Milblogs and soldier representations of the Afghanistan War: The case of Sweden

Introduction

Military blogs, or milblogs, form the object of analysis in this study and are defined as ‘first-person online diaries by serving troops’ (Andén Papadopoulos, 2009: 20). The milblogs might be seen as making up an alternative discourse about the military profession and the conduct of war aimed at a public situated far away from the war zone. Such storytelling might have an impact on the public’s views and perceptions of warfare with consequences for western nations’ participation in future armed interventions. But it might also take on significance for the discursive construction and very definition of the military sphere as distinct from the civilian sphere, for how the military profession is looked upon by the public and what tasks the military are expected to carry out. Thus, the way that soldiers represent themselves and their experiences has implications for the public perception and understanding of soldiering, for the legitimization of warfare and for the role of the military and of war in society.

From the point of view of governments, war blogs and other social media might on the one hand pose increased difficulties in winning and maintaining legitimacy for military operations, but on the other, the governments, like every other social institution also make use of these new media (see Hjarvard, 2008.) Milbloggers of different nationalities and military strategic cultures in turn seem to present different narratives about their experiences of warfare. US and UK soldiers have, for instance, published accounts of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as dramatic, brutal and violent. Soldiers have produced films about dangerous and frightening experiences in order to share these with their families at home, to spread images to the world, but also for therapeutic reasons – as a way of coping (Andén Papadopoulos, 2009). The videoclips have featured soldiers both as victims and as perpetrators of brutal and violent acts and in combat situations. In many instances such accounts have formed a counter-hegemonic discourse not approved of by the western military or political leaderships (Gardner, 2009; Kahn and Kellner, 2004; Touri, 2009). Several blogs and other internet sites such as videos published on YouTube have been shut down. Defence forces in both the US and the UK have restricted soldiers’ blogging as it was said to harm the war efforts (Andén Papadopoulos, 2009; Christensen, 2008; Kennedy, 2009). A study of the Swedish military blogosphere from the Afghanistan mission showed instead that the blogs supported rather than challenged the government strategy – independent and Defence Force milbloggers alike (Hellman and Wagnsson, 2013).

The point of departure for this article then is that milblogs do not always serve to strengthen the national strategic narrative, but they have the potential of serving a government well by legitimizing its strategic narrative. The purpose of the article is to look further into how this can come about.

Strategic narrative in this context refers to the definition by Antoniades et al. (2010: 5–6):

Strategic narratives are representations of a sequence of events and identities, a communicative tool through which political elites attempt to give determined meaning to past, present and future in order to achieve political objectives. Examples include the justification of policy objectives or policy responses to economic or security crises, the formation of international alliances, or the rallying of domestic public opinion.

It is thus considered a persuasive tool mainly for political actors, often drawing on shared conceptions of national identity; a soft power instrument intended to legitimize a certain course of government action and with links to public diplomacy (Miskimmon et al., 2013: 1–5).

The Swedish strategic narrative in the case of the military operation in Afghanistan emphasized solidarity and humanitarianism (Swedish Government, 2010) even if regional stability and the fight against terrorism were also mentioned. Sweden was in Afghanistan to support and protect the Afghan people (Defence Minister Sten Tolgfors, 29 July 2009), to strengthen democracy and human rights and to assist the Afghan government in stabilizing the country (Swedish Government, 2010). It was also part of the narrative to take responsibility for the global, UN-based order as with the humanitarian aspect, a feature in line with the Swedish tradition of being actively engaged in international crises.

In the study by Hellman and Wagnsson (2013) of the correlation between the Swedish national strategic narrative and the Swedish blogosphere it was found that the bloggers stressed that the military presence ‘was vital in order to secure civilian aid’. Based on their (2013) analysis, Hellman and Wagnsson (2013: 9) wrote:

… building playgrounds and handing out gifts would not be possible without the uniform and the presence of arms and military vehicles, but nor would the task of stabilizing the security situation be possible without friendly conversations with the locals and visits to schools.

