Resistance or Repression: An Expressed Agenda Model of The

Afghan Taliban’s Communications

Margaret J. Foster

April 22, 2016

Abstract

The Afghan Taliban has a unique opportunity to dynamically influence international perception of their

identity, an opening through which the organization can try to shape their political and military environment.

In particular, at different points of the American-led war in Afghanistan, the Afghan Taliban may choose

whether to emphasize their jihadi associations or their domestic operational focus. This instrumental self-

representation should be targeted most strongly at international audiences who lack day-to-day interactions

with the Taliban. Using a database of English-language Taliban documents released from 2007 through

2015, I use a structural topic modeling approach to test whether the Afghan Taliban’s media arm dedicated

more attention to domestic and anti-Afghan operations as the invasion continued and American leaders

experienced growing pressure to implement a stable power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan. Contrary to

the prediction that the Taliban should progressively emphasize domestic issues so as to present themselves

as legitimate actors who must be brought into the peace process, the results indicate that the Taliban has

articulated a broadly consistent message throughout this window. The findings suggest that the Taliban may

seek to benefit from both worlds: profiting from widespread interest in the transnational jihadi ideology to

which they are tightly linked, as well as from the aura of legitimacy accompanying powerful and high-profile

insurgent groups.

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Introduction and Motivation

Is the Afghan Taliban a member of the transnational jihadi community, or a conventional, predominantly na-

tionalist, insurgency? Although the Central Asian militant organization displays many of the characteristics

of a conventional, nationalist, insurgency, such as holding territory and engaging in guerrilla warfare (Asal

et al., 2012), the group has strong tactical and ideological connections to the transnational jihadi community.

Notably, the Afghan Taliban has closely coordinated with militant groups that are unambiguously identified

as terror organizations, such as al-Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and the Haqqani network. As well, along-

side their conventional battlefield activities, the Taliban has employed tactics, such as suicide bombings, that

are closely linked to terrorism. One consequence of widespread uncertainty about their identity is that the

West’s political space in which to interact with the Afghan Taliban is in unusual flux, particularly compared

to many armed organizations whose identities are more static. This lack of consensus about their identity

provides the Taliban with a unique opening to structure the discourse around their activities. Widespread

ambiguity about the Taliban’s role permits the group to present itself as both a jihadi organization and a

nationalist insurgency. Each mode of self-presentation has benefits and costs: the jihadi framing has close

associations with terrorism, but does not cut them off from an international bastion of supporters. The na-

tionalist framing may help the Taliban market themselves as legitimate negotiating partners with the United

States and American allies in Afghanistan, but comes at the cost of repudiating their ideological origins and

jeopardizing their close connections with established jihadi organizations.

Why might presenting as a nationalist group benefit the Taliban? Chief among these benefits is the possibility

of being invited to partake in peace negotiations and post-conflict power-sharing agreements. The prospect of

Western withdrawal from Afghanistan may crystallize the Taliban’s own interest in being perceived in a more

nationalist light, in order to be regarded as a legitimate player in the post-occupation political environment

of Afghanistan. From the vantage point of a distant adversary, media reports of decreasing public support

for war can seed the expectation that American leaders face mounting pressure to come to a settlement in

Afghanistan. Similarly, the group may expect that the prospect of gaining political and military ground at

the negotiating table increases as constituent members of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)

began to plan and announce their intentions to withdrawal from the country. The Afghan Taliban is likely

to pick up on opportunities to interact with Western audiences.

However, although the Afghan militant group may expect that downplaying their jihadi roots can produce

benefits at the negotiation table, the strategy comes with an internal cost by eroding their ideological coher-

ence and consistency. Their own releases excoriate nationalism and the Taliban maintains an explicit pro-

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jihadi, anti-nationalist, platform throughout their multilingual propaganda output. One extreme example of

their ideological marketing as a jihadi movement occurred in the 82nd issue of the Taliban’s Arabic-language

Al Samoud electronic magazine. The issue, released online on February 14, 2013, features an article baldy

stating their mision: “It is Jihad in Order to Establish the Shariah of Allah the Almighty, not a ’Nationalist’

War of Liberation.”1 Additionally, the Afghan Taliban is so closely connected to jihadi organizations and

ideology that attempting to spin themselves as a nationalist organization runs the risk of alienating their

international base for naught, if Western perception of the organization fails to respond to their framing.

Externally, the Taliban had led a sometimes-uneasy alliance of jihadi militant groups. Appearing to repudiate

the shared ideological framework of this network undermines cohesion, straining the militant coalition,

and adding to the expensive and difficulty of keeping the network under control. Internal tensions have

been made especially visible with the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) as

a jihadi movement with ambitions to form their own transnational alliance. As ISIS has attempted to

siphon members of the global jihadi network led by al-Qaeda, fissions have begun to appear between the

Taliban and several of the organizations with whom they have frequently operated. Releases from defectors

consistently feature complaints about Taliban nationalism, among them an open letter from the leaders of

the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Former allies of the Taliban, the IMU declared their support

for the Islamic State in mid-2015 and their leadership released an “Open letter...to the leaders of the Islamic

Emirate of Afghanistan” complaining about the Taliban’s nationalism and their pragmatism in interacting

with ideologically unacceptable states in the region. Among their demands, the IMU urged a “cleansing of

all the political statements published by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the phrases of the Afghan

nationalism” (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, 2015).

