.S. efforts to counter the Pakistani or Afghan Taliban’s wide ranging radio broadcasts, as Amb. Richard Holbrooke has called an imperative — either through jamming their frequencies or by confronting their messages. Maybe that’s not strictly a function of her job, but it’s conspicuous that in a speech ostensibly about national security that no such practical public-communications about the war issues arose.

She gave a lot of public praise for the Defense Department, counterinsurgency and Petraeus. But the text of her speech was pretty orthogonal to their concerns. McHale’s appearance here appears to be an act of diplomacy of her own.

“The humanitarian crisis in Swat gets worse every day, which is why it’s so critical that the government of Pakistan and the Obama Administration undertake immediate joint relief operations modeled on our successful efforts following the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. The United States must commit military assets, such as Chinook heavy-lift helicopters, combat engineers and uniformed medical personnel, that the Pakistani government needs to facilitate these efforts without further delay. When terrorist groups such as Jamaat-ud Dawa are reportedly already operating relief camps in Swat, there is no basis for turning back the far more capable assistance of the United States military.

“The statistics underscore the emergency: between two and three million civilians have been displaced and have little or no access to adequate shelter, food or medical care. In a few weeks, the summer monsoons will turn ramshackle camps into fetid swamps, incubators for a host of preventable epidemics. History has already taught us that poorly-resourced refugee communities are prime breeding grounds for extremist movements; the Taliban itself had its genesis in the Afghan refugee community driven into Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. We don’t need to repeat that disaster when instead we can show America’s true commitment to the Pakistani people.”

So speaking of public diplomacy, it’s often said that public diplomacy is a poor substitute for good policy — and there’s truth to that, though they don’t need to be defined in opposition to each other. (Gen. David Petraeus tells a story about how, at the start of the surge, visiting dignitaries would tell him he had a public-diplomacy problem; he rejoindered that he had a results problem.) U.S. efforts at helping the people of the Swat Valley might be better promoted, especially as bin Laden’s making it a central aspect of his latest propaganda tape.

In this manner, Obama appears to have followed the same path taken by his predecessor, in creating more enmity towards Muslims, and adding on to the fighting enemies, thus paving the way for new long wars.

Let the American people prepare to continue harvesting what their White House leaders grow, in the years and decades to come.

They say the classics never go out of style. But more distressing that bin Laden’s expected bleating is the lack of rapid response from the administration’s public diplomacy infrastructure. If this were a political campaign, the pushback would have begun already. But so far there’s nothing from the State Department’s blog taking bin Laden’s message down.

Now, there have to be a number of caveats to my criticism. First, Obama’s Cairo speech tomorrow is, of course, a massive public diplomacy effort aimed at essentially refuting bin Laden’s worldview, even if the president doesn’t mention bin Laden. Second, the administration’s announced National Security Council shakeup last week is creating a White House director for interagency public diplomacy, so that represents an elevation of the importance of public diplomacy. Third, an argument that I don’t personally find persuasive but others might is that you don’t want the president of the United States in a back-and-forth with an al-Qaeda mass murderer. Fourth, Judith McHale’s testimony to the Senate last month to be the State Department’s public diplomacy chief made some gestures to treating public diplomacy as a national security issue, and embraced a series of Web 2.0 tools for rapid response. Fifth, the bin Laden tape was just released.

But I’m not going to let all that get in the way of my complaint! The longer bin Laden’s dreck is out there, the greater likelihood it’ll spread through the information bloodstream, and experience demonstrates that disinformation will be accepted if it’s not promptly confronted. The State Department has existing infrastructure set up — the DipNote blog, its Tweeting, and so forth — to get the U.S. message out, and yet it rarely spends much effort countering anti-American messages directly. Similarly, the Pentagon is getting out of the public diplomacy business for fear of edging too closely into propaganda. That’s laudable, but it contributes to an information lacuna that several administrations have failed to address.

Al Qaeda’s second-in-command told Muslims not to be fooled by U.S. President Barack Obama’s policies which, he said on an Islamist website on Monday, are no different to those of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

“America came to us with a new face, with which it is trying to fool us. He is calling for change, but (he aims) to change us so that we abandon our religion and rights,” Ayman al-Zawahri said in an audio recording on the website.

It’s been a bad couple of months for Ayman al-Zawahiri. First he calls Obama a “house Negro” to widespread ridicule. Then his former allies attacked his dedication to the Cause and his justifications for continuing his terrorist war against America. (That locution was for you, Rudy.) Then Obama visited Ankara and made a high-profile pitch for new relations with the Muslim world based on mutual respect. It’s like the guy can’t catch a break.

But it can be even worse for him. Bureaucratically at least, U.S. public diplomacy under Obama has gotten off to a slow start. Now, at least, the Obama administration has a nominee, Judith McHale, to become undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, the quaterback of public-diplo efforts. It’ll be interesting to see whether McHale thinks a component of U.S. public diplomacy should be to discredit American enemies. Zawahiri certainly isn’t stingy about providing opportunities to do so.

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