This article focuses more closely on the soldiers’ experiences – the boots on the ground perspective. The aim of the article is to deepen our knowledge of exactly how blogging that depicts soldiers’ personal experiences of ‘everyday life’ can serve to support a strategic narrative. It further explores the idea that, instead of representing war as exceptional, disruptive events, threatening and brutal, soldiers’ blogs might make an even stronger and longlasting imprint on the home front by their depictions of war as an everyday practice – a de-dramatization and normalization of warfare. ¹ Connected to this is the discursive construction of the soldier as an ordinary rather than an exceptional professional engaged in aid and reconstruction work as much as in combat situations and fighting insurgency.

Showing empirically how this is articulated will further an understanding of how the genre and format of social media might impact on the discursive construction of wars and the self-representations of soldiers in wars. Furthermore, the analysis seeks to highlight the interrrelationships between the soldier experiences from the war zone and the strategic narrative, in line with which the soldier is expected to perform his or her duties. Due to the emphasis in the Swedish strategic narrative on humanitarian aspects, it is of particular relevance to explore what the milbloggers tell us about military–civilian overlaps and what consequences such accounts might have for self-representations of soldiering. The article thus explores dimensions of the empirical material presented below that have not been analysed before, by posing three main questions: (a) how do soldiers perceive their roles and tasks?; (b) how do soldiers depict their views of the military profession?; and (c) what do they think of the relations between the military and civilian aspects of the mission?

Milblogs, soldiers’ individual and mediated accounts of their experiences from war-zones, work – in a similar way to soldier memoirs and letters from the war front – as self-representations of soldiering. As with all kinds of representations, milblogs are political, they involve power relations – in this case the impact on the legitimization of warfare through support for the strategic narrative. They come about as a result of strategic choices on what to represent and how – decisions made by the soldier/author but also restricted by the regulations of the armed forces, socialization, and so on. Added to this is the individual experience (Thumim, 2012: 8) which is the very essence of the milblogs since it is through the telling of personal experiences of soldiering and warfare that the soldiers come to represent themselves. Soldiers’ tellings of personal experiences from the war zone, their engagement in self-representations, should thus be seen as individual projects, undertaken for therapeutic reasons or to remain connected with fellow soldiers, family and friends, and facilitated by developments in digital technology and social media. Yet they also remain part of collective and/or state projects with implications for power structures and strategic narratives.

Anthony King (2010), in his study on commemorations of the British dead of Helmand, deals with the two views of the soldier as an individual/professional and as a representative of the nation state. He identifies two conventions – personalization and domestication – which, he argues, point to a change in the representation of the soldier (in this case the dead soldier) with wider implications for commemorative practices and collective memories. Whereas previously the soldier who died in combat tended to be viewed as a casualty who had given his life in the name of the nation and the armed forces, the current obituaries present the soldier as an individual situated in a familial position and as a unique professional. State authority can therefore be said to be diminished as a result of the soldiers being represented as individual professionals and not to the same degree through their sacrifice for the nation or as a loss for the national community. However, King states:

… personalization also legitimates the state. The state no longer acts in the abstract name of the nation but on behalf of and through identifiable personalities and families. The collective mission of the nation is increasingly and perhaps, ironically, understood in personal, domestic terms. It is possible that the new emphasis on personality is connected with the claims made by government that new wars are fought not for territory or resources, primarily, but for values. (p. 21)

This study supports the notion that a growing focus on soldiers as individuals might indeed parallel sustained state authority and it further sides with the latter argument by King that the legitimacy of the state might in certain circumstances benefit from soldier narratives characterized by personalization and domestication.

For these reasons, it is important to further our understanding of articulations of war as an everyday practice since such articulations may have political significance for public support for military intervention, for recruitment of soldiers and for the evolution of society into a more ‘militarized’ kind of community – referred to here as militarism (see below). Milblogs depicting war as everyday practice can enhance public support by strengthening the national political strategic narrative, one reason for this being that blogs tend to be seen as particularly credible accounts of the state of affairs on the battlefield. Previous research shows that milblogs are generally perceived as more credible sources for news about war than traditional media and media blogs (Johnson and Kaye, 2010). Johnson and Kaye suggest that the main reasons for the enhanced popularity and credibility of blogs during the Iraq war were that blogs written by soldiers from the battlefield provided more detailed descriptions than traditional media; bloggers were free to express their own views and publish images while unbound by journalistic standards; and the audience appreciated the interactive nature of blogs. Moreover, they argue that users visiting milblogs frequently tend to become ‘a part of a community of like-minded individuals’ (p. 317). In addition to strengthening public support for military interventions in general, blogs thus tend to be particularly effective for facilitating the recruitment of new soldiers.