Echoing the anti-nationalist sentiment featured in the IMU’s letter, on July 30, 2015 an alleged Taliban

dissident took to Twitter to castigate the organization for allegedly subverting the jihadi cause under Afghan

nationalism. The dissenter, writing under the name “Abu Talut,” articulated a cynical take on the group’s

ideological ambiguity, claiming that the “Taliban like [sic] the idea of AQ [al-Qaeda] sending them money,

and fighters to die for their nationalistic cause, this is something they won’t tell you.” (Abu Talut Khorasani,

2015a). In another message on the same day, “Abu Talut” claimed: “they exploit arab mujahideens, Taliban

needs their money and fighters.” (Abu Talut Khorasani, 2015b). Although both the IMU and “Abu Talut”

messages against the Taliban were issued in 2015, the themes echo longstanding complaints about the

balance between Afghan-centric goals and the Taliban’s efforts on behalf of the larger global jihadi cause.

With allegations of Taliban nationalism an existing stressor among members such as “Abu Talut” and local

1Table of contents translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.

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allies, such as the IMU, additional framing that presents the Taliban in a primarily nationalist light runs a

serious risk of inflaming the existing tension within their ranks.

The risk of undermining their ideological bases of support may be worthwhile if the group’s messages can

influence a larger audience. A survey of references to the Taliban’s website suggests that the Afghan Taliban’s

online marking has widespread impact: for example, in January 2015, the United States Institute of Peace

argued for the need to amend Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution. The American institution build their argument

in part by quoting from a December 24, 2012 Taliban statement announcing the group’s perspective on the

peace process (Kane, 2015, 2). Material released to the “Statements” section of the Taliban’s official website

is frequently referenced by influential regional and Western media organizations, ranging from the Pakistan-

based Dawn newspaper, to the British Broadcasting Corporation, to the American NBC and Fox News

agencies. In particular, statements indicating potential changes to the group stance on political issues, such

as peace negotiations, receive widespread scrutiny. Similarly, messages from the group’s senior leadership

have been described as constituting the “most authoritative statements of Taliban policy” (Rubin, 2015).

Most recently, a July 15, 2015 message attributed to titular leader Mullah Omar generated widespread

media attention for appearing to back peace talks. The message, titled “Eid Felicitation Message of Amir-

ul-Momineen, Mulla Mohammad Umar Mujahid” and released as part of a yearly series of messages from

Mullah Omar, also proved deeply embarrassing to the Taliban, as, within days of the statement’s release,

the group was forced to admit that Omar had died more than two years earlier. Correspondingly, the July

2015 statement has been removed from their official website, although copies are available online.2

Strategic media

Despite the tension between the two modes of self-representation, the Afghan Taliban’s media efforts indi-

cate their attempts to use propaganda to shape their political and military environment, particularly with

respect to treating media releases as a tool to undermine American military strategy. An inspection of their

productions suggests that the Taliban’s media wing pays close attention to domestic American politics and

expectation that domestic public opinion limits American foreign policy options. As well, their media evi-

dences an understanding of common American rhetorical norms, such as an emphasis on freedom, national

self determination, and the desirability of responding to the wishes of the local civilian population. For

example, one day after the American president Barack Obama outlined a new strategy for Afghanistan in

a December 1, 2009 speech at the American Military Academy, the Afghan Taliban issued their response.

2While the July statement is no longer online, an archive of the website, taken on July 18, 2015, indicates that the message waslocated in the “statements” section of the Shahamat English website. The archive can be accessed at: http://bit.ly/1OTm8Fd

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Obama’s address, “on the way forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” called for the addition of 30,000

more American troops to the conflict and identified June 2011 as the date to begin withdrawing American

forces The White House, Office of the Press Secretary (2009). On December 2, 2009, the Afghan Taliban

responded with a statement dismissing the American strategy, and attempting to frame the American in-

volvement in Afghanistan as a consequence of anti-democratic hijack of foreign policy. The press release

stated that: “the needs and wants of the American people have been overlooked during the framing of

this strategy and it has been formulated under the pressure of (army) generals of Pentagon, the American

Neo-conservatives and the wealthiest few of America and for the protection of their interests” and presented

the Taliban as a defensive, inwardly-focused, domestic Afghan organization with “no intention of harming

any one” who fight for “freedom” against “foreign invading forces.” (Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, 2009).

Another Afghan Taliban statement, released on December 22, 2010, indicated the organization’s expectation

that their propaganda influences the audience costs of their foes. The statement, titled “Obama’s Annual

Review of the Afghanistan Strategy Inflated and Wishful,” shared the organization’s official view that: “As

far as the political front is concerned, the public opinions at world level go against the current war of

Afghanistan. Pressing oppositions to the war raise [sic] up from all parts of the world, urging the Afghan

war could not be won through military muscles showdown. At the diplomatic front, this is an achievement

for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” (Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, 2010).

