NATO/ISAF has one (and it’s not bad either if excessively wordy). The real issue in a place like Afghanistan is getting a fractured (in the nicest possible sense) coalition to use that narrative from the political-strategic through to the tactical.
The current strat-political game of one upmanship over who's pulling more weight and which countries are truly fighting is completely drowning out the narrative and significantly impacting on the information battlespace. There is no single report in AFG media or the worldwide media that doesn't highlight the differences (perceived or otherwise) in national approaches to the op.
Call me a simple former section commander but if we all signed up to ISAF and ISAF wants to promote a certain narrative shouldn't every contributing nation align to it? We're in no way different to anyone else ... in fact our new Government has been leading the drive down this route just to highlight its differences with the previous administration (and score a few points along the way).
Of course if we can't get that strat narrative sorted, all of the real information issues then fall out. Case in point what do we call our adversary in AFG? "OMF" (mum and dad have no idea what that means), "ACM", "Taliban" (several countries including the AFG Government want to open political negotiations with the people representing the Taliban movement so by putting everyone in the same boat we're potentially impacting on this LOO) "Taliban extremists", "Insurgents" "Nutbugs in a Pakhul with an RPG"... it goes on ... if you check the media releases for the current 32-odd nations in ISAF there's about 15 different descriptors for who we're actually fighting. In reality that should be simple to fix but then what to do with the counter-narc problem?
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