AFGHANISTAN - The Confidence Gap & Conspiracy Theory.

As in Afghanistan and other countries in the Islamic world, there is the combination of a confidence gap and the conspiracy theory which is quite popular in Iraq. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the Pentagon only recently came up with proper planning for the US-led occupation. Worse still is the lack of Arabic-speaking guides and analysts and of good translators working with the US and other foreign forces.

Officials at the Pentagon, as well as military commanders in Iraq, still wonder why they have not managed to win the trust and confidence of many ordinary Iraqis. The local rumour mill - with the conspiracy theory having developed as an important part of the culture for centuries - is working dangerously against the Americans.

Even more damaging to the US-led military operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq are the round-the-clock Arabic-language satellite TV networks, mainly the Qatari-owned and Islamist-dominated Al-Jazeera and the Saudi-financed Al-Arabiya, which since 9/11 have been feeding anti-American sentiment with reports of wanton destruction of mosques and battlefield atrocities committed by the US forces. Officers complain that there is no effective American effort to counter those reports. The US government-owned Al-Hurra TV and Radio Sawa networks have been rendered less credible by Friday sermons in which Imams warn the congregations not to listen to their propaganda.

When Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the senior US military spokesman in Iraq, was asked on April 11 what he would tell Iraqis about televised images "of Americans and coalition soldiers killing innocent civilians", he said: "Change the channel". Singling out the popular Arabic-language networks for criticism, he added: "Change the channel to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies".

Anthony Cordesman, a private military analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said he believed the US was losing the information war in Iraq. He said: "We are still unable to explain to ourselves and even to the Iraqis who is going to be in the government on the first of July, and the political dimension is as critical as the military. Never, from the day we began the planning for this operation to today, have we been able to develop an effective method of communicating with the Iraqi people to explain to them how they could benefit or what we were trying to achieve".

As in the case of the US-led war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon planned the invasion of Iraq in a hurry; and, in a continuing power-struggle with Colin Powell's foreign policy team since the Bush administration came to office in early 2001, the Defence Department turned down a plan prepared by the State Department even before US troops moved into Iraq. Once they drove into Iraq from Kuwait, the US-led forces quickly snaked their way to Baghdad and within days they advanced hundreds of kilometres. But they kept their long supply lines virtually undefended as the strategy was to take the capital, not concentrating on the cities and towns on the way to Baghdad. It was only after Saddam's forces and Baathist militias began "cutting the snake" that the Pentagon came up with a plan to defend the supply lines.

On April 9, Phebe Marr, author of The Modern History of Iraq, was quoted as saying: "It looks like a significant portion of... (Iraq's Sunni and Shiite) communities are against the US. Both elements have to be brought under control to get law and order, but it is going to be costly and we don't have the resources". Marr said she still thought "most Iraqis want us to stay long enough to set up a reasonable government, but we are not going to get much help from them in cleaning up a mess of our own making. We're now going to have to fight the war we didn't fight on the way in".

Michael O'Hanlon, a military and foreign affairs expert at the Brookings Institution, on April 8 was quoted as saying while he remained "guardedly or resiliently optimistic" about an ultimate US success, he was "much more nervous". O'Hanlon said he still believed the basic ingredients for the construction of a stable, post-Saddam government remained in place, but that the apparent intertwining of Shiite and Sunni ideology into a potent anti-Americanism could be an obstacle Washington would not be able to overcome. "Once anti-Americanism takes off, it's hard to see how you get ahead of it", he said, adding: "You can strike back...but then that breeds more anti-Americanism, and it really becomes a race against time".