Starting from the assumption that militant groups are strategic in their self-promotion, I use English-

language statements and communiques issued by the Afghan Taliban from 2007 through 2015 to investigate

the evolution of the Afghan Taliban’s online self-representation to Western audiences. I expect that the

Afghan Taliban’s self-presentational style will evolve as the prospect of the West’s eventual retreat from

Afghanistan becomes increasingly concrete and immanent. In particular, as American leaders face rising

pressure to implement a stable power-sharing agreement in the country, the Afghan Taliban should attempt

to portray themselves primarily as a domestic militant group and a legitimate “spoiler” organization who

must be brought into the peace process (Cunningham, 2013). I expect this shift to be in evidence in their

rhetorical presentation, as measured by the topics underlying their media output.

If the militant organization intends to use their multimedia productions to shape the environment in which

they operate, the attention the group publicly devots to topics in their communiques and statements will

should focus more on subjects associated with domestic actors and foes. 2009, in particular, is an important

year as the United States and American allies not only announced their intention to boost the number of

forces in the country but also committed to begin withdrawing forces by 2011. The Taliban—knowing that

the American military leaders faced a looming deadline to resolve the conflict—have an increasingly strong

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incentive to present themselves as unobjectionable negotiating partners as they can possibly accomplish.

Thus, 2009 represents a natural point for the Taliban to shift the focus of their media from positioning

themselves as an anti-imperialist jihadi organization focused on battling the United States to building the

case for being a critical domestic actor.

Research Design

I measure the Afghan Taliban’s construction of an external identity via the expressed agenda framework,

which uses probabilistic topic models to capture how actors publicly commit to priorities over time. The

expressed agenda approach quantifies an agent’s priorities by measuring the attention that they dedicate to

particular topics across their public documents. The expressed agenda framework is built from the topic

modeling approach, introduced below, which aims to discover the underlying thematic structures in large

bodies of documents (Blei, 2011). The use of topic models to analyze the character of large volumes of

political press releases and communiques has been gaining increasing application within political science in

contexts ranging from communications among members of the United States congress (Grimmer, 2010) and

Senate (Grimmer, 2013), to the political discourse of Russian elites (Stewart and Zhukov, 2009), to Japanese

campaigning strategies (Catalinac, 2016).

These models interpret “topics” as a probability distribution over a fixed vocabulary—namely, words in a

document— and proceed by positing that each document in a body of texts, or “corpus,” is comprised of a

set mixture of “topics” that are shared across the entire corpus. When the inferred underlying structure of

words in the documents resembles the thematic structure of the corpus, topic modeling produces interpretable

outcomes about the substantive organization of a collection of documents. In the context of communiques

from a rebel organization, one might think consider plausible topics as encompassing expressions about the

organization’s ideology, announcements of their operations, threats to future targets, and exhortations for

support.

The topic modeling variant most commonly applied by political scientists is the latent Dirichlet allocation

(LDA) modeling strategy. Under LDA, words in the document serve as observed variables that are used

to detect the unseen topic structure, modeled as hidden variables of the data (Blei, 2011, 6). The LDA

framework assumes that the probability of individual words in each document arises from a mixture of

topics, which in turn represent a distribution over the vocabulary of the document. These latend topics are

modeled via a Dirichlet distribution, also known as a multinomial distribution, thus giving rise to the name

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of the approach (Blei and Lafferty, 2006). One drawback of the LDA approach is that the model assumes

that the occurrence of topics is uncorrelated through the corpus— a clear violation of the method through

which coherent documents are generated and structured. Blei and Lafferty (2006) have proposed an alterante

approach, correlated topic models (CTM), which relaxes LDA’s assumption that topics are independent by

allowing topic proportions to be drawn from via the logistic normal distribution

Data

I focus on the Afghan Taliban’s English-language media, as this material addresses the external audience

tha the strategic representation theory indicates that the Taliban should be focused on influencing.3 As an

indication of the wide range of potential audiences that the Afghan Taliban hopes to reach through their

English-language website, versions of the website online during 2015 have included references aimed both

at dedicated supporters, such as directions to pages where readers can send financial donations, as well as

references that suggest that the organization expects to reach an audience that does not necessarily already

support their mission, such as links to websites proselytizing for Islam. Moreover, from the perspective of

the transnational jihadi community that the Afghan Taliban has been an uneasy part of—carrying out a

primarily nationalist struggle while simultaneously maintaining close links to jihadi movements for whom

nationalism is ideologically anathema—issuing messages in English serves three purposes. On one level,

English is the language of the United States and the United Kingdom, primary antagonists for the broad

jihadi community and specific military opponents of the Taliban. English is also broadly understood, and

jihadi media strategists and supporters have described it as an important language for messages that are

intended for the widest possible audience.4 Thirdly, English is one of the two official language of Pakistan,

a significant audience, enabler, and foe of the Afghan Taliban. With a single English-language message, the

Taliban is able to address several potential audiences, from military foes; to transnational supporters; and,

as argued above, even influencers of Western domestic opinion.

