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This is a 5 mins and 9s long video Documentary on emergence of modern media’s coverage of military conflicts :

Print Media: World War I,

Electronic Media: Gulf War I

Social, Electronic and Print Media : The Syrian Civil War

View here

Credits:

Salman Ghumman (Narration, Script , Video Production , Score and Editing)

Adil Khan: Camera Work – Interview Analysis

Henry Shum : Camera Work – Interview Analysis

SLIDE 1: INTRO

SLIDE 2: THE DRONE

You are looking at the future of warfare. The MQ-9 reaper drone.

It is high-tech in performance, sleek in appearance, global in reach

It is mysterious, distant, and deadly

….  its message of destruction is in its name: The Predator and The Reaper

SLIDE 3: WEAPON OF CHOICE

In the United States War on Terror , the drone has been the Weapon of Choice.

President Obama has ordered 500 strikes to Bush’s 50.

Largely due to the fact that in America’s costly wars this guy is frugal to the nth degree.

SLIDE 4: THE STRIKE

To the enemy the drone has an aura of divine retribution.

It means death, destruction, deceit, and despair from the Sky.

At 50,000 feet above ground, the modern drone can hover overhead for days,

Little escapes its scrutiny AND it strikes without blinking an eye

SLIDE 5: THE TARGET

The Ground zero of the CIA’s drone program has been WAZIRISTAN

For centuries the tribal people of this region have lived autonomously.

Their love for personal freedom, egalitarianism and a Code of honour and revenge is the stuff of legend.

SLIDE 6: THE PSY WAR

The capacity of the drone to see but not be seen   – To deliver death in the most destructive ways and without warning.

Psychologically,  it  runs opposite to everything a Warrior Tribal stands for.

It is not only dishonourable but also smacks of sacrilege.

To the tribal the drone is appropriating all the powers of God and more.

SLIDE 7:  AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

Juxtapose this with the Americans :  The drone frees Americans of any risk.

It can be operated safely and neatly

The pilot can complete work in his office and then go home to take his family bowling.

SLIDE 8:  XBOX XPERIENCE

Ignoring the moral debate, drone operators are infatuated with the weapon and the sense of power it gives them.

It leaves them electrified and adrenalized…. almost like playing a modern console war game.

Only that it is real and the people who they observe are most vulnerable in their most private moments.

SLIDE 9: LIVES OF OTHERS

“We watch people for months,” “We know their patterns, we see their children playing, their women doing laundry.

We know them like we know our neighbours. We even go to their weddings and funerals.

Some operators speak of watching people having sex at night through infrared cameras.

SLIDE 10: THE DENIGRATION

Keep in mind the importance Muslim tribal peoples give to notions of modesty and privacy.

But it doesn’t’ end here : the military slang for a successful drone strike is “bug splat.”

Such denigration has been heard before, and as recent history teaches, it never ends well for the abused people.

SLIDE 11: ACCIDENTAL GUERRILLA

So- with absolute disregard to the due process of law –  a drone acts as the Judge, Jury and Executioner  all at once. 

In the deathly shadow of collateral damage born is what we call the Accidental Guerrilla

The code of revenge is reinvigorated like a spell – and strapping himself with dynamite the Guerrilla destroys everything and anything that it comes across.

SLIDE 12: EDUCATE THY SELF

The more damaging aspect of this kind of warfare is that it obliterates the fabric of an ancient civilization.

Tribal communities represent the very foundations of human history.

In the most profound sense, they allow all societies a glimpse of their origins.

Their codes of honour and revenge will lead to escalating global violence.

In the end, may well bring about the destruction of one of the oldest forms of human society.

Bob Woodward, a perennial Washington insider, provides a fast paced account of president Barack Hussein Obama’s early days in office. The newly elect president has inherited two of America’s longest wars and Woodward, of watergate fame, projects his gravitas on the most surreal deliberations from the “Situation room” between Obama and his top military advisors. The description of events leading up to the appointment of key cabinet posts in the Obama administration, with honourable mention to the newly elect-president’s pursuit of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, reads from an Aaron Sorkin script. Woodward demonstrates his grasp of everything Washington and the inner workings of the White House with short quip jabs amongst Obama’s campaign staff, all jostling for power in the administration, interluding it with the serious policy debate happening in the Oval office.

Barack Obama has some decisions to make and Woodward begins at the very beginning: its 2008 and president-elect Obama fresh of his victory speeches receives his first Intelligence briefing by the director of national intelligence Mitch McConnell. The “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and the “raging war” in Iraq are at the top of this agenda. Here in the same meeting, Woodward (enjoying complete impunity) reveals Obama receiving his top secret code words for the Predator drone operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan “SYLVAN-MAGNOLIA”, thus setting the reader up for more.