In addition, by bringing the audience close to the everyday life of soldiers and making war look like ‘normal practice’, blogs may have repercussions for society in a more general sense, contributing to what Woodward and Jenkings (2012) have termed ‘militarism’ (see also Der Derian, 2009, and his notion of the Military–Industrial Media–Entertainment network). Militarism is defined as: ‘the extension and prioritisation of military objectives and rationales into civilian cultural, social, political and economic life’ (Woodward and Jenkings, 2012: 495). This implies an acceptance of Western liberal societies deploying forces in international interventions such as that in Afghanistan. The military takes over duties and tasks that used to be, or under other circumstances would be, carried out by civilian bodies and agencies, local or international, gaining increased legitimacy in the process and turning these duties into normal military procedure. ² This can be seen as an overlap of civilian and military spheres or a blurring of the boundaries between civilian and military duties. From the point of view of the military it has been an intentional and often promoted strategy, emanating from the insight that civilian tasks are key to military success, to ‘winning hearts and minds’.

In their study of British soldiers’ memoirs from Afghanistan, Woodward and Jenkings (2012: 495) argue that military memoirs

facilitate this [militarism] through their validation of the idea of the deployment of military power. They may facilitate war, not in any crude causal manner, but as artefacts of cultural militarism through which military intervention become normalised, simplified and potentially sanitised, and justified.

The narrative features of the military memoirs that work to normalize wars and military intervention are not dissimilar to King’s personalization and domestication. Woodward and Jenkings (2013: 158) show how the military operation in Afghanistan comes to be legitimized and justified through soldiers’ writings about heroic and courageous deeds; they are seen as ‘individuals deployed to execute lethal violence’ against an enemy depicted as tenacious, but also as soldiers suffering injuries and making remarkable recoveries (Woodward and Jenkings talk about ‘recovery narratives’), soldiers exposing themselves to danger and grieving the loss of colleagues. The focus is on the personal and often also on the physical experiences of warfare. The political rationale for military intervention and achievements in reference to the mission’s purpose is rarely mentioned or reflected on (p. 161), further adding to the perception of the Afghan problem as one calling for military rather than political solutions. Taken together, these features of the soldiers’ accounts work to normalize military responses, making manifest how ‘military ideas, rationales, explanations for action are translated into civilian discourse’ (Woodward and Jenkings, 2012: 505).

As with the soldier memoirs, the Swedish milblogs contain personal accounts of war experiences legitimizing military intervention. In this study, the milblogs will be viewed as being positioned between the personal experience and the strategic narrative. How such a position is negotiated by the milbloggers is an empirical question to which we will return in the analysis.

The following section presents the method used for the empirical analysis: a qualitative content analysis aimed at tracing the main patterns of the soldiers’ self-representations and their views of the work in the Afghanistan mission from January 2010 to April 2012. Based on the findings of the analysis, the article concludes with a discussion about the propositions above, considering the way in which the blogs might work to legitimize the military operation through depictions of the military activities as normal, mundane and civilian in character and how this may contribute to the militarization of society.

Method

In order to explore the self-representations of soldiering with regard to civilian and military factors and the nature and character of the activities performed, a qualitative content analysis was undertaken. The analysis focused specifically on aspects of the blogs that capture how Swedish soldiers (the milbloggers) reflect on their self-images, roles and tasks including the connections between or juxtapositions of the civilian and military aspects of the mission. The aim is to accomplish a close reading of how they depict war as part of everyday life in reference to the three research questions presented above and referred to below in the analysis.

Approximately 500 blogposts published on four separate Swedish soldier blogs were analysed. The four bloggers were active from January 2010 to April 2012 or parts of that period (depending on their deployment). The time period can be seen to represent the peak of the Swedish mission before the withdrawal of the troops had begun and with years of military experience of the mission accumulated. The time period was also the most violent that the Swedish force experienced.