In preparing materials to analyze, I follow the classifications of Taliban’s official “Shahamat” website. On

the site, the official English-language online portal of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” messages are

classified under a five-part ordering of: “News,” “Weekly Analysis,” “Statements,” “Articles,” “Interviews

and Reports,” and “Videos.” The “News” category is the most populous, and corresponds to communiques

3The Afghan Taliban’s official website also features media released in Arabic, Dari, Pashto, and Urdu. Dari and Pashto arethe official languages of Afghanistan.

4As a recent illustration of the jihadi perception of English as the default language for broad outreach, on December 7, 2015a jihadi supporter wrote on Twitter that:“IS [Islamic State] Media really need to up the game by adding English to EVERYRelease. Too much Info and Messages go Lost due to Millions not understanding.” On August 15, 2015, a blog entry strategizinghow to improve the media outreach of the Islamic State observed that: “The brothers that speak Arabic and English arguablyhave the most influence online.”

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promoting their alleged military successes. “Statements” announce the organization’s perspective on military

and political events that impact the Taliban. Through these statements, the Taliban shares their perspec-

tive on domestic and international events, such as reports of negotiations between the group and the United

States, detentions of Afghans in Pakistan, the implementation of alleged anti-Muslim policies in France, and

alleged Afghan civilian casualties attributed to the American occupation. The website’s “Articles” present

wide-ranging essays and editorials which feature commentary about supposedly futile American efforts in

Afghanistan, opinions on global geopolitics, and attempts to rebut allegations of Taliban malfeasance. Ma-

terial is uploaded to the “Articles” substantially less frequently than other areas of the site, with fewer than

100 articles populating the region as of December of 2015.

Emphasizing material classified as “statements” would provide the most appropriate fit for the theory out-

lined above, as these documents feature the clearest example of the Taliban attempting to shape external

perception of their activities and of the activities of other armed actors in Afghanistan. Characteristic of

this dynamic, a representative statement released to the Shahamat-English website on December 4, 2015 al-

leged that Afghan national forces—“hireling troops” in the parlance of the Taliban— had massacred “locals

and children gathered around a fire in front of a mosque” in Maidan Wardag Province (Islamic Emirate of

Afghanistan, 2015). Illustrating the identity-shaping attributes of the statements, the message included a

sentence— “The Islamic Emirate strongly condemns this crime of the Kabul regime and views it as a clear il-

lustration of their brutality and merciless nature towards the common people” —that simultaneously referred

to the Afghan Taliban as a legitimate Islamic government, or Emirate; dismissed the Afghan government in

Kabul as oppressors of the population; and distanced the militant group from endorsing policies that target

civilians. Furthermore, the statement concluded with an attempt to depict Taliban attacks against Afghan

forces as actions intended to defend the Afghan people, promising that the group“will surely take revenge

from the hireling troops for these brutalities, Allah willing” (Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, 2015).

However, this emphasis comes at a cost: focusing on documents classified as “statements” by the Shahamat

website removes a substantial amount of material from the analysis, such as featured in the Taliban’s in-

house interviews, weekly analysis, and articles. Unfortunately, each of the other sources of material are

not only infrequent, but are also comprised of documents that combine discussion of many subjects. For

example, Taliban promotional interviews with regional commanders address a wide array of topics, from

local administration, to military successes or setbacks, to discussions of future campaigns, to responses to

international news, and descriptions of the composition of the regional force. The heterogeneity of subjects

is a challenge for the topic modeling approach that I use, which attempts to ascribe a single topic to each

document in a collection of texts, or corpus.

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To supplement this narrow window, a second model evaluates a larger cache of communiques released as

“News” by the group from 2008 through July 2012. Here, again, the instability of online jihadi websites

presents challenges to data collection, as the Taliban’s current website features only recent communiques.

Faced with a lack of data hosted directly by the Taliban, I augment the data by drawing from material

archived by an organization, the Unjust Media, that is supportive of the jihadi cause. The Unjust Media,

located at http://www.theunjustmedia.com/, was created in 2002 and, for years, has aggregated propa-

ganda released by jihadi organizations around the world. The site administrator has evidenced a particular

emphasis on the Afghan Taliban, which is the group with the deepest and most thorough archive on the site.

Relying on any third-party source risks tainting any effect in the data if the host’s agenda systematically

influences which messages are released and shared. However, in the case of The Unjust Media, the distorting

influence of third-party selection may be mitigated as the website appears to have little independent agenda

other than to promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and distribute the Afghan Taliban’s messages. In-

deed, the Canadian-based administrator of The Unjust Media has been so close to, and approved by, the

Afghan Taliban that in 2010 he or she conducted a friendly interview with an alleged Taliban commander in

Kandahar.5 Further complicating the data collection process, The Unjust Media website is currently offline.

I sidestep this complication by downloading material from Archive.org, using a version of The Unjust Media

saved on November 17, 2015.6 Previous versions of the Afghan Taliban’s own website have been incompletely

captured by Archive.org, limiting this project’s ability to draw a deeper cache from the independent online

repository. While the Afghan Taliban has had an official presence online for over a decade, the transient

nature of online jihadi platform complicates data gathering. The current English-language website was cre-

ated on April 25, 2011 and only contains an archive of media releases for the past four years, with the

most accessible region of the site only highlighting 53 statements covering June through December 2015. A

separate area of the website, on which I rely most heavily, provides an archive of 212 statements that span

April 28, 2011 through May 25, 2015.

