Political India: Engaging America

While the Internet's democratisation of communication has empowered the ordinary citizen to engage with those quite distant to them in the real world, this compression of cyber-distance has raised the thorny of question of whether groups such as the Taliban have the right to freely post anti-West messages.

The latest controversy surrounding this issue has fixed the spotlight on the United States government's efforts to pressure microblog site Twitter to cancel the accounts of pro-Taliban tweeters.

The Los Angeles Times highlighted the role of lawmakers such as Senator Joe Lieberman, Independent and Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, “to persuade Internet companies to remove videos and blog posts that he says promote terrorism or offer instructions on how to commit violence.”

Though Twitter feeds ostensibly from the Taliban first appeared last year in Arabic and Pashto, the LA Times reported, an English-language feed started in April and many of its posts referred to U.S. troops in inflammatory terms.

At the heart of the issue is a deeply troubling question for U.S. foreign policy itself — the fact that there has been flip-flopping on the question of whether the Taliban is the enemy or a partner in the future Afghan state.

A lack of consistency on this matter has meant that the State Department has not listed the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation, a fact that Twitter executives were said to have underscored to the likes of Mr. Lieberman. So long as the Taliban is not an FTO, they are reported to have argued, the microblog posts are in no way a violation the Twitter's terms of service.

Yet it is undeniable that the U.S. and more generally the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul is feeling the cyber-heat, a view corroborated by the fact that the ISAF has engaged in a cyber-battle with a specific pro-Taliban account.

The ISAF Twitter account is @ISAFmedia, with 16,000-plus followers and its detractor is the @ABalkhi, with 3,000-plus followers.

Hammering out dozens of tweets per day and trading allegations over specific attacks by either side, these exchanges create the impression of an ugly online brawl.

Most recently the Taliban tweeter highlighted claims that NATO forces were using Afghan mercenaries and noted on Thursday: “@ISAFmedia - your officials admitted to it dumb dumb.” In response the ISAF tweeter wrote: “@ABalkhi - Dumb dumb? How the dialogue elevates. Look: Nobody takes you seriously. Everything you type is wrong. Just. Stop.”

Labels: cyberspace, ISAF, Taliban, Twitter