While the prospect of “bringing the troops back” seems alluring for a president who did not vote for the Iraq war, and in-fact won his presidency over this very issue, the reality of doing so sets in rather quickly as Barack Obama prepares to take office at a most circumspect time in recent memory. The looming 2008 financial crises ensures that  Obama remains preoccupied domestically, taking total heed from the Pentagon in devising his military strategy. This is perhaps more a failing on Woodward’s part than Obama’s, for seemingly projecting the actors at the top brass of US Army, Navy, the Marines, CIA and Special Ops as heroes from a western, who can do no wrong. Some of these characters, namely: General David H. Petreaus , Admiral Mike Mullen, General Stanley McChrystal regularly feature in Obama’s Situation room briefings and are invariably stoic about their assessment of the situation in the war theatres. The situation is always grim and would remain so unless more resources weren’t pooled in. The mantra of the generals asking for more translates into Vice President Joe Biden and the state department led by Hillary Clinton getting into gear and touring the world, asking the already fatigued NATO allies to do more.

Interestingly, Woodward finds discussing the origins of the long war in Afghanistan (9/11) and the Iraq war (WMDs), an exercise in futility. It makes sense, as it has the potential of blowing the steam out of the fast paced narrative he is trying to build. The Taliban in Afghanistan are now enemy number one, a de-facto reality, there to be fought. Al-Qaeda is on the run and the original equation from the “Bush doctrine” has morphed into one of containment. America’s nemesis Osama bin Laden and his deputy  Ayman al-Zawahiri are on the loose since the Battle of Tora Bora in 2001 and “fighting and degrading” the Taliban under the leadership of Mullah Mohammad Omar now seems to be priority number one.  In a shocking admission Senator Billy Graham (R) visiting the AfPak region (coined for Afghanistan-Pakistan) on Obama’s directive, tells it how it is: “If you ask ten of our people what we’re trying to accomplish here, you get ten different answers. This [war] has been on autopilot.”

The dichotomy in decision making in Obama’s Wars is at full display in the later half of the book. On the diplomatic front Obama appoints Richard Holbrooke as his special envoy to AfPak. Holbrooke, who hates being called Dick, is a career diplomat, a stern negotiator from the Bosnian conflict of 90s and according to Biden “the most egotistical bastard [he’s] ever met, but [perhaps] the right guy for the job.”  On the war front, the generals, particularly McChrystal is unrelenting in his demand for a surge in troops for ground operations in Afghanistan: a number ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 to reverse the momentum of the Taliban. The generals are clever in that all options converge to a singularity: a greater physical presence in Afghanistan. Obama settles for 40,000 with the goal to “degrade” the Taliban “not dismantle, not defeat, not destroy”. This is a huge concession and Woodward’s trepidation is obvious as he highlights Obama’s efforts to allay the fears of his national security advisors with the political cost of giving in to the generals completely.

A Harvard law graduate and a professor of constitutional law, Obama finds himself in a tight spot with Pakistan vis a vis the CIA drone program. Henry Kissinger’s famous quote: “There are no permanent friends, only permanent interests” is an underlying theme of Obama’s Pakistan policy as he initiates a full scale drone operation against Al-Qaeda HVTs (high value targets) in the tribal areas. The upsurge is unprecedented.  Speaking at the Brookings institute a year earlier Obama is vociferously critical of Bush administrations drone policy and promises to  restore proper legislative and judicial oversight to counterterrorism operations. But the economic realities of this new-age war sets in rather quickly: Pakistan is an unreliable ally, boots on the ground on their territory is not an option, thus the CIA is given a free hand to own the skies, and the rest is history. The book culminates with the lead actors an agreeing to disagree on various policy front and with Obama’s admission that “The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another—that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy” an excerpt from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The latest victim of the Panama paper’s leak might very well be the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and he owe’s this misfortune to none other than the charismatic opposition leader Imran Khan.

Through much of last decade, I followed the meteoric rise of Khan into the labyrinth of Pakistani politics. With his crystal clean image and an unrelenting campaign against corruption, Khan has certainly earned the low hanging fruit of electoral politics in Pakistan, the educated urban middle class.

Sharif on the other hand is in his third stint as Prime Minister, and he is still being chased by the ghosts of the past. A corruption scandal from the 1990s, charges of money laundering, offshore accounts and property in central London all have come to fore in the latest Mossack Fonseca revelations and the Supreme Court is investigating.