Communiques and statements are distinctive forms of engagement and self-presentation, so I evaluate each

set of documents separately. The yearly distribution of both types of document can be seen in Figure 1.

Statements provide a greater focus the evolution of Taliban policies and positioning, while communiques

portray the organization as militarily successful against their local enemies. Additionally, as Figure 1 sug-

gests, communiques are released on a more consistent timeline, with a steady stream of single dispatches.

Conversely, the materials tagged as “statements” have a less uniform release pattern. In particular, there

5The interview can be accessed at http://supporttaliban.blogspot.com/2010/04/

theunjustmedia-interview-with-commander.html6The archived site is available at: http://bit.ly/1Qza2CN

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0

1

2

3

4

Sep 2007Mar 2008Sep 2008Mar 2009Sep 2009Mar 2010Sep 2010Mar 2011Sep 2011Mar 2012Sep 2012Mar 2013Sep 2013Mar 2014Sep 2014Mar 2015Sep 2015Date of document release

Num

ber

of d

ocum

ents

type

Communique

Statement

Figure 1: Communique and Statement Histogram

are several release spikes throughout the summer of 2011, when the group released nine statements, six of

which were uploaded to the website between July 19 and 23, 2011. The July statements illustrate the vari-

ous messages that the Taliban distributes through this tag: messages released during this flurry of activity

include two documents disputing then-ISAF Commander David Petraeus’ characterization of the group as

diminishing in activity and influence,7 one that rejected a United Nations claim that the Afghan Taliban is

responsible for the majority of civilian casualties in the country,8 an announcement of a general assassina-

tion campaign against Afghan military officials,9 and one statement that claimed responsibility for killing a

half-brother of Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan.10

Methodology

For each of the two sources of information, I downloaded the identified archives, and saved the statements

locally as HTML pages. Before conducting analysis, I pre-processed the documents by removing unnecessary

material, including standard introductions and conclusions, Quranic verses, non-English text fields, and

references to other areas of the website or external links. During this step, I also identified and extracted

7Documents 28929.txt and 28932.txt8Document 28927.txt9Document 28930.txt

10Document 28931.txt

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publication dates from the saved website. The result was a single .txt-format file for each document to be

evaluated. Topic models require data to be input in the term-document matrix (TDM) format, a corpus-

level structure with one column for each word that appears in the entire collection of documents. Each row

corresponds to a document in the corpus, and each cell in the matrix is a count of the number of times the

word occurs in the document. To generate the TDM, I processed the text documents into so-called bag-

of-word format by removing structural information from the document, generating files that are comprised

of the lists of words which occurred within the document. The collections of statements and communiques

were processed separately, generating two distinct corpi to analyze.11

I then stemmed each document, which removes word endings and allows the topic modeling algorithms to

recognize variations of the same word. Thus, a series of words such as “martyr”, “martyrdom”, and “martyrs”

would share the common stem “martyr.” Following this step, I removed extremely frequent words, known

as “stop words.” Stop words, such as “an”, “the”, “did”, “our”, “that,” and “we” may occur thousands

of times within even a small corpus but do not contribute to the overall meaning of a text. To this list of

excluded terms, I also added a collection of terms that relate to the process of releasing the communiques,

such as names of the Taliban spokesmen who signed the documents, Hijiri months, and the Taliban’s own

names for itself.

After removing both the standard and custom stop words, I generated a second version of both corpi that

removed the most frequently occurring words, as these words are terms are associated with the Taliban’s

rhetorical style in general, but, given their frequency, do not assist in uncovering the underlying topics

associated with each document.12 The list of excluded terms include words such as “Allah,” “Afghanistan,”

“America,” “emir,” and “mujahideen.” While removing the most common words would initially appear to

undercut the entire exercise of identifying prevalent topics, the terms are sufficiently frequent that their

inclusion simply dilutes the coherence of identified topics.

That topic modeling approaches are able to process extremely large bodies of text and produce topics which

often correspond to thematic groupings which underpin the true organization of the documents underlies their

appeal for social scientists. However, the substantive interpretation of these topics remains contentious with

Chang et al. (2009) claiming that many standard evaluation metrics fail to capture whether the identified

topics are coherent. Instead, they urge researchers to forgo likelihood-based measures for evaluations that

depend on “real-world task performance” such as qualitative determination of how well identified topics

11As a consequence of a change in the style in which The Unjust Media saved their content, the communiques corpi itself wasprocessed as two parts, one featuring the 183 earliest documents and one with the 1120 subsequent documents hosted by TheUnjust Media.

12The thresholds for most frequent terms are those words that occurred more than 150 times in the corpus of statements,2000 times in the largest collection of communiques, and 500 times in the smallest collection of communiques.

