Obviously the subject of terrorism, the “war on terror” and the acts of terrorists are something that appears every day in the media.
It’s also something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while, something more in-depth. Often all we see are simply news reports of terrorist and counter-terrorist acts with little analysis or discussion of the overall picture.
It’s quite easy to condemn terrorist acts. But what can be done to stop it? What strategies need to be implemented?
In that vein, I see that the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute has published an 84-page paper entitled 100 Osama bin Ladens (PDF). It’s definitely very interesting.
This is an official government paper and it’s definitely worth reading, if the subject of terrorism and the larger strategies concerning how to contain and defeat terrorism interest you. This paper focuses strictly on Islamic terrorism and not any other form.
Some quotes:
For obvious reasons, large numbers of analysts and contractors have been drawn from Europeanist or Soviet studies backgrounds or a general security focus to an Islamic world focus. They lack necessary regional training, language skills, and requisite ?eld experience. In addition, the Foreign Area Officer’s typical language skills are based on 1 or 2 years of Arabic language study and do not suffice for needed communications or intelligence skills.
This is clearly one of the biggest problems the United States has. Condoleezza Rice was a Russia expert, and her entire training and career dealt with Russia and the Soviet Union.
There are almost no high-level policy makers or military officers who even speak Arabic, much less have expertise in the region and the culture. Furthermore, the people on the ground, whether troops or government employees, need to speak Arabic and understand the culture.
Imagine a large company Pepsi or Coca-Cola wanting to sell their products in Iraq. Would they take a commercial made for the USA and just dub it over with Arabic voices? Or would they hire the best local people to tailor the ad campaign to the way people in Iraq think and act?
It’s relatively easy to send in helicopters and kill people who are shooting at troops. However the overall strategy in Iraq is (theoretically anyway) to implement a new way of thinking, a new way of governing and a new way of living. That takes people who speak the language and understand the culture to promote these ideas, “sell” them if you will.
Strategic and security studies have not truly internationalized. Western experts frequently have not been interested in, nor exposed themselves to the ideas of, their Middle Eastern or Muslim counterparts. As in any professional specialization, it seems more important to quote insiders to the policymaking world. Sometimes strong xenophobia results (as strong as anti-Americanism on the other side of the world); we hear “foreigners” blamed for an inefficient control over “their terrorists” that culminated in 9/11. Most often, though, specialists simply lack access to non-Anglophones and their ideas, which would be useful if, in fact, we hope to address the ideology of Islamist extremists.
Exactly. If all you speak is English, the only people you are ever going to listen to or talk to are other people who speak English, and very, very few of them are Muslims. The world has 1.3 billion Muslims and (relatively) very few of them speak English fluently as their first language.
You can’t market something if you don’t understand your potential customers. If the U.S. is going to be in the business of marketing the ideas that democracy, transparent voting, representational governments and resolvation of political conflicts through peaceful means is good, then the U.S. needs to have people who can understand and relate to the intended audience.
It’s super easy to sit in one’s armchair and condemn Islamic extremism. But the extremists aren’t preaching to the Christian, English-speaker sitting in his armchair in California, he’s selling his beliefs and ideologies to people living in a very different culture, with a very different way of thinking, using terms that are not very familiar with most westerners.
Unless the ideas of extremism are debated and discussed and countered, then the extremists are the only ones with a microphone and the only ones being listened to. And paying for propaganda, embellished news articles and one-sided television networks are not the solution. As Christian evangelicals know quite well, you have to meet people on their own ground in order to engage them. That means the streets, the mosques, the living rooms of the elders and tribal chiefs are where this debate needs to take place, not beamed at the population from satellites.
To be a secularist today is to be considered religiously delinquent, and one cannot be an atheist or an agnostic in Muslim society as is quite possible in the West. The Arab and Muslim media therefore speak of liberals rather than secularists. If the United States continues to promote secularism, in one form or another as the antidote to extremist or revivalist Islam, it will not reach hearts and minds.
Whether you live in the United States or Europe, one is quite accustomed to religion having little to do with governance. Sometimes people advocate for laws and norms to be based on religious principles, but in many Muslim countries this is the long-established norm, not the exception.
If you want to “sell” the concept that democracy is good, for example, it is not good enough just to say that it’s beneficial and the right thing to do. You have to say why it’s also in concordance with Islamic principles, what backing and justification it has with being a “good” Muslim.
Commercial products in America are often marketed to make the customer feel like owning or consuming that product will make him/her “cool”. But that’s not going to sell democracy in Iraq (or Kuwait or Jordan, etc). Being “cool” is nice, but being a good Muslim has a much broader appeal.
I think the easiest way to think of this is that being a good Muslim is akin to being a patriotic American. Americans often disagree on exactly what makes someone a patriot but there’s never any disagreement that being patriotic is desirable. Honoring the flag, standing up for “American values” and defending the country are concepts which all Americans agree on, even if they disagree on exactly how this should be done.
