Leaflets offensive to Afghans
According to the Associated Press, a US commander in Afghanistan has apologized for propaganda leaflets which offended locals – usually a difficult group to offend, since they tolerate mass executions, public bombings and torture, but a graphic rendering of a dog carrying a Taliban flag is really just too far;
The leaflets dropped Monday night, which encouraged Afghans to cooperate with security forces, included an image of a dog carrying the Taliban flag, said Shah Wali Shahid, the deputy governor of Parwan province, north of Kabul. The flag has Islamic verses inscribed on it, and dogs are seen as unclean in much of the Muslim world.
“Local people are very upset with this incident, and they want the perpetrators brought to justice,” Shahid said, adding that demonstrations were expected across the province.
I guess the leaflet is much more offensive than the two civilians who were killed by a Taliban roadside bomb last night.
Category: Terror War
The dog is unclean, but cleaning the shit off your ass with your hand is A-Okay.
Tell us how you feel about Donkey F-ing, lots of that gong on to.
Not just donkeys, they’ll fuck sheep, goats, cows and any other animal that will sit still for more than three minutes.
Also innocent little boys.
3 minutes?
“cleaning the shit off your ass”
The leaflets are free toilet paper.
why use toilet paper when you can walk around smelling like shit all day?
Dogs don’t bury their poo like cats do. They also lift a leg and mark their turf with urine. Therefore, they are unclean.
Removing poo by hand is no worse than what the orangs do with it. They sniff it, and if it ain’t done to a turn, they put it back. (Yes, I did see this at the zoo.)
yeah, like tomcats don’t spray to mark their territory? And dogs do try to bury their poo… and many cats don’t. Sorry, ma’am, but after having dogs for all y life and having cats for almost 50 years (not to mention being married to That Crazy Cat Woman Down the Street for damn near 40 years) I can tell you that the supposed cleanliness of cats is pretty much a myth.
I knew a guy who trained his cat to do its “duty” in the toilet.
Damn thing drowned trying to cover it up.
Well, if scratching leaves in the dirt with the back feets is burying it, okay, but I always viewed that as scattering it, not burying it.
Yes, all male cats do spray to mark their turf. You should see the cheetah stud dance. But no, cats are no more ‘clean’ than any other critter. They’re just more useful to THOSE people than dogs because they kill rodents that get into food supplies (and everything else).
I’ve had 4-leggers my whole life, including dogs. Cats just don’t have to go for walkies in the winter in the blizzards like dogs do, and you can’t let dogs run loose around here.
One of my favorite cartoons from years gone by: As the owner looks at his dog and says “Dog’s life? You get fed, walked, have a nice house climate controlled house to sleep in, someone to take care of you – you got it easy!” while the dog is thinking “Oh yeah? YOU try shitting in a snowbank”
you forgot, cats like to leave their road kill on the front porch to show off ‘)
they hate dogs and cats because they are the animals who won’t let them f*ck them.
I got to know much of the PSYOP community during OIF…there was an old tired joke that you can kill the locals, but you can’t insult them…that said, dogs were a favorite feature since muslims generally find them repugnant….and the recurring message was that the bad guys were no better than dogs…now, will someone hellfire the shrieking goat fucker in that photo…I don’t think he’s amenable to a soft kill hearts and minds campaign
You don’t like Rage Boy?
I should cut him some slack…if I had been raised a bacha bazi boy serving tea and taking it up the pooper every night from Pashtun perverts, I too would struggle with “anger management”
Rage Boy needs some fiber.
It will take a stick of dynamite…dude has log jammed colon from all that dancing boy action
No, he needs some “lead”!
I’m PSYOP.
Showing a leaflet, with a dog holding an Afghanistan flag, is a classic example that we could use to show how not understanding cultural nuances could result in misinterpretations that could backfire. How we see things would be different from how others would see the same things.
We see dogs, here, differently than what they see over there. So, if we have a leaflet with a badass cat, or dog, holding a U.S. flag, in the U.S., chances are good that many people in the U.S. wouldn’t take issue with that, and wouldn’t take issue with how that image is presented.
Take this same thing and put the flag or any Muslim country into the hands, er paws, of a dog, and you’re going to provide a message, to the audience, that’s going to be interpreted differently.
In this case, it was like saying that regular Afghanis, regardless of what tribe they’re in, regardless of whether they’re on our side, their side, or somebody else’s side, are nothing but dogs. This leaflet would be seen as an insult.
This is like the use of the rat to describe others. During the Iraq Invasion, Comical Ali (Baghdad Bob), described the U.S. forces as “scattering like rats”. You’d notice his nonverbal emphasis, and change in voice tone, while he said, “scattering light rats”. He kept referring to us as rats. In the Arab world, being identified as a “rat” is more derogatory than what it would be if used from one American to another.
Baghdad Bob missed a career as a stand-up comic in Las Vegas.
