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COUNTERPRODUCTIVE

HOW DO TERRORIST groups end? According to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI), an analysis of 586 terrorist groups that had operated between 1970 and 2007 found that religious groups represented the highest proportion still active between 2007 and 2017. And whereas military or police defeat was the most successful approach in ending left-wing terrorist groups, the same repressive counter-terrorism measures achieved the least success with religious terrorist organizations—contributing to the demise of only 12 percent. Of the 586 groups analyzed, 37 percent were left wing, 37 percent were nationalist groups, 21 percent were religious groups, and 5 percent were right wing.¹

Another study, by the RAND Corporation, which analyzed 648 terror groups that existed between 1968 and 2006, found that military force led to the demise of only 7 percent overall. The sample also comprised religious, nationalist, left-wing, and right-wing groups. Subsequently, one may question instead, what measures do have a success rate greater than 7 percent? According to the authors—one of whom is a US Naval Postgraduate School professor—more than 80 percent of terrorist groups ended after either reaching a political solution (43 percent) or as a result of being penetrated and eliminated by local police and intelligence agencies (40 percent).²

When it comes to religious groups, not only is unilateral military intervention costly and ineffective, it has proven to be counterproductive. For example, while military operations weakened Boko Haram and Daesh in 2015—achieving a 10 percent decrease in the total number of deaths in both Nigeria and Iraq—subsequently, Boko Haram expanded into Niger, Cameroon, and Chad, increasing the number of terrorism-related deaths in those three countries by 157 percent. Meanwhile, Daesh and its affiliates almost doubled their international presence, from fifteen countries to twenty-eight. Consequently, in 2015, many nations recorded their highest levels of terrorism in any year in the past sixteen years.³

Was the military intervention worth creating a more fatal and less contained permutation of the threat it sought to eliminate? I am not entirely certain how the efficacy of such interventions is measured and evaluated, but failing to map systems-level impact is self-defeating when one considers the wider scope of global human security. By systems thinking, I mean approaching and analyzing components as holistic, interrelated, and interdependent parts of a larger system, and studying the effects of changing one part (e.g., military operations against Boko Haram) on other parts of the system (e.g., surrounding countries). A beautiful example of systems-level impact—renowned among sustainability practitioners—is how the seemingly disconnected action of reintroducing wolves in Yellowstone National Park played a role in affecting the entire ecosystem and contributed to altering the park’s geography and the course of its rivers.⁴

Dispersing seeds of terror isn’t the only repercussion of military interventions. After conducting extensive interviews with imprisoned violent jihadists in the UK, criminologist Andrew Silke noted that while initially they would attribute their involvement to ideological reasons, after speaking with them, he found “out about . . . what was happening . . . in their personal lives, employment discrimination, yearnings for revenge for the death toll of Muslims.” Since this is an unpopular outlook with counterterrorism agencies, he adds that “The government does not like to hear that someone became a jihadist because his brothers were beaten up by police or air strikes blew up a bunch of civilians in Mosul. The dominant idea is that if we concentrate on, somehow, defeating the radical Islamicist ideology, we can leave all of the messy, complicated behavioural stuff alone.”⁵

History (and common sense) forewarns us that bombing bases and bunkers may destroy people and targets, but never ideologies, and certainly not grievances. Are we perhaps overlooking the possibility that these tactics bankrupt our security deficit by fueling the anger, humiliation, and injustice that immortalizes the dogmas we are fighting in the first place? Data scientists from the Naval Postgraduate School offer some indication that they do. In a social media study, the researchers compared Twitter feeds from Daesh strongholds before and after US bombings. Before the bombardments, tweets targeted their fury at local enemies in the vicinity—such as mayors, imams, police, and soldiers. As the bombs dropped, the tweets rapidly escalated into an international call for the destruction of Western governments and civilians.⁶

Just as the neuroscientist Emile Bruneau would have predicted, empathy for the suffering of one’s in-group correlated with an increased willingness to inflict harm on members of the out-group.⁷ Moreover, such actions reinforce the role of a protector—in this case, Daesh—with guardianship over the restoration of justice—or at least retribution. Given that Iraqis rank coalition air strikes as a greater threat than Daesh, according to a Pentagon-funded meta study, one can only imagine the implications of a testosterone-driven adolescence punctuated with daily bombings.⁸ In the face of this existential threat and injustice, youth are fed the narrative of a Western crusade against the Muslim umma. Can we reasonably expect these young men not to believe this when their day-to-day experience consistently validates this very belief?

Security measures should seek to ensure human security by enhancing life and reducing—even eliminating—vulnerabilities rather than provoking them. Yet as Iraq’s military expenditure rose by 536 percent between 2006 and 2015—the largest increase by any country in the world during that period, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)—this one-dimensional strategy was paralleled with a rise in civilian deaths.⁹ As Dr. Yassir Abd Al-Hussein Al-Darweesh, an Iraqi author, journalist, and researcher, notes in the SIPRI report, “Terrorism is not the disease, but the symptom.”

While it is abundantly self-evident to me, as an Arab and Muslim, I acknowledge that my opinions and analysis are subject to skepticism. A Donald Rumsfeld–commissioned report, however, might serve as a more credible source. In 2004, Rumsfeld handpicked and directed a Defense Science Board Task Force to review the impact that the Bush-Cheney administration’s policies—specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—were having on terrorism. Most people in the Middle East could have saved them the time and told them that US foreign policy is, inadvertently, a talent and recruitment funnel for extremist groups. And the task force did indeed come to the exact same conclusions—though they seemed puzzled to find that American intervention in the Muslim World had “. . . paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.”¹⁰

Redirecting a portion of military and security budgets towards “soft power” diplomacy, like development projects and addressing unemployment, may have proven to be a wiser allocation of resources. Despite the absence of a direct causal relationship between poverty and terrorism, recent studies in Nigeria indicate that the mere visibility of USAID programming correlated with decreased levels of support for Boko Haram. Conversely, cutting State Department and USAID spending to pay for military interventions with the intention of defeating terrorism could have precisely the opposite effect.¹¹

GOOD GOVERNANCE KILLS TERRORISM

State-imposed brutality, human rights violations, and lack of accountability have proven to be similarly counterproductive to counterterrorism efforts, according to an intensive two-year investigation undertaken by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), entitled Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives, and the Tipping Point for Recruitment. After an unprecedented number of former recruits (718) in remote, high-recruitment terrorist hotbeds on the African continent were interviewed, data showed that an overwhelming 71 percent of respondents in the study attributed “government action,” including “killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend,” as the catalyst triggering their decision to join terrorist groups. Accordingly, those who expressed a significantly lower degree of confidence in democratic institutions and their potential to deliver progress or meaningful change were the most susceptible to radicalization.¹²

Despite Boko Haram’s long-time rejection of secularization, the group’s extremism did not turn violent until a government clampdown in 2009 killed their group leader, along