The three most frequently visited officially-sanctioned blogs were chosen: Afghanistanbloggen (The Afghanistan blog, http://blogg.forsvarsmakten.se/afghanistanbloggen), Armé-bloggen (The Army blog, http://forsvarsmakten.se/armebloggen/) and I Skuggan av Hindu Kush (In the shadow of the Hindu Kush, http://blogg.forsvarsmakten.se/iskullganavhindukush/). Also included were the blog Fredssoldater (Soldiers of Peace, http://www.fredssoldater.se) – a blog that was part of a longstanding exhibition at the Swedish Army Museum and Efter bomben (After the bomb, http://efterbomben.bloggsida.se/), a blog written by a wounded war veteran on his return to Sweden. With the exception of After the bomb, all the blogs were officially sanctioned. Out of security concerns for the troops, they were not allowed to state the names of places where operations took place, nor give specifics about soldiers’ leave days and rotations. As officially stated they had no other restrictions.

Since the different bloggers had different military and civilian positions during their time of service in Afghanistan, the sample of blog posts included in the study covers a range of different bloggers in terms of rank and assignment. Some were riflemen and patrolling soldiers, gender advisors and fire fighters. Others worked at the Swedish or German camps, as technicians and engineers for instance, and some alternated between ‘office’ work on the camp, frequent visits to villages and towns and occasional long patrols over a couple of days. The blog Fredssoldater consisted of two different bloggers, deployed for six months each. In the shadow of the Hindu Kush was authored by one person, the same with After the Bomb. The Afghanistanblog and the Army blog, published on the Defence Force’s website, consisted of several different bloggers from different sections of the Swedish force. Some were commanders and others lower in rank. Since there was little difference in content between bloggers of different rank and occupation with regards to the research questions, no distinctions are made between them in the analysis. Instead the blogs taken together are treated as the Swedish soldiers’ self-representations and the analysis aims at finding major patterns in the overall material.

Military operations as day-to-day routine procedures

The first and second questions posed concern: (a) the way in which the milbloggers depict the Afghanistan mission and what it entails for them, what tasks they perform and what their main role and functions are; and (b) how the soldiers depict their views of the military profession. The results relating to these questions are presented together since their respective results are interconnected. The analysis found that the Swedish blogs about the ISAF mission in Afghanistan are mainly focused on the Swedish soldiers, their daily life on and off camp Northern Lights and how they maintain and uphold their own security and safety. The off-camp activities centre around the daily social patrols in the region where the securing of roads is combined with interactions with the local population and nightly guards. A considerable amount of space is devoted to describing the weather and the nature of Afghanistan. The serene landscape depicted in footage and text describing the majestic mountains, the clear blue sky, the desolate desert and the amazing starlit sky at night are contrasted to the dangers lurking in the form of home-made bombs (Improvised Explosive Devices, so called IEDs) and attacks by insurgents, indicating the sudden turns of both the conflict and the weather conditions. This contrast is well captured in the following sequence:

Miles away a silent storm occurs. It feels surreal to sit there on the back of the tank and listen to the silence, follow the lightning as it crosses the sky while simultaneously managing a critical situation which might change shape at any time and turn into one of self-defence, an arrest or a regrouping. (Fredssoldater, 13 May 2010)

The soldiers also reflect upon the riches of their camp in contrast to the poverty outside it, but also speak repeatedly of friendly meetings with the local population. The insurgents are not mentioned very often and only rarely as denigrated enemies. The blogs contain few war stories and combat situations, with the exception of the blog Fredssoldater in the fall of 2010.

Throughout the material analysed and independent of the topic, the blogs – from a boots-on-the-ground perspective – all describe events and activities as routines and everyday practices. Some bloggers refer to the routine nature of procedures explicitly, making the point that in warfare there is very little action. In other blogs the pattern of repetition and routine come to the fore as the bloggers depict their days in the format of a diary.

Many of the blog posts are focused on the details that make up everyday life: what it feels like to carry the 30 to 50 kilos of equipment on your back, the constant practices of pulling your gun quickly from its holster, the strict routines of hygiene on the camp, the waffles that are served every Friday, the heat and the dust or the rain and the mud (depending on the season) and the different physical exercises that are organized on the camp, the long working hours and the feelings of never having time alone.