“No (BOOM!) American rats and their warplanes (BOOM!) will ever enter Iraqi airspace! (BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!)“
That was the dude giving the interview from atop some building, and it looked to me, of course I could be wrong, that if you looked close enough there was a freaking M1 tank in far background
But it wasn’t the flag of a “Muslim Country”. Purposely, I think, it was the flag of the Taliban…i.e. The Taliban are dogs.
I think the miscal was in that the flag contains Koranic verse.
Correct. And even worse… according to Wikipedia, the text on the flag is the Shahadah, their “statement of belief”. So even friendlies would take issue with that.
It’s similar to problems that come up when translating ad copy into foreign languages:
http://www.businessinsider.com/worst-foreign-ad-translation-fails-2012-5#the-american-dairy-association-1
How many active-duty or reserve Psyop soldiers are near-native speakers of either Dari or Pashto? How many break at least 3-3-3 on the DLPT? Have at least 4 years in theater? Read every local newspaper in either language every day? Listen to local radio and media broadcasts every day? Is the psyop effort dialed in to each region of the country, addressing local concerns?
If the answer is “not many”, then I don’t expect that we’re putting out Psyop product that is anything the average local in Afghanistan will take the time to consume and absorb.
Who fucking cares. How has any of this tippy toe bullshit helped?
Fucking zero. The moment we are gone there will be a video posted of the taliban burning down that little white church on KAF.
Anyone who still thinks leaflets, money and pillow talk is effective in Astan is fucking wrong.
That commander instead of apologizing, should have said “here is a quarter, call someone that GIVES A SHYT!”
Looks like Afghan is going to the dogs.
It’s strange how theViet Nam war enriched America in so many ways
Many of our soldiers married Vietnamese women, Vietnamese restaurants serve great food, thriving little Saigon neighborhoods in our cities, even the nail salon industry here is dominated by hard working Vietnamese people
I assume they pay taxes and have integrated into American society
I don’t see any of that with Afghan culture
It seems to have nothing to offer to us
I have no idea as to the percentage but it does make me stand a wee bit taller when I see military folks of obvious Vietnamese heritage. Our sacrifice in their country, has resulted in the best of them doing well in our country.
I went to college after the war and sat next to a Vietnamese kid. Smart as whip and determined to learn. And he didn’t cheat like American kids.
Did he let you copy his test answers ???
In 1988 my neighbor was a nice Vietnamese lady and she had this Vietnamese guy mowing her yard. I asked her about him and she said he was new here with his wife and new baby and looking for work. So I had him do a lot of yard work and he worked his ass off, double time. A hot July day he was trimming hedges and when I saw him walk by sweating like a mule, with a shoulder load of trimmings I said, “hey Kim, buddy please take a break, get some water.” He looked at me and said my name and then, “America…no work, no eat.” I truly fought back tears to hear that. I finally talked to the guy across the street who was a supervisor at the mechanic’s shop for a big concrete outfit. He talked to Kim and got him a job. I asked him about six months later how Kim was doing. He told me he cleans everything like he was going to eat off it and a piece of trash had about a 10 second life span on the floor. He told me that in honesty, “if all my workers worked like Kim I could get by with half of them”. Kim and I talked about the war and his was a tragic and at the same time hope filled story. He is doing well today, having become a citizen along with his wife and all of his kids are either in or headed to college for engineering degrees.
I meet a lot of second and third generation Vietnamese kids at the University of Austin driving for rideshare.
I enjoy talking to them and always try to thank them and their families for coming to America and working their asses off to succeed.
Now if we could get a few million Americans to actually work instead of sit on their asses looking for some way to game the system.
I just found out today that one of my friends was given the status of unemployable by the VA and now gets a 70% rating for payment by the VA.
He was post Vietnam era, he never saw combat and he drank his brain cells away…
He’s not unemployable, he is just too damn stubborn and lazy to work at all…
Meanwhile the rest of us have to continue to work out asses off just to keep our heads above water…
Unemployable???
What in the actual fuckety, fuck, fuck, fuck is that???????????????????
Sure they do Doc, a great testing ground for new munitions.. delivered from a safe distance of course, most of those goat fuckers are not worth a drop of American blood!
But MOAB, new and improved versions, and hell, even tactical nukes, why not, all we’d be doing is rearranging sand…
One further point, I find the leaflets offensive as well, shouldn’t insult dogs that way.
Dogs have the right to be offended, too.
Is it possible to bomb someone FORWARD to the Stone Age?
You get an extra gold star for that.
I am offended that they are offended. And that anyone apologized for unwittingly offending anyone. And a bunch of other stuff.
So what?
Next case.
We went thru the same shit a few years back with soccer balls covered with flags of the world, Afghan flag has Islamic verse, ball therefore verse is played with in the dirt, locals want someone’s head. Some PSYOP lessons learned don’t get passed down.
That takes work to fuck up soccer…it’s one of those normally positive themes that allegedly play well in the Middle East/South West Asia….you know, national unity, sectarian group hugs, sportsmanship…yeah, it’s bullshit; once the game is over and they’ve done their celebratory automatic weapon discharges into the sky, it’s back to the seventh century
The Afghan National Sport is Buzkashi where men on horseback rumble each other over the carcass of a freshly beheaded goat.