The same is true in Muslim countries. The sanctity of the Qur’an, living one’s life in accordance with Muslim principles and reverence towards Allah are all things which Muslims agree on, even if they disagree with how that should be accomplished. To win people’s “hearts and minds”, the ideas on the table (democracy, etc) must be framed along these lines. Anything else reeks of imperialist colonialism, and that’s how many people quite frankly view the United States’ actions in the “war on terror”.
Also, Muslims generally are concerned with whether or not a person, action, or substance is Islamic, categorizing each as “allowed,” “forbidden,” or “neutral.” Which looks more Islamic: a party that aids prisoners’ families, or secularist party officials who are known to torture young militia members and siphon off party funds? Which looks more Islamic: radicals who claim that they will restore a Muslim way of life to Egypt’s rapidly changing environment, or government officials also associated with corruption and torture?
That’s another fundamental shift which sadly is not likely to be addressed. Some of the most corrupt, thuggish and repressive governments in the world are in majority-Muslim countries. And with few exceptions (Iran mostly), they are heavily supported by the United States.
Sometimes that’s because the country in question has oil (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc) and sometimes simply because of political expediency (Egypt, Morocco). The people of Saudi Arabia or Egypt might not want a “westernized” form of democracy, but they surely do not want to be intimidated, harassed and even tortured by their government.
An honest and judicious Muslim government, even if it is not completely democratic by western standards, would be very welcome indeed. Islamic extremists promise to root out corruption and overthrow abusive governments, and that’s very appealing.
I’m not foolish enough to recommend that the U.S. immediately cease doing business with every corrupt country in the world. But the U.S. has tremendous leverage and it’s time to start using it to press for reforms, not just towards democracy but also to root out systemic corruption, abuse of authority and endemic cronyism and nepotism.
Al-Qaeda and many other groups absolutely loathe the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, who espouse some of the most hardliner Islamic ideology on the planet. They hate the ruling family not for being western, but for being corrupt, abusive and decadent. Their rallying cry is that social injustice is un-Muslim. And therefore any country which supports (and promotes) these behaviors is also an enemy of Islam as well.
Shallah has made claims, repeated by young jihadis, that Israel will never defeat human bombs, “not even by nuclear bombs,”60 emphasizing the indefatigable thirst for martyrdom, persistence, and inverse relationship of small operational cost to much larger effect that characterizes this strategy. Western analysts wrongly have pointed to suicide operations (jihadis insist these are martyrdom operations) as a mark of desperation, arguing that groups would only engage in such efforts when there is no other hope left to them. In fact, popular songs, children’s games, and public discourse shows that the linkage of martyrdom to suicide attacks is accepted by many individuals who see these actions as being “moral.” Jihadists further claim moral superiority when they say that their willingness to die expresses a type of commitment that Israelis and Americans lack.
Ah yes, the suicide bomber. Always a mysterious and foreign concept to westerners, who view it as one of the most horrific and repugnant acts.
Yet in American history, the patriotic Patrick Henry is widely celebrated, who not only issued the words “give me liberty or give me death” but actually led heavily outmanned troops into battle with the British.
In a sense, Patrick Henry (and George Washington, John Paul Jones, etc) are all heroes for the same reason suicide bombers are – they risked their own lives for a greater cause. Henry and Jones and Washington used musket balls and torpedoes to fight the enemy while the suicide bomber fights with his own body, but the distinction is a fine one.
Ayman Zawahiri carried Faraj’s ideas further in his own book, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, which was serialized in the popular Arabic newspaper, al-Sharq al-Awsat. Here he portrays himself as an educator to Muslim youth. He is spreading jihad successfully, and the proof may be found with thousands of young men in prisons who have become Islamists there. He recommends a “by any means necessary” strategy, pointing to the damage that even small numbers can exact and suggests targetting the UN, multinational corporations, the media, and international relief groups because these are covers for other operations, according to him, as well as rulers of Arab states.
It should be noted that al-Sharq al-Awsat is a newspaper published by Saudi Arabia in Great Britain. The extremists have their access to their audiences – it’s the opposing view which is largely silent in these fora.
A video made by Zarqawi’s organization and obtained in Falluja is a superb recruiting tool that critiques the West, documents and ritualizes martyrdom, demonstrates the pan-Muslim membership of the organization, and multiplies its impact. The video features religious quotations and nontraditional “religious” music, borrowing from the Eastern/Arab church and Western traditions, that add to the drama of the tape. In the very ?rst segment, American soldiers kick their way into an Iraqi home and lead away a small child who calls for her father. This illustrates the reality of Muslims under siege, when jihad is compulsory for all and obviously necessary in order to save children and innocents.
Again, more examples of how extremists are getting their message out. The techniques of successful propaganda have been available to anyone for about 80 years now and can be used equally well by marketers of soda as by religious extremists.