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match human concepts and whether test words injected into the topics can be reliably identified by human

validators. (Chang et al., 2009, 8) In most topic modeling frameworks, the number of topics occurring in

the corpus must be pre-specified by the researcher. By convention, the decision for the level at which to

ultimately set the number of topics is determined by selecting the number of topics that “yields the most

interesting and substantively relevant topics” (Stewart and Zhukov, 2009, 326). As a guideline, Roberts,

Stewart and Tingley (2014) observe that 3-5 topics is an appropriate starting point for small corpora with a

specific focus, and that 5-20 topics is reasonable for corpora with a few hundred to a few thousand documents.

I use two topic modeling approaches to capturing the expressed agenda of the Afghan Taliban across each

corpus: the first is the Correlated Topic Model presented above, which I implement using the tm package

for the R statistical language.13 The second modelling approach uses the Structural Topic Model (STM)

framework, introduced in 2013 by Roberts et al. (2013). The STM approach extends correlated topic models

by using a logistic normal linear model, rather than the CTM’s logistic normal prior, and operationalizes

the distribution over words as a multinomial logit. I implement the STM model in R using the stm package

developed by Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley (Roberts, Stewart and Tingley, 2014). After fitting the model,

both approaches summarize the identified topics by listing the most frequent words within a topic.

The first modeling strategy, using the CTM algorithms implemented by the tm package, generated topics and

a document-level identification of the likelihood that each document was drawn from a given topic. As well,

leveraging the larger size of the communiques corpus, I subdivided the entire corpus by year, and estimated

separate CTM models for the statements according to the year that they were issued. Unfortunately, one

drawback of the CTM implementation is that the results can provide information on within-year distributions

and probabilistic statements at the document-level, but only an impressionistic take on across-year variation.

The difficulty in comparing across years is particularly acute as the estimates of topic models are notoriously

unstable for small collections of documents. Thus, across-year variation could be either a true change in

expressed preferences or random variation in estimated topics. For ease of interpretability, the preliminary

results presented below were derived using the STM framework, which permits the inclusion of structural

covariates.

13I evaluated the more common LDA model, but the identified topics were not sufficiently compelling as to motivate choosingLDA, and the accompanying assumption of independence among topics, over CTM.

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Results

This section presents the results of extracting five topics from the 212-document corpus of statements hosted

on the Afghan Taliban’s official website.14 The five topics identified by the STM algorithm suggest distinctive

message strategies employed in statements: the first topic suggests a religious mode of communication.

Notably, the most frequent terms in this topic, “mujahid,” “oper[ation],” “year,” “muslim,” “almighti,”

and “jihadi”, are generically jihad terms that would not seem out of place in the missives from any jihadi

organization. The second topic, typified by words such as “report,” “media,”,“written,” “outlet,” and

“publish,” references the communications process itself. I refer to this as the media topic. The third

and fourth topics, which I name as prisons and civilians respectively, indicate the Taliban’s attempts to

depict themselves as the defenders of oppressed Afghans and the champions of civilians in the country. The

third topic centers around issues of incarcerations, a significant motivating theme in both regional jihadi

insurgences and the transnational jihadi community in general, and the fourth decrying alleged incidents

of civilian victimization by Western agents. The fifth topic is the most Afghanistan-specific topic and, not

coincidentally, the topic which focuses most clearly on topics of governance. I describe this as the gov. topic.

The STM-identified topics are introduced in Figure 2; the results are broadly similar to the topics identified

by repeated runs of a five-topic CTM model. Figure 2 depicts two fields for each topic: the top row presents

the seven words with the highest probability of being assigned to each topic while the bottom features

the seven “FREX” terms for each topic. FREX terms are words that are both very frequent within a

topic and relatively exclusive to their category, and generated from the identified topic rather than similar

topics (Airoldi et al., 2014, 288). In both the statements and communique results presented here, coherence

between a topic’s most probable and FREX words is one measure of my evaluation of the model specification.

When the most probable words and FREX words cluster around similar themes—such as phrases that relate

to governance as is the case for the topic 5 of the statements corpus— I assess the fitted topic as indicating

a more cohesive identification than if the sets of words diverge, for example with one set of words describing

military operations against NATO and ISAF troops while the other features references to Islam.

After identifying five organizational themes for the 212 statements, Figure 3 shows the yearly variation of the

probability of documents, along with 90% confidence interval estimates. The small number of documents in

each of the yearly sub-corpi complicates analyzing yearly changes in the topics expressed by the Taliban.15

For the most part, the overlapping confidence intervals suggests that the proportion of documents allocated to

14Alternate specifications assessed the corpus at four and six topics, with five representing the specification with the fewesttopics that generated distinctive topics.