The routine is described as tedious and boring, but there is also reassurance and a sense of security created in its wake even if the bloggers themselves rarely reflect on this. There is a pattern in their daily records of how they leave the camp to go out into the danger zone, perform strenuous tasks only to return to the comforts and safety of the camp, their assignment completed. Most of the time, however, the heat and the dust are the main difficulties to manage, and the long hours of scouting out in the desert. One blogger contrasts the action-oriented images of war seen in the entertainment industry, and which he imagines is also the public’s perception, with the reality of war as he sees it:

Those of you, who despite my words of warning, still expect long depictions of a war so horrible that only Rambo and his friends could stand the hardship will most likely be disappointed when I am once again stating that it has been pancake-Thursday. But for all of us who live here, even if temporary, there are routines like pancake-Thursday which make everything work. Everyone who has been in contact with the Defence Forces knows that it must be so and that maybe it gives a certain peace of mind to those colleagues who are now getting ready to take over where we finish off. (In the shadow of the Hindu Kush, 26 January 2012)

The routines are supported and given meaning. The soldiers rarely talk about the mission’s purpose and achievements concretely, but instead focus on the day’s successful operation, a social patrol that started out with difficulties, but that ended with a good ambiance among happily playing children; village elders who came out of their houses only hesitantly but then eased up and showed their gratitude for the Swedish presence in the region. So the work takes on meaning through small-scale achievements and, although several bloggers admit that they have doubts about the ISAF mission as a whole reaching its goals given the very complex conflict environment, they feel that to them as soldiers it is enough if they can make a difference for someone for some of the time at least. Soldiers having met with difficulties during an assignment are often given special appreciation by their superiors who confirm the significance of that individual achievement.

Overall, there are relatively few depictions of fights and combat situations. During the fall of 2010, the Taliban activities intensified in the previously relatively calm PRT of Mazar e Sharif where the Swedish camp is based and this resulted in about 30 combat situations between the Swedish force and the insurgents. The blog posts from this time period tell about the fights, but these events too are made part of the daily routine and fit in with the format of the other blog posts. They do not stand out as particularly tense or as increasing the threats against the Swedes, but become part of the ‘normal’ everyday procedures. They are not framed as fights or as operations aimed at striking against an enemy.

In one such blog, Fredssoldater (6 August 2010), the blogger Joel Thungren speaks of the recent weeks. They have been intense, he says, yet he does not frame his account as a depiction of unexpected dramatic events or sharp combat situations. The rationale of the insurgents is difficult to understand, but he says his spirits remain high because he has just been assigned to another town for a few days, a place which he is somewhat familiar with from a previous mission. With a focus on the daily tasks, fighting the Taliban becomes one of those tasks, but not the centre of attention. In this sense, the soldiers’ blogs are not framed around fights against the enemy, but around the soldiers’ everyday routines. This blog post illustrates how encounters with the insurgents are depicted matter of factly as part of a daily routine. Thungren describes a ‘normal’ day in the region and outlines what happens and how he looks upon those events:

As usual, insurgents have been shooting around us, but never at us and we never make it there in time to catch them where they are raging. It usually ends with us standing still watching through the night for enemies who have most likely disappeared from the place a long time ago or suddenly hidden their weapons and have thereby become civilians. They shoot at different police checkpoints every other night. I find it incredibly strange. They rarely hit anything. (Fredssoldater, 6 August 2010)

There is no fear expressed and the Swedish troops do not appear to be exposed to any serious danger. Rather, the blogger depicts a situation which is tiresome and wears the soldiers out mentally and physically, chasing after the insurgents, trying to follow their movements without achieving much or seeing much progress in their work and having to live under difficult conditions.

It is anyway annoying to dash off to where shootings are going on only to establish that yes … they were here but they are no longer. It wears us all down because it involves frustration, little sleep and little food. It is rare that we get more than three to four hours of sleep a night when we are out. And those hours we do get are not very good since they are often spent on the combat vehicle’s armour or in a too short NATO-bunkbed in a tent that is too hot. (Fredssoldater, 6 August 2010)

Blog posts of this kind which describe instances of combat situations and hardships in the terrain also contain self-reflections about not feeling the adrenalin pumping any longer when there is an attack underway – getting ready for a possible combat situation has also become a routine practice.

