State Department Releases Terrorism Report
Yesterday the State Department released its congressionally mandated Country Reports on Terrorism for 2009. Among other things, the report pointed to many of the trends that we noted in our Are We Winning? Mid-Year Update, particularly the decrease in the overall number of terrorist attacks, the increase in terrorist activity and active recruitment from Somalia and Yemen, the importance of regional affiliates and those affiliates’ increasingly international focus, and the trend toward domestic radicalization and effective media-driven recruitment efforts.
One small point that I found interesting on the domestic radicalization front were the links made between the potential causes or factors associated with radicalization and potential strategies to counter it. The report, discussing radicalization in Europe:
Europe may continue to be a fertile recruitment ground for extremists if sizable numbers of recent immigrants and, in particular, second and third-generation Muslims continue to experience integration problems and feel alienated by governments’ domestic and foreign policies.
And approaches to combating radicalization in general:
The State Department is working to address the local drivers of radicalization that can lead large numbers of young people to be vulnerable to al-Qaida‘s ideology. The State Department recognizes that violent extremism can flourish where there is marginalization, alienation, and perceived – or real – relative deprivation.
In many cases, Muslims have more credibility than the U.S. government in addressing these issues in their own communities…only they have the credibility to counter the religious claims made by violent extremists. The U.S. government is working to identify reliable partners and amplify those credible Muslim voices…to challenge violent extremist views.
Accepting that these concepts apply to domestic radicalization in the U.S. as well as in the other countries being discussed in the report, we’re acknowledging:
1) That feelings of alienation can often stem from disagreement with U.S. policies, 2) that alienation makes young Muslims vulnerable to AQ’s narrative demonizing U.S. foreign policy [e.g. that the U.S. policies are deliberately designed to kill Muslims and that violence is necessary to counter this deliberate killing], 3) that the U.S. government can’t credibly provide a “counternarrative,” or at least not as credibility as “Muslims,” and 4) that the U.S. should find and support Muslims who discredit violent ideology.
Obviously the fact that we don’t have a very credible narrative to counter alienation and the radicalization that sometimes follows is not good. But is the best solution really to find people who speak credibly against violent extremism and taint them, perhaps permanently, by having the U.S. government “identify and amplify” their voices? It would seem that we would then just be bringing a lot of people from the relatively obscure but reasonably credible camp to the higher profile but totally useless camp.
Also, doesn’t this kind of sidestep the bigger issue, which is the alienation itself? We’ve already established that the alienation born of aversion to governments’ domestic and foreign policies, among other things, makes individuals and groups more vulnerable to jihadist ideology. But instead of looking more frankly and more often at the alienation itself and how its causes could be minimized or dealt with more effectively, we generally seem more concerned with how to out-talk violent jihadists taking advantage of it. That might work of course, the report cites some evidence of success. But for how long?
State’s report discusses the benefits of and advances in de-radicalization, counter-radicalization media programs, etc. But one of the major underlying problems, disaffection with government policies, particularly those undertaken by the U.S. and a number of U.S.-allied and supported governments, probably can’t really be effectively addressed in these approaches. Given that, the best even a completely credible actor can do is probably do with the “counternarrative” approaches is convince people to continue to be angry about the policies, but not express that anger as violence.
That’s obviously an important step. However, given that in the absence of major foreign policy shifts the predisposing risk factor, the alienation which we are supposedly addressing, would still exist essentially unchanged, it doesn’t seem that constructing a “counternarrative,” spoken by the U.S. government OR by Muslims it supports could ever really be more than a temporary solution.