15The distribution is 43 statements from 2011, 57 statements from 2012, 47 statements from 2013, 39 statements from 2014,and 26 statements from 2015

13

Figure 2: Topics Identified in Statements (STM)

Topic 1 Topic 2High probabilitywords

amujahid, oper, year, muslim, almighti, mu-jahidin, jihadi

report, media, district, hijri, written, outlet,publish

FREX words mujahidin, umar, homeland, mohammad,mass, path, jihadi

haji, publish, outlet, muhammad, rumor,akhond, spokesman

Topic 3 Topic 4High probabilitywords

prison, muslim, human, right, may, nation,almighti

civilian, martyr, children, incid, district,kill, area

FREX words inmat, prison, jihad, soviet, red, eid, hu-manitarian

unama, civilian, children, incid, casualti,villag, raid

Topic 5High probabilitywords

nation, govern, want, intern, year, countri,continu

FREX words negoti, particip, constitut, presenc, prob-lem, futil, countri

each topic per year are, statistically, indistinguishable. The exception to this observation is in the proportion

of topics identified as being in the jihad subtopic, which has become identifiably more frequent in 2014 and

2015 than at the start of the corpus in 2011 and 2012. This finding contravenes my expectation that, within

the established conventions of their deeply-religious and jihadi rhetorical conventions, the Taliban should be

directing their communications efforts away from associations with the transnational jihadi community.

The second model presents the initial analysis of yearly changes in the Taliban’s rhetoric, as measured on

group communiques and using topics identified by the STM algorithm. Figure 4 presents the seven words

with the highest probability of occurring in each of the 6 topics. As one might expect from a cache of

communiques detailing five years of military activity, the majority of the topics center on violent activities.

As one might expect from military communiques, the topics do not separate by theme as neatly as did the

statements. Topics one, three, four, and five appear to be associated with terms that relate to operations

against “invaders.” I identify these topics by their most distinctive tactic or strategy, labeling topic one as

the landmines topic, topic three as the bombs topic, topic four as the aviation topic, and topic five as the

ambush topic. Conversely, topic two, with a high probability of the word “puppet” suggests a thematic focus

on domestic military actors. Comparing high probability words to the FREX words provides additional

information about the messaging associated with each category. The FREX words for categories three, four,

and five accentuate the association with foreign troops as they feature terms clarifying the actors identified

by the topic. Indeed, topic four in particular emerges as having a clear focus on announcements of helicopter

14

●

0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3

Topic 1: Jihad

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2013)

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2014)

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2015)

●

0.10 0.20 0.30 0.40

Topic 2: Media

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2013)

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2014)

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2015)

●

0.10 0.20 0.30

Topic 3: Prisons

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2013)

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2014)

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2015)

●

0.05 0.15 0.25 0.35

Topic 4: Civilians

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2013)

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2014)

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2015)

●

0.10 0.20 0.30

Topic 5: Gov

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2013)

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2014)

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2015)

Figure 3: Estimated yearly effects on of topic per statement

crashes. Other FREX terms in the six categories relate to regions of Afghanistan, such as Wardag (topic

three) and Kandahar (topic two), or months of the year (topic two), although additional refinement is needed

in the stemming process. Topic 6, the most enigmatic of the topics, may represent communiques that are

primarily intended to promise fortitude in religion and resistance: the highlighted terms evoke religious

terminology and vague references to enemies. I name this as the threats topic.

After estimating word assignments for k-number of topics ranging from 5 to 11, no specification clearly

stood out as distinctly superior to the rest when evaluated for internal coherence and term distinctiveness. I

evaluated distinctiveness with an informal intrusion test, categorizing topics as “distinct” if the intrusion of

terms typical to the other topics would be noticeable. In the following section, I present results for a 5-topic

STM model. In keeping with the prediction that the Taliban will increasingly focus on presenting themelves

as a domestic, even nationalistic, militant actor rather than a jihadist insurgency that has been lethal for

NATO and other coalition troops, I expect that terms and topics associated with domestic actors should

be more prevalent in the later years of the corpus. This change should be particularly evident in topics

that address Afghan security forces, which the organization habitually refers to as “hirelings” or “puppets,”

versus NATO, or “invader,” forces. Furthermore, I expect the organization to downplay their use of suicide

bombings—a tactic closely associated with terror organizations—although the generality of the preferred

term, “martyrdom operations,” may obscure changes in references to these attacks as references to martyrs

15

Figure 4: Topics Identified in CommuniqueS (STM)

Topic 1 Topic 2High probabilitywords

approxim, landmin, invad, control, remot,blew, report

puppet, kill, yesterday, wound, dead, bomb,morn

FREX words istrict, werereport, birad, ibrat, islam-icemir, occupationmilitari, rovinc

ahmadiandahar, ahmadisep, ahmadioct,jun, zhiri, ahmadijuli, ahmadiaug

Topic 3 Topic 4High probabilitywords

two, report, bomb, blast, kill, invad, tank report, helicopt, militari, explos, mine,carri, casualti

FREX words elsewher, april, mujahidat, briton, unclear,wardagreport, yousufat

apr, seek, pick, protest, crew, aboard, heli-copt

Topic 5 Topic 6High probabilitywords

report, invad, around, two, ambush, blast,patrol

destroy, enemi, may, offici, believ, name,like

FREX words newpamir, garishk, animprovis, khail,ranger, devic, six

never, verili, flood, youo, nationo, mightyal-lahu, seao

are extremely common.