In his own words, Khan is pouncing on this opportunity like a cornered tiger.

Khan has called for a “million man march” into the capital on Nov 2nd, threatening a “lockdown” of the city until Sharif resigns. Sharif who is not directly named in the Panama papers isn’t budging.

And this is where things get convoluted. It is Sharif’s family, his two sons and a daughter, who are named in the Panama papers, not him. It is they who have held offshore companies and properties in central London, not him.

In a nascent democracy like Pakistan, parliamentary politics seldom remains within the confines of the parliament. Khan is known to use massive rallies and street movements to force the agenda; he found himself in a rather precarious position the last time he tried to oust Sharif through brute force. In 2015, his protests demanding Sharif to resign over rigging allegations, turned into a 126 day sit-in, in the capital Islamabad.

While Sharif clung to power, Khan persevered to find yet another opportunity in the Panama papers, and he is making sure this one does not go begging.

Khan is placing his bet on the Supreme Court to see through the facade of offshore property holdings by the Sharif family.  His latest march on the capital is in part a strategy to pressurize the top court into taking public outcry as a legitimate variable in deciding the case. After all, it is well a known fact that the Sharif children were in their teens when the London properties were bought.

Although many a political pundits have questioned Khan’s political acumen and have often sentenced him into political oblivion, his party continues to grow in numbers and is most vocal on social media. With just a year to go in the next general elections, to Khan’s advantage, the evidence against Sharif is piling and all the more damning this time around.

Imran Khan checks all the right boxes. An oxford graduate and hugely popular figure prior to his political career, he captained the Pakistan Cricket team for 10 years leading it a World Cup win, beating the colonial masters England in the final. He then turned to philanthropy, building a university and country’s only private cancer hospital.

His party is a cadre of professionals and technocrats. On the contrary Sharif is bankrolled by the corporate behemoths and industrial tycoons. He himself owns sugar and steel mills, while the state owned enterprises have defaulted under his watch.

With the rise of electronic and social media, the Pakistani youth, making 48% of registered voters has never been more aware or more connected.The political dynamic is ripe for change. And change indeed is Khan’s slogan, only if the state institutions, particularly the Supreme Court performs its part and holds Sharif to account.

Historically though, the same courts have subverted the constitution by aligning with the status quo. They have legitimized the rule of military dictators bulldozing all democratic norms. Therefore, it would be foolhardy to expect a very radical outcome.

But this shouldn’t deter Khan; although an ouster or disqualification of Sharif is unlikely Khan’s  end game ought to be to prolong the focus of the media lens into the Panama- scandal for as long as possible. Nothing could be more damaging to incumbent party than clouds of corruption hanging over their legacy heading into next year’s general elections.

The momentum is with Khan and Sharif’s end is in sight. There is reason to believe that Khan’s struggle is coming to fruition, much sooner than the naysaying forces of status quo would like to believe.

These old foes are back at it again: India and Pakistan, the world’s second and sixth most populous nations respectively, with a history of conventional wars, are at loggerheads after last weeks attack at an Indian Army camp in the disputed valley of Kashmir. Drumbeats of war are spearheaded by the electronic and print media on both sides of the border. Primer Minister Narendra Modi of India has openly expressed India’s desire to inflict punitive measures on Pakistan and increased diplomatic efforts on India’s part to isolate Pakistan on the international front. Meanwhile Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif while addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York has categorically rejected any involvement in the Uri base camp attack, which killed 18 Indian Army soldiers.

The recent spate of violence that gripped the Kashmir valley began this summer with the killing of a young social media activist Burhan Wani. Kashmir which has a long history of being the centerpiece of confrontation between these two nuclearly armed nations is once being touted as a “nuclear flashpoint”. Here are 7 reasons why a full-scale war is not likely to break out between the old enemies anytime soon.

4 reasons India and Pakistan will Not Go to War.

1.Nuclear Deterrence

The maxim of nuclear deterrence in the subcontinent is more relevant now in then ever before. India tested its first nuclear missile in 1974 code naming it operation “Smiling Buddha” followed by a series of second tests in 1998. Pakistan followed suit conducting its own tests nuclear tests in the aftermath of India’s 1998 tests. “The countries have not engaged in a full scale war since ” writes Micheal Kuggelman of the Woodrow Wilson institute in Washington DC. Pakistan, however has opted not to be bound by the “No-First-Strike policy” to which India is a signatory claimant. “The mismatch of conventional military force heavily in India’s favor”  adds to the security paradigm of Pakistan’s strategy , “meaning any use of substantive military force by India would endanger Pakistan’s sovereignty could conceivably be responded with a nuclear strike” continues Micheal Kuggelman a resident expert on South Asia at the Wilson Centre. Therefore, India is likely to tread carefully, weighing all options,  considering possibilities of light surgical strikes, rather than engage its Army.

