Narrative Misdirection? UK Strategic Communication for Afghanistan and Beyond

Britain’s war in Afghanistan – specifically its latter stages, where the UK’s role and casualties sustained in the conflict rose dramatically – coincided with the institutional emergence of Ministry of Defence-led ‘Strategic Communication’. This article examines the circumstances through which domestic strategic communication developed within the UK state and the manner in which the ‘narratives’ supporting Britain’s role in Afghanistan were altered, streamlined and ‘securitised’. I argue that securitising the Afghanistan narrative was undertaken with the intention of misdirecting an increasingly sceptical UK public from the failure of certain aspects of UK counter-insurgency strategy – specifically its counter-narcotics and stabilisation efforts – by focusing on counter-terrorism, and of avoiding difficult questions about the UK’s transnational foreign and defence policy outlook vis-à-vis the United States by asserting that Afghanistan was primarily a ‘national security’ issue. I conclude this article by arguing that the UK’s domestic strategic communication approach of emphasising ‘national security interests’ may have created the conditions for institutionalised confusion by reinforcing a narrow, self-interested narrative of Britain’s role in the world that runs counter to its ongoing, ‘transnationalised’ commitments to collective security through the United States and NATO