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Radio Free Afghanistan? No!
I'm sorry to see the knee-jerk reaction of forming Yet Another American Propaganda Station starting to get some traction. It's not enough that we already have Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Marti, and Radio Free Asia competing with the Voice of America for taxpayer dollars and listener attention. Back in 1989, Kim Andrew Elliott wrote an article for the journal Foreign Affairs decrying the fact that there were "Too Many Voices of America". The basic thesis of the article (which unfortunately is not available online that I can find) is that by diffusing our external broadcasting efforts, we make it impossible to create a single effective broadcaster. A secondary effect is that the actions of the so-called surrogate stations boomerang on the credibility of the "main" Voice of America. I know from talking to Kim and attending a presentation he made earlier this year that the situation has only gotten worse since he wrote the article. This leads to another point. Our experience with RFE/RL and especially Radio Marti shows that the stations tend to be captured by their expatriate community members for their own purposes, and don't necessarily serve wider US interests. Entire books have been written about the events at RFE during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 where the expat broadcasters arguably fed the uprising by claiming (falsely, as it turns out) that western troops would be on their way to Hungary, with tragic consequences for the people they were broadcasting to. The view expounded by Chuck Newman that "what we need is some good ol' fashioned propaganda" appears to me to be based on a faulty understanding of what makes for effective propaganda. Chuck, and many politicians, seems to think that propaganda works on the "injection theory"; you innoculate listeners with your propaganda, and they all follow in lockstep. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, it doesn't work that way. (Doc, as a reformed marketer, you should really understand this.) Decades of experience show that the most effective form of propaganda is to simply tell the truth, be effective, comprehensive, and accurate. As a result, the most effective propaganda station in the world is the BBC World Service (who, sadly, feel that North America can no longer benefit from their services, but that's another story and one I'm way too involved in to be objective about). The Voice of America is a poor second or third in this, in large measure because the politicians in Washington can't resist the opportunity to fund Yet Another Surrogate Home Service at the cost of the VoA's credibility. (They also can't leave their hands off when the VoA wants to broadcast a legitimate news story that includes the opposition's point of view, as the suppression of an interview with Mullah Mohammed Omar of the Taliban this past week makes crystal clear. That sort of action destroys VoA's credibility more than anything else, and provokes idiots like Safire to write columns calling for more stupid moves....) Incidentally, we *did* have a Radio Free Afghanistan for a while, back in the 1980s. It went off the air in about 1992. The BBC World Service has announced that they've expanded their broadcasts to Afghanistan in Pashto, Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. Somehow, the British seem to understand something that we don't: our country's interests are better served by having a strong, independent, credible international broadcaster rather than a hodgepodge of loose cannons shooting holes in our credibility.
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