Damn…hard to work THAT into a tasteful and effective PSYOP line of operation…”hey General, need you to sign off on these new PSYOP products for release…we got a team of doped up bacha bazi boys riding horses backwards playing buzhashi that glorifies venerable tribal institutions of child sodomy, animal mutilation and opium addiction…Afghanis with eat it up! And since it’s an entertaining TV commercial series, it will get tremendous outreach to the five operating television sets left in Afghanistan….sorry, on my third bourbon…
or play polo with the head of an infidel!
Aw fuck. Really? I was at COP Waza Khwa and I knew the inventory of every conex on the place. One day a local Afghan dad and his little boy showed up at the gate. The kid had a broken arm. While they were in the doc shop, I went and dug out a brand new soccer ball and aired it up. Then we gave it to the little boy before they left. The soccer ball had some sort of local language script on it and a flag (I think). Hope it didn’t cause any problems. We closed COP Waza Khwa shortly thereafter and left it to the ANA.
FUCK ‘EM, we pulled them out from under the foot of the taliban, I remember reading accounts of how happy they were about that, barber shops reopened and in business, people unearthing radios and TV sets without fear of persecution, etc etc and now they get offended as fast as college snowflakes.
The Taliban flag does not offend.
A dog carrying a Taliban flag does offend.
I conclude that they are total morons and I don’t care about their offended feelings.
Is there a good reason why we haven’t nuked that shithole from orbit yet?
Afghanistan has a large resource of rare earth minerals estimated to be worth over a trillion dollars!
The problem is, China’s been there for years sucking it dry like. Once they are done, they’ll chuck it over their shoulder like an empty beer can. The same exact thing they are doing in Africa.
But, there’s no oil in Afghanistan. So, the protestors who say we’re there for “oil” show how utterly ignorant they are about the issues. They only know the “protestor talking points” from their favorite anti-military / anti-US website.
They have poppy oil!
Ok, neutron bomb then.
They have Special Snowflakes in Afghanistan? Poor baby’s……..
Fuck em. Just fuck em.
Dogs are great. I once owned a talking dog who was a mathmatical expert. I said to the dog-whats two minus two and the dog said nothing.
I asked a talking dog to name the greatest baseball player, and he said “ROOTH! ROOTH!”
…
I looked at him suspiciously. After a moment he said “DiMaggio?”
What doesn’t offend Muslims? Seriously.
Don’t like bacon. Don’t like man’s best friend. Don’t like women.
Why would anyone trust these people again?
and don’t drink… which the Scots, Irish, German and Welsh in me finds TRULY offensive.
Can’t speak to the Afghan of the Stan, but Iraqi men drank, smoked and fornicated more than any Scotsman I’ve encountered…it was pure western genius that inflicted General Order One on our troops…most Iraqis had more pressing issues after the invasion than what US troops did for R and R…I scored my hooch through State Dept or Iraqis, or flew to Basra to get lit with the brits…. no fucking way to run a war without some meaningful distractions…I got to hand it to sailors though, a bunch went to mast for running a saloon/brothel in some KBR trailers at Camp Victory…I just love the Navy’s deck plate entrepreneurial spirit!
I saw Hadji shops jam-packed with beer and liquor a stone’s throw from our front gate in Kabul!
Hope u were able to score a little, PI, if u were one to imbibe…again, GO One was bullshit…
Has anyone else seen the “You Might Be a Terrorist If…” list? It had a few gems like:
-You refine and sell heroin for a living but claim a moral objection to beer.
-You wipe your ass with your bare left hand but consider bacon “unclean.”
-You like women so much you think every man should own at least two.
no, they dislike women so much they think every man should own one young boy!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-angers-afghans-offensive-leaflet-drop-070800159.html apparently someone considerd himself offended enough to suicide bomb a checkpoint over this; casualty figures range from 3 to 20 WIA (I assume the bomber did not survive)
Yeah, he’d probably never thought of exploding in public before he saw the leaflet.
That dumb cunt Susan Rice would say it was the leaflet
OK, my counselor said that I have to be nice, and say something good. I’m trying hard with this picture. Mmmm….. OK… I see he’s been stretching his jaw prior to Man Love Thursday, that takes some initiative, good for him…
I thought someone had him by the balls.
That, too lol
I simply thought he had Donkey Blower’s Cramp!
Rage boy?
Isn’t he from India?
So stop dropping leaflets and start dropping cluster bombs.
awwwwwwwwwwww woof woof! the dog was some ones mother?
“usually a difficult group to offend”
I disagree there. The fact is they tolerate a lot of barbarity that we don’t – that much is true. They don’t tolerate ANYTHING that might burst their religious bubble. This episode being an example.
And this goes for a vast majority of Muslims around the world. That’s why the West and Islam don’t mesh so well. The whole freedom of speech thing and all. . .