Talking Loud and Saying Nothing

Four big problems with the Obama administrations plan

for countering violent extremism.

BY KIM GHATTAS-AUGUST 4, 2015

If the last decade was the age of the GWOT, or Global War on Terror, were currently
living in the era of CVE. If youre not caught up with the lingo, thats countering violent
extremism and just as we had counterinsurgency tactics and counterterrorism
experts who specialized in the GWOT, a new cottage industry has sprung up of CVE
analysts and officials. The White House even had a summit about CVE earlier this
year mostly notable for the lack of any workable recommendations it produced.
The concept of preventing men and women from sliding down the path of
radicalization is, of course, not new. But the term is catching on because of the flow of
young Westerners traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State, and also a handful of
incidents of young Muslim Americans launching attacks at home potentially
including the Chattanooga, Tennessee, shooting on July 16 that killed four Marines,
though that mans motives remain unclear.
I recently returned from the Aspen Security Forum, which was three days of intense
discussions about homeland security, foreign policy, and cyberwarfare with experts,

foreign ambassadors, administration officials, and members of Congress. From FBI

Director James Comey, who told the assembled crowd that the biggest threat to the
United States is now the Islamic State, to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh
Johnson, who spoke of outreach to Muslim American communities, extremism and
how to counter it was the events recurring theme.
If I have one takeaway from the experience, however, it is this:Nobody really seems to
know how to go about countering violent extremism, and, more crucially, no one knows
if it really works. There is no way to quantify success. And a number of different trends,
countries, and problems are thrown together in one haphazard approach to deal with
all of it.
CVE is supposed to be about far more than Islamic radicalism. Keep in mind that since
2001, twice as many people have been killed in the United States in attacks by white
supremacists and other non-Muslim groups than by radical Muslims. And perhaps
jihadis and neo-Nazis do have more in common than we think: As John Horgan,
author ofThe Psychology of Terrorism, put it: The similarities of how they get
engaged, involved and disengaged in terrorism by far exceed the differences.
Yes, U.S. officials take great pains to make clear that they are not focused on the
Muslim community and that Islam is a religion of peace. As the Department of
Homeland Security website on CVE says, The threat posed by violent extremism is
neither constrained by international borders nor limited to any single ideology.
However, when people in Washington discuss CVE, most of them are thinking of the
Islamic State and other radical Muslim groups.
When applied to the effort to counter the Islamic State and its hangers-on, here are
four key questions about CVE that need better answers or arent being asked at all.
What is the counternarrative?
Much of CVE seems to be focused on countering the narrative put out by groups like
the Islamic State, with their slickly produced videos and aggressive recruitment on
social media. The question, however, remains what is the Wests offering in place of
the Islamic States worldview? One participant in the Aspen Forum had a unique
suggestion: Bring in the advertisers, this person said. If they can convince me I want
something I never knew I needed, surely they can put out positive messaging against
the Islamic State and convince people to turn away.
But this is not an advertising war its not about selling a beautiful product. Unless
Europe and the United States are actually offering access to a stable, happy, if
somewhat imperfect life in the West but judging from how few desperate Syrian
refugees have been welcomed into these countries, its safe to assume that this
product is not for sale to everyone. Public diplomacy to promote Western values or
lifestyles failed miserably under President George W. Bushs administration, and is
barely more successful now.
Establishing good governance and rule of law in broken countries would be a good
start creating better education systems, too. However, those ideas rarely came up

in the discussions at Aspen about how to prevent the spread of extremism. Few are
calling for nation building, but CVE efforts are happening in a silo that ignores the fact
that Arab countries use the pretext of extremism to clamp down on all domestic
opposition often with the silent acquiescence of Washington, as in the case of
Jordan or Egypt. The truth of the matter is that state repression and lack of civil
liberties are directly linked to rising extremism.
In a January speech in Brussels, Undersecretary of State Sarah Sewall addressed
that fact by noting that preventing violent extremism requires using traditional foreign
policy tools, such as development, stabilization efforts, humanitarian assistance, and
peace building.
However, Sewall seems to be the only one who discusses CVE and governance in the
same breath. And shes up against a host of U.S. policies and regional leaders at odds
with exactly that multilayered approach.
Who is the audience?
There is a difference between trying to convince a young, middle-class British woman
that traveling to Syria to marry an Islamic State fighter is going to make her life a living
hell and trying to convince a Jordanian from Zarqa, the hometown of Abu Musab alZarqawi, that his life as an unemployed, single man there is better than life under
Caliph Baghdadi. There are smarter, more creative approaches to addressing each of
these people: Officials, for example, can give a voice to former Islamic State recruits
about the reality of life under the militant group, and enlist mothers of victims or current
and former fighters to speak out about how extremism destroys lives.
Then there are those joining out of deep conviction including Western men, mostly
Europeans, who joined Islamist rebel groups in Syria a couple of years ago out of
anger that the West wasnt doing enough to support the rebels, as Gilles de Kerchove,
the EU counterterrorism coordinator, pointed out at the forum.
The backgrounds of those who have become radicalized, and the reasons why they
did, are incredibly diverse.There are also the recent converts to Islam, who are joining
the caliphate and who baffle many experts. And there are differences between the few
dozen Muslim Americans joining the Islamic State and the several thousand European
Muslims who have made the journey. This difference is not because the United States
has a better grasp of CVE, but comes down to what European officials acknowledge
are gaps and failures in the integration of generations of immigrants, which has left
scores of young Muslims on the margins of society.
For now, the discussion in the West about CVE seems to conflate all those groups.
Organizations in the Arab world or specific initiatives in countries like Denmark, which
has a de-radicalization and reintegration program for returning fighters and a
comprehensive approach to preventing violent extremism, provide a more targeted
approach but the results are still unclear.
Does CVE work if everyone has different foreign-policy priorities?