Where is the counter-message? Where are the videos of Americans building schools and working in cooperation with (and respectful to) tribal elders and chiefs? Where are the testimonies of Iraqis and Afghanis of how their life has improved being transmitted to their fellow countrymen?
Understand and respond to the increasing sophistication of Islamist tactical and strategic efforts. In this monograph, I have outlined the progress of radical Islamist thought at the leadership level. Theories of cultural superiority always are treacherous. We should not imagine that, because Western militaries have been more effective than those in Muslim countries, leadership cannot be cultivated or represent any kind of challenge to a technologically superior force.
Easily the most dangerous weakness in American foreign policy is the sense of cultural superiority. Not just superior to Muslims but to people of all faiths even in much more similar cultures such as France and Germany and Russia. The constant swaggering attitude that America, with its big stick military and superior technology, can defeat anyone and everyone and needs no help is deadly.
Oddly enough the CIA used to publish sabotage manuals for Central American guerillas in the 1980’s, showing how 5 cents of material (a nail) could force the government to spend thousands to repair damage (punctured tires). Causing chaos is always cheap while maintaining order and stability is expensive.
Saddam Hussein, for all his obvious faults as a cruel dictator, understood the need for stability. And even Iraqis whom he repressed agreed that Iraqi society was by and large stable under his rule, at a fraction of the financial cost of America’s current war/occupation. That’s because he was an Iraqi, integrating the Iraqi people under social organizations he controlled, the Ba’ath party and the military.
The U.S. dismantled both the military and the Ba’ath party because they were considered culturally inferior. They were organs of a repressive state, and deserved to be dismantled, but only in exchange for other unifying organizations. But the vast majority of Ba’ath Party members and Iraqi soldiers were participants because it was either mandatory or de facto mandatory in Iraqi society.
It was only the top tier of these organizations which needed to be eliminated, with careful selection of replacements, for these quite useful social bodies to continue to preserve the unifying role in Iraqi society that they had previously played. Yet the U.S. nearly completely dissolved them in favor for a Russian-style system of American military control and propped-up puppet leaders, including the hated Ahmed Chalabi.
Carefully consider the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and in other areas of the Muslim world on the stated aims of the Global War on Terror. The Palestinian issue is of paramount importance to many of the Muslim Middle Eastern countries and has become important even to Muslim countries outside the Middle East. Clear public statements about America’s relationship with Israel and long-term interests in Iraq and Afghanistan all require open communication and some modifications and resolution, or they will continue to be used as evidence of pervasive American hypocrisy.
Without going into detail, the Israeli-Palestinian situation is clearly the number one festering sore in regional instability. For as long as the United States maintains such a heavily biased favoritism towards Israel, there will always be widespread resentment in the Middle East, even by people who do not subscribe to extremists views.
The following are some of the the author’s recommendations:
Continue making legitimate efforts to obtain and coordinate information concerning the interaction, travel, and whereabouts of Islamist extremists. The use of physical and psychological torture and extralegal procedures is counterproductive to the moral terrain necessary for the establishment of a terror-free world.
Quite clearly put, and quite accurate. I’ve written about torture in-depth in other articles, and whether in the Muslim world or in other conflicts (N. Ireland, for example), the use of torture is always counter-productive.
Humane treatment of even the worst offenders in society gives that society the justification to advocate ethical behavior. Treating people inhumanely reduces the supposedly “just” cause that the inhumane treatment is allegedly being done for.
Establish a multi-country full media (Web, television, radio, and print) program to discuss and debate Islamist and other forms of religious extremism. It is particularly important that such communications be made in the local languages, and at a fairly sophisticated level that will not insult the intelligence of viewers and readers in the Muslim world, and which also will serve the purpose of educating the Western public about the complexity of the issues. Discussion of other “extremist” ideas ranging from Muslim questions about Christian efforts to proselytize and convert Muslims, to the role of other religious nationalisms (Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian) is important here, if indeed, Islamic extremism is not being treated as a unique phenomenon.
Indeed. As I stated earlier, the ideas that the United States wants to propagate must be brought to the people. The concept that people will rise up and spontaneously greet (with flowers) a new ideology is naive at best.
The policy makers of the United States need to have a counseling board of Muslim scholars and Arabic cultural experts, whose participation is well-publicized. And not just for show either, but with tangible results.
When the president himself regularly criticizes Muslim and Arab media, that’s only furthering the alienation of the viewers towards American foreign policy. It would be far, far more useful and productive to regularly have American policymakers appear on those Arab and Muslim media outlets, to counter the time given to the extremist’s videos, speeches and opinions.
Of course I realize I’m just spitting in the wind here, as I am not in a position to influence those who are behind current American foreign policy in the “war on terror”. That being said, it’s time for those who find fault with the current policy to begin assembling solutions.
Politicians are, in the final analysis, dependent on the support of the people. And it is we the people who must begin debating the solutions to terrorism, to advocate new strategies to be implemented, because the path we are on now is leading towards further disaster.
This is cross-posted from Flogging the Simian