Figure 5 plots the marginal topic proportion for documents in each year.16 Perhaps unsurprisingly topic

four, the topic with a strong focus on helicopter malfunctions and downings has the most consistent, and

narrowest, range across all years. Attention to the topics identified in the six-topic specification display a

noticeable temporal arc, although the .90% confidence intervals overlap on a year-to-year basis. In keeping

with the predictions, as the years progress there is a clear trend away from topics one and five— which are

typified by words describing IED and bomb attacks against external forces—and a corresponding increase in

statements associated with topic two, the topic describing bombing attacks on Afghan forces. The proportion

of communiques assigned to topic six, the least coherent of the topics, also increases as the years progress,

potentially indicating that the organization has diversified their messages leading up to the announcement

of ISAF wind-down.

Conclusion and Discussion

Through this paper, I have presented preliminary results of using Bayesian topic models to estimate yearly

changes in the topics to which the Afghan Taliban dedicates attention in their English-language “statements”

16For these specific graphs, the probabilities are nearly all positive. Alternative specifications of the topic model’s parametersindicate that the positive ranges of the x-values are not required.

16

●

−0.1 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3

Topic1: Landmines

Liklihood of topic assignment

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2009)

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2010)

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic1(Covariate

Level:2008)

●

0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3

Topic 2: Puppets

Liklihood of topic assignment

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2009)

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2010)

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic2(Covariate

Level:2008)

●

0.04 0.08 0.12

Topic 3: Bombs

Liklihood of topic assignment

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2009)

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2010)

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic3(Covariate

Level:2008)

0.03 0.05 0.07

Topic 4: Aviation

Liklihood of topic assignment

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2009)

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2010)

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic4(Covariate

Level:2008)

●

0.00 0.10 0.20

Topic 5: Ambushes

Liklihood of topic assignment

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2009)

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2010)

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic5(Covariate

Level:2008)

●

0.40 0.50 0.60 0.70

Topic 6: Threats

Liklihood of topic assignment

●

Topic6(Covariate

Level:2009)

●

Topic6(Covariate

Level:2010)

●

Topic6(Covariate

Level:2011)

●

Topic6(Covariate

Level:2012)

●

Topic6(Covariate

Level:2008)

Figure 5: Estimated yearly effects on topic assignment per communique

17

press releases and “news” communiques. In doing so, I make two contributions. The first is an empirical

test of a theory of strategic self-presentation that complements and extends the existing literature on how

terror and insurgent organizations seek to influence their audiences.

The findings suggest qualified support for the hypothesis that the Afghan Taliban should seek to redefine

their self-presentation to make themselves more palatable negotiating partners for the West. The study finds

remarkable consistency in the topics expressed by the Taliban’s statements from 2012 through mid-2015,

despite an uptick in messages expressing broadly jihadi sentiments. Within the larger scope of Taliban

communiques from 2007 through 2012, the study finds greater thematic evolution. The resultant narrative

arc suggests a diminishing focus on claiming operations against occupying forces with a corresponding rise

of focus on domestic targets and a rise in attention to diffuse statements of defiance. Most interestingly,

the evaluation of the influence of the Taliban’s communications with which this paper opened suggested

that some of the most influential of their productions have fallen under the header of “statements.” Yet,

the first model indicates that topics featured in the Taliban’s “statements” have been the most invariant

to change throughout the time frame under investigation. The result is counterintuitive if, as suggested by

their own texts, the Taliban is attempting to use their messages to shape perception of their role within

the Afghan war. According to a strategic self-representation model of propaganda output, the statements

should have been the most responsive to changes across time as the organization attempts to dynamically

frame their international identity. Conversely, communiques are a relatively unexpected place to see thematic

movement: issued frequently, focused on specific events, and quoted less often, communiques would seem

to be a low-impact platform for influence. The differing findings across the two communications platforms

may shed light both on how organizations choose to represent themselves as well as their choices behind the

selection of differing platforms.

Secondly, I argue for employing topic modeling as a meaningful tool to study rhetorical presentation among

militant groups. The STM model does not yet appear to be widely applies to terror and insurgent media.

The text-as-data approach allows researchers to leverage the benefits of topic models for contexts in which

the number of texts would be human-unreadable. A text-as-data approach would enrich research into the

strategies of violent organizations by leveraging the hyper-communicative nature of modern revolutionary

organizations. These organizations, many of which straddle the same terror-insurgency line as the Afghan

Taliban, engage in frequent, multilingual and multi-channel dialogue with an array of supporters, opponents,

and potential recruits. Moreover, in a boon to researchers, electronic media not only enhances the reach of

their own media efforts, but heightens the impact of oppositional media outreach. Although some organi-

zations, particularly those that control populations, have responded by attempting to restrict media access,

18

others find themselves having to defend their actions and positions. In responding to challenges and at-

tempting to manipulate perception of their actions, organizations release statements and text that highlights

their idealized vision of themselves. Analyzing these productions in the aggregate can reveal changes— or

interesting lack of changes— that may reveal which challenges are significant enough to spur meaningful

change in self-presentation and outreach style. In particular, issues that emerge with great regularity may

point to a group’s own assessment of their weaknesses, which they attempt to reinforce through media efforts.

19

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