Even if the soldiers themselves rarely speak directly about their fears or feelings of insecurity, they talk of the security they feel on the camp and sometimes contrast this to the insecure situation outside. Behind the preoccupation with routines and procedures is also the Army’s concern for the safety and security of the soldiers. This can be seen as a reassurance aimed at the soldiers’ families and next-of-kin, but it nevertheless gives rise to a discourse in which the Swedish soldiers themselves are the prime referent objects – the people in need of protection – rather than the Afghan population. In the shadow of the Hindu Kush explains how he has learned from the Afghan population to live with fear. He claims to have learned to live with war while making everyday life as normal as possible:

Note that what I am talking about is fear, not the real dangers. Because they are there no matter my feelings. The enemy will not decrease in numbers because I have stopped being afraid. The road bombs can be planted there even if I don’t worry about them. The point is that it is not possible to live in fear and that is exactly what the Afghans have realized. They have chosen not to live in fear but to try and make every day as normal as it can be among tanks, suicide bombers and poverty. Impressive when you think about it. (In the shadow of the Hindu Kush, 6 February 2012)

Military force as assistance to civilians, not to fight a war against an enemy

The third research question focuses on the civil–military relationship and asks what the soldiers think about the relations between the military and civilian aspects of the mission. The question thus deals with whether and how activities and tasks presented in the blogs are talked of as military and/or civilian; and whether and how the mission’s aim and achievements are related to the military and civilian spheres.

It was found that the blog posts tend to emphasize the civilian aspects of the mission. This is mostly stressed in the blogs published on the Armed forces’ webpage, Afghanistanbloggen and Armébloggen, where higher ranking officers write extensively about cheerful meetings with locals and the cultivation of close relations with village elders, and where the gender advisor writes about progress being made in the military’s support of women’s organizations and education programmes. In blogs by low-ranking soldiers, the civilian tasks are spoken of as part of the daily assignments (social patrols and games of football with the local children) and are often combined with military tasks or set in a military context.

The overlap of civilian and military aspects of the mission is a strong theme that runs through all the blogs. It is especially marked in the blog posts that talk about tasks performed outside the camp:

When the farmer ploughs his field with his donkey we feel that we make a difference, or when the woman who picks cotton sees our presence as positive, only then can we win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people … The military security is a precondition for the civil reconstruction to work in parallel with our efforts or to take over when we pull out – those who differ in opinion are welcome to visit real-world Afghanistan. (Fredssoldater, 20 January 2010)

In accounts similar to this, more or less explicitly formulated, the bloggers express the view that their work in Afghanistan is to assist the local population in establishing stability and security and thereby help them reconstruct their country so that people can work and go to school and grow cotton in their fields. In some more personal notes it is stated that the reason for going to Afghanistan as a soldier was to do good, albeit in combination with the adventure of going to a war zone, making money and enjoying the good comradeship. Several of the bloggers talk about their peaceful intentions behind joining the ISAF force and how they see the military context as a necessary while not desirable component of the mission. The veteran blogger After the bomb says that he did not go to Afghanistan to fight a war, but to avoid war. He says that he is tired of critics in Sweden who frame the participation in Afghanistan as ‘war-fighting’ (After the bomb, 23 May 2010). He never once fired his gun during his mission in Afghanistan. In the shadow of the Hindu Kush says that he went to Afghanistan to make peace and not to fight a war. One veteran soldier writes:

I also believe more aid and civilian organizations are needed in Afghanistan, yet unfortunately it is necessary to have some soldiers to help with security matters. Soldiers with weapons who are able to defend themselves against armed Taliban who mess things up for their own people with acts of violence. The [Swedish] soldiers are not there to conduct war but rather to safeguard peace. This is exactly what the Swedish soldiers do every day in Northern Afghanistan. (Efter Bomben, 23 May 2010)

Another blogger talks about the difficulties of performing civilian tasks, playing football with children in a village, for instance, while all the time remembering that he and his colleagues do not form an aid organization but an armed force. As they hand out water bottles to the footballers, a large group of other children come running up so as not to lose out on the gift. One boy even climbs onto one of their armoured vehicles. The situation almost gets out of hand with children wanting to play around the tanks and they have to leave in a rush (Fredssoldater, 11 January 2010). During other football games with local children, or friendly conversations with village elders, snipers are discretely positioned in the compounds overlooking the open field or village centre. Despite the soldiers’ good (and sometimes idealistic) intentions, they express in their blogs that they are well aware of the need to be cautious and to stay alert at all times. The uniform and the arms are sometimes talked about as obstacles to winning hearts and minds and to forging trusted and reliable relations with the people, and sometimes the soldiers park their tanks outside the villages, remove as many of their weapons as they deem safe and walk on foot to approach the villagers.