2. Who’s got what to Lose

“India with a two and a half trillion dollar economy paired with global ambitions, has a [much] greater pain threshold” writes Cyril Almeida , resident editor of Dawn news. The software and IT export-hub of the world has teeming metropolis and a full scale war would set its economy back years. On the contrary, Pakistan an agrarian economy with a GDP growth rate half of India’s has seemingly less to lose , tilting the deterrent equation further into its favour. There have been calls within India to cut off or divert the water supply of Pakistan three major river systems flowing through the Kashmir valley. However, “this will give Pakistan an excuse to Internationalize the Kashmir issue further” writes Jayanth Jacob for India’s leading daily the Hindustan Times.

3. Lack of evidence and Media Hype

A major piece of the puzzle that has gone unnoticed in the current debacle is the linking of Pakistan with the Uri army base camp attack. While the state of Pakistan has issued a categorical denial to any involvement, non-state actors. i.e. = militant groups which have operated within its territory in the past or indigenous separatist Kashmiri groups are the likely perpetrators . However to date no group has claimed responsibility which has been a known modus-operandi and the “Indian media has been quick to jump conclusions after a release of a viral whatsapp video thus stirring up a controversy” writes Shivam Vij the contributing editor of Huffington Post India. “At the best of times, the Indian media is pro-establishment–particularly on foreign policy. In matters of National Security, the media goes a step further and allows itself to become a mouthpiece of the government”, he adds further. Therefore after the hype dies down, it would be a calculated move on Indian defence establishment’s part to gauge whether to engage in a war with Pakistan or look for the root causes within its occupation of Kashmir.

4. Strong ties between the Civil Society

One intangible factor which often gets overlooked is the relationship between the civil societies of the two countries. Ever since gaining independence from the British rule in 1947, India and Pakistan have shown a remarkable propensity towards encouraging the flow of cultural icons, namely from the film, music, sports industries and even academia to continue the exchnage ideas. The process of dialogue and exchange has accelerated during periods of warmth notably in the early part of 2000s when the Indian cricket team visited Pakistan. And prior to that the then Indian Prime Minister crossed the border on a bus and signed a declaration of peace in Lahore. Hence, there is precedence of resiliency in this relationship between two foe’s who share many commonalities including language, culture and history.

Syrian War ( Download HD version of InfoGraphic)

PRE-ANALYSIS     

Tone: The Strategy is to keep a formal tone due the seriousness of our topic, under the assumption that an overtly casual tone would discourage participation by diminishing the gravity of the issue we are trying o highlight.

Design: InformationGraphics. We are going to take inspiration from GraphicNews.com and use Pixelometer (Mac) a variant of adobe photoshop  for this task. The graphics design is based on the most “relevant” statistics from credible sources (like the HumanRightsWatch and United Nations) , most profound “quotations” , “catchy” statistics, Hi Res photographs depicting the war torn country, and the lead “actors” of the war ( important largely due to the fact that the conflict is multi-faceted with multiple regional players (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Israel) and major powers like the US (Nato), Russia, the Syrian Regime, and rogue elements notably the Rebel Groups and ISIS.

Goals: Our  primary goal is to raise awareness on the humanitarian front and secondary goal is to create space for a dialogue on the conflict  itself, largely due the aforementioned issues, and if a  credible policy can be shaped to better address as complex an issue as a multi-pronged international conflict.

Hashtag: The air raid of Monday September 26th conducted by the Russian airforce on Aleppo, is to be our focal point for this Social Media Strategy. From the early reports, there has been significant human death toll reported from by the western media outlets as well as Aljazeera. The hashtag we will employ is #WakeupAleppo. There current trending Hashtag #SyrianLivesMatter is also extremely relevant to our cause, therefore we may interject our content on this hashtag on twitter as well.