Some analysts consider the U.S.-led airstrikes against the Islamic State an essential
component of the overall CVE strategy. But the military campaign was also criticized
heavily by Republican members of Congress attending the Aspen Forum, who decried
the small number of targets struck so far and the lack of political solution to
accompany the military effort. Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) said, that in her view, a
more sustained campaign against the Islamic State and more pressure to find a
political solution would help CVE efforts by making clear to potential jihadi recruits that
the militant group has no staying power. Four years into the war in Syria, thats still
easier said than done.
And a key question remains: How is this going to work if the United States is focused
on defeating the Islamic State while some of its allies have their eyes set on bringing
down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad? While the U.S.-led coalition is bombing
Islamic State positions, governments in the region stand accused of turning a blind to
the flow of foreign fighters into Syria.
The mismatch between the priorities of the different allies is part of what has allowed
the Islamic State to hold on to territory and keep recruiting. It took Turkey more than a
year since the fall of Mosul to finally engage fully in the anti-Islamic State campaign
and it did so not just because it started to worry about the repercussions of Islamic
State growth on its own territory, but also because it hopes to curb Kurdish advances
in northern Syria. The Saudis also probably still prefer to bring down Assad first and
take Iran down a notch, before dealing with the Islamic State.
These are real-world problems that are hindering the effort to decrease the appeal of
the Islamic State. But too many of the discussions about CVE efforts are happening
separately from foreign-policy discussions about how to engage the Middle East.
So does CVE work in the context of the Middle Easts many conflicts?
Is there any point in Secretary Johnson engaging in CVE efforts and reaching out to
Muslim American communities if there is a raging conflict in the Middle East that stirs
deep feelings in the hearts of Sunnis?
As Rashad Hussain, State Department special envoy for counterterrorism
communications, pointed out, it is also important to acknowledge [extremism] is
stemming from an ideology, and if you dont address it in one place then it will appear
somewhere else.
What Hussain was probably trying to touch on very delicately are the elephants
in the room of the CVE discussion, such as Wahhabism, the austere brand of Islam
spread by Saudi Arabia and which has been taken to extremes by a minority of radical
militants. The other issue is that many Sunnis feel, rightly or wrongly, that their faith is
under attack either by the West or by Iran, and are eager to defend it or at least turn
a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the Islamic State.
So, isnt trying to counter extremism while wars and radical ideologies spread across
the Middle East akin to trying to plaster over a breach in a dam? Thats what one U.S.
official seemed to think when he told me the CVE effort would be useless if the conflict

in Syria wasnt brought to an end in a way that also made Sunnis feel their grievances
were being taken into account. As a representative of the U.S. government, this
thinking is a difficult proposition: Before you know it, youre explaining the violent acts
of others by blaming it on your own foreign policy. But what this official was trying to
say was that, to reverse the trend of radicalization, it was important to acknowledge
how the Syrian conflict was playing into the hands of the Islamic State.
No one believes that removing Assad will bring about the demise of Islamic State. But
the group thrives on the broken politics of countries like Iraq and Syria, has taken root
in their ungoverned spaces, and feeds off the resentment created by the Wests
apparent lack of interest in the deaths of more than 200,000 Syrians. A renewed effort
to try to bring the Syrian conflict to an end could partly pull the rug out from under the
organizations feet.
One of the problems with CVE is that it is focused on countering the spread and allure
of the Islamic State, while the reality is that no one has yet given a comprehensive and
convincing explanation for the groups rise and its staying power. Some of it starts by
thinking through the questions here.
While CVE is worthwhile as an effort to ring-fence young, vulnerable souls from the
lure of violent adventure, it does little in its current form to address the roots of the
problem and turn the tide.
ABDIRASHID ABDULLE ABIKAR/AFP/GettyImages
Posted by Thavam