In another blogpost, Fredssoldater’s blogger Daniel Jansson tells how he succeeded in closing down a main road in the region that needed clearing of an IED and, despite having a machine gun aimed at him, managed to solve the situation with the Afghan military by stretching out his hand and starting a friendly dialogue. Jansson tells how he and the Afghan general talked for two hours and parted both in good spirits, the situation no longer hostile or threatening. Jansson concludes that:

One must speak clearly and be decisive, but at the same time show respect. We are guests in their country and no-one will gain anything by being arrogant or playing it cool … I win his confidence and the situation, which actually never was directly threatening according to their standards, is under control and quite pleasant. (Fredssoldater, 7 January 2010)

In another blog, Armébloggen, Chief of PSYOPS Ingebrikt Sjövik, tells a similar success story about how military force, negotiations and dialogue have resulted in 100 former insurgents deciding to leave the criminal life behind and change to the government side. He depicts himself standing eye–to–eye with a man who had formerly been his enemy and was now his brother and says that he was happy to be able to participate in the ceremony where these turn-arounds took place. The military operations leading up to the insurgents joining the government side are not elaborated on in Sjövik’s account. Instead the civilian aspects are stressed and combined with other visits during the day such as encounters with hospitable Afghans offering both good food and interesting information and visits in town where girls are now able to go to school (Armébloggen, 24 November 2011).

Thus, the message of many blogs is that to succeed in winning the hearts and minds of the people and to be able to improve the life conditions of the local population, the military must appear as little like a military force as possible and yet have the force required when it is called for. Courage in this context is to step outside the military context and solve disputes and critical situations with dialogue and negotiations.

The mentor role, talked of in many of the blog posts, in particular in the Afghanistanbloggen and the Armébloggen, fits that aim well. Numerous posts by different soldiers describe how they themselves and their group have supported the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Police Forces (ANP) with courses and training. There are also accounts of how the Swedish military supports the ANA in operations that the latter plan and lead, so-called ‘partnering’. These operations pose difficulties to the Swedish troops, yet they are positively depicted and often include comments saying that the Swedes must never forget that they are after all guests in Afghanistan. It is also sometimes mentioned that the real students are the Swedes and not the Afghans.

The blogs show how dialogue and collaboration with the local population give good results. The bloggers say that the real gain and personal satisfaction with their work in Afghanistan is to meet with people and talk to them. It makes up for the tediousness of the daily chores and the boring routines. Only rarely are the Afghan people and the village leaders criticized or depicted in a negative light. Swedes and Afghans are presented together mainly in civilian types of situations, having dinner or tea, sitting in meetings, talking in the streets, but there are also occasions depicted where the Swedish soldiers are teachers and mentors for the Afghan Police Force or the Afghan National Army.

Concluding discussion

The milblogs, written as diaries from a boots-on-the-ground perspective generate insights about soldiering and what it means to be a soldier and participate in warfare, which seems to stress a status quo and a routinized everyday practice. The blogs become snapshots of the way things are at the moment with few reflections on the larger issues at stake, the overall achievements and aims of the mission. Instead the blogs present how the soldiers go about their jobs each and every day in an orderly and safe manner all the while enjoying and appreciating their comrades and superiors. And when the assignments have been accomplished for the day, or special hardships are over, then there is good food, a well-deserved rest offered at the Swedish camp and, if they are lucky, a sleep-in in the morning and a little free time to spend with fellow soldiers.

The blogs thus depict the soldiers as occupied with routines and ordinary everyday practices. The bloggers often point out that the days are similar to one another and that it sometimes gets boring and tedious – despite long working hours and little rest. The routines involve not only the daily chores at the camp, but also patrols, and even attacks by insurgents (during a limited period of time) become routine and are depicted as following a predictable pattern. Although perhaps not the most stimulating of environments and not the place where heroes are made, the mundane life in the barracks lends the reassurance that the soldiers are safe. This is further stressed as many blogs describe happy returns of fellow soldiers (and of themselves) to the camp and others contrast the hovering risks in the Afghan danger zone outside the camp with the safety inside the gates. Some soldiers also explicitly speak of how they are safe and lead relatively ordinary, mundane lives and they ask their next-of-kin not to believe what they see on the news or read in the paper, which the soldiers find to be over dramatic and not representative of their situation.