Strategy across networks: Basically our infographic will stay the same across Facebook and Twitter, barring resolution; we will create both high and low resolution images of the same content. In our assessment a targeted and focused message should be delivered to the audience to stir a natural response. We will employ other tools like online polls to gage the response of Facebook, especially keeping in mind that social space could be an impersonal space and some people would likely feel comfortable contributing to a poll over voicing their opinion on a military conflict.GOING LIVE

Behind the Scenes:

Monday:

Twitter: Salman created the twitter hashtag #WakeupAleppo & introduced the infoGraphic on #SyrianLivesMatter Twitter activity cont … Twitter activity cont …

FACEBOOK:

Wednesday: Posing went live on AdilKhan’s Timeline 

Thursday

Response:  Comments & “dialogue”

FB comments  … Online Poll # 1 : Online Poll #2 Comments on Online Poll #2 :

POST-ANALYSIS

Our topic of focus was on the current crisis in Aleppo, Syria, where a part of the city besieged by rebel forces had recently experienced aerial bombings resulting in high civilian casualties. To see how people responded to the crisis, Salman tweeted about Aleppo bombings with hashtags #WakeUpAleppo and #debatenight (trending worldwide on Sept26th ) to see if it would even be mentioned during the first US presidential debate between Clinton and Trump. It barely garnered any attention. There was little to no reaction after several more tweets on hashtag #AleppoisBurning (one of which was shared by Henry on his Facebook Timeline).

We figured that we may be able to gain more attention by creating polls on Facebook. since clicking on a poll option takes considerably less effort than replying to a tweet. We also posted our infographic on Adilkhan’s Facebook timeline that outlined the conflict in Syria. As expected, it generated much more reaction that the tweets made by Salman, possibly due to the fact that Salman’s twitter followers were inactive (or indifferent to the issue) while Adilkhan’s Facebook friends were active. Henry posted a poll in a Facebook group that specifically focused on discussions with regards to war crimes in Syria. asking “Who should be held responsible for the current crisis in Aleppo?” with the options: 1.Syrian Regime, 2.Rebels, 3.Pro-Regime countries that arm the government, 4.Pro-Rebel countries that arm the rebels, 5.The US for its inaction to regime war crimes, and 6.Other parties. Adilkhan posted a similar poll on his Facebook Timeline.

In Henry’s poll, there were barely any reaction emoticons to the poll, but it generated a conversation between the group’s admin (Arab speaking London resident) and one of the group’s members (from Lebanon) disagreeing about who should be accountable to the current Aleppo crisis. While the group admin agreed with most the poll voters that the Syrian regime should be held responsible, the other member thought that it was Russia’s fault, and also implied that if we directly asked the people in Syria that question, we would not be able to get an accurate response because the people there felt the reprisal for making political statements. The conversations were organic and required no prodding from the person who created the poll.

In Adilkhan’s poll, there were many more reaction emoticons, but we had to specifically ask people to not only vote in the poll, but comment on what they thought about the current crisis in Aleppo as well. Most of the votes in the poll pointed the finger at the Syrian regime. Only one person (a Russian friend of Adilkhan) took sides in the comment section after Salman responded to his question of why the Kurds were an option in the poll. He explicitly blamed Saudi and Qatar for sponsoring terrorism, and also called out the US for interfering with the political affairs of the Middle East. He also implied that if the lack of a dictator creates continuous political chaos in a country, then having a dictator in power is better than no dictator. In the case of Syria, he felt that without Assad in power, the minorities protected under him (like the Alawites) would be slaughtered by the rebels.

Although these posts generated a limited quantity of conversation, it did bring up different perspectives on the Syrian Civil War. Unsurprisingly, the Arab commentators outside of Syria attributed the current crisis in Aleppo to the Syrian regime, as most media focus on the fight between the mainstream rebels (ones who are neither Kurds or parts of the Islamic State) and Assad’s forces, has been on the Assad regime’s war crimes, while the Russian commentator placed responsibility on the US and outside Arab influence for fuelling the conflict.

Our social media experiment made us understand the need to use different platforms (in this case, Twitter and Facebook) as well as different methods of inducing the audience to react to an issue and/or comment about it. Simply using hashtags for Aleppo wasn’t enough because no one in our group were internet celebrities. We had to go to both a Facebook group and a person’s individual Timeline to collect opinion on the Aleppo crisis. The quality of the conversation was more in depth for Adilkhan’s poll than Henry’s poll, possibly because the person responding to Adilkhan’s poll is already Facebook friends with Adilkhan, which implied that he was more comfortable with offering a detailed and honest opinion. This highlights the importance of the strength of social networks in drawing attention to an issue. With people who share common interests with you, responding to your comments would be a natural reaction for them, over not responding to comments from a complete stranger.

The results from the two online polls as well as our collection and analysis of the metrics are below:Poll #1 Results : On AdilKhan’s FB Timeline Poll #2 Results : FB Group Documenting War Crimes in Syria

Download pdf of Complete Analysis:

Military Conflicts – Social Media Excercise