One Voice or Many for the Taliban, but Pegged to a Single Name

By ROD NORDLAND
NYT

KABUL, Afghanistan — Will the real Zabiullah Mujahid, mouthpiece of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, please stand up?

Afghan intelligence officials say he is really Hajji Ismail, a 42-year-old man from the Pakistani town of Chaman. In cellphone conversations, he insists that his real name is Zabiullah Mujahid, and that he is a middle-aged man living on the run in Afghanistan. American military intelligence officials prefer to call him the Zabiullah persona, saying that he is actually a team of Taliban operatives pretending to be the same man as they run what amounts to a media call center over the border in Pakistan.

Whoever he may be, he has proved to be an effective communicator, as even some of his enemies acknowledge. The Taliban’s message gets out through a number of different social media tools — cellphone calls, text messages, e-mails, postings on jihadi Web sites, Facebook accounts and, more recently, Twitter feeds. And, most important, the messages get out quickly, with the Taliban often claiming responsibility for an attack within minutes of its execution, and with just enough credible detail to be believable.

Rarely are NATO communicators able to move with that sort of speed, hampered as they are by member nations’ competing restrictions on the release of information, as well as by a huge military bureaucracy that is not as nimble as one man, or a small staff, with cellphones — especially when truth is no obstacle.

(More here.)