There are few situations and incidents depicted where the soldiers risk their lives or where soldiers express fear of dying and the bloggers rarely depict themselves and their fellow soldiers as fighters and warriors nor do they refer to the insurgents as enemies. The absence of negative images of the insurgents (Taliban) are especially noteworthy when Swedish armoured vehicles hit IEDs and soldiers are killed. Homage is paid to the dead comrades who died for a good cause accompanied by arguments in favour of the mission and their own personal conviction that they must go on with their work.

The soldiers depict themselves as mentors, teachers and mediators and they describe how they work to support the local population, to build relations with them and to increase the security in the region which will enable girls to go school, and farmers to cultivate their land and transport their goods to the markets. A large part of the blogs, however, centre on increasing and maintaining the security for the soldiers themselves. Thus the soldiers often figure as the referent object – those who are in need of protection.

A major theme in the blogs is how the soldiers combine civilian and military duties to the point where it almost becomes difficult to separate one from the other. Whereas the civilian duties are talked of as the aim of the mission, all the bloggers in a fairly similar manner express that these duties are dependent on military force, on the soldiers carrying arms, keeping watch, patrolling to uphold the military presence in the region and so on. One blogger defending this position writes that those who disagree with the need for the military presence should come and visit Afghanistan and see for themselves.

Notably, rather than discussing the overall purpose or accomplishments of the mission – a feature that the Swedish milblogs share with the British soldier memoirs (see Woodward and Jenkings, 2012, 2013) – the soldiers focus on everyday small-scale achievements and ordinary events that infuse their work with a sense of meaning. The ‘civilian’ component is obviously helpful here; it is the meetings with civilians that provide meaning and a sense of success to their experiences and depictions. This is a clear indication that the ‘everyday life’ story in the blogs can serve to strengthen the sense of success and in turn boost public support for the mission. Moreover, in this sense, the blogs also lack clear distinctions between which duties are to be considered military and should be performed by soldiers and which are not. Conversing with people in the street requires military backup and turns depictions of a civilian situation into depictions of a military situation – or a civil–military one. In this respect the Swedish milblogs could be said to work, in a similar way to the British soldier memoirs, as ‘vectors of militarism’ (Woodward and Jenkings, 2012), not by depicting military force as the only alternative for crisis resolution in Afghanistan, but by depicting blurred boundaries between military and civilian tasks. The milbloggers position themselves in the texts between lived (i.e. ‘authentic’) experience and the Swedish strategic narrative (which strongly emphasizes the mission purpose as humanitarian), and negotiate between these meanings. The result is a legitimization of the military intervention.

Whereas it has been seen in other countries that milblogs and soldiers’ use of social media have given rise to a counter-hegemonic discourse, challenging military interventions, their purposes and achievements, this case shows that, in a consensual political strategic culture such as that of Sweden, milblogs lend support to the strategic narrative and contribute to expanding the role of the military in society at large and in international conflict management in particular. This might be looked upon as a way in which the legitimacy of the military in international missions can be enhanced.

However, the blogs’ depiction of soldiering as an ordinary and civil–military occupation is a two-edged sword as the increasing legitimacy for military missions might be countered by the decrease in the status and prestige of the soldier who might not be seen as courageous and self-sacrificial in the public’s eyes to the same extent as before. The military troops might come to appear not primarily as brave men and women risking their lives for a higher cause, in defence of human rights and democracy, but more as individuals like any one of us making an extra buck with tedious chores at a military camp in a distant country. Furthermore, with civilian and military duties becoming subsumed during military operations, the military profession itself as well as its duties and missions will be less clear-cut.

This study has illustrated that, under certain circumstances, military bloggers come to contribute to an image of soldiering as ordinary and mundane with tasks that are a combination of civilian and military assignments often difficult to distinguish from one another. These soldiers’ representations serve the government well by legitimizing the strategic narrative. However, they might be less welcome in regard to the changing views of the military profession that they promote and pose challenges to those within the military who prefer the military profession to be held in high esteem and to be regarded as exceptional. Finally, with depictions of soldiering as entailing civilian duties similar to aid and reconstruction work, there might be reason to further explore the impact of social media on warfare using the militarization of civil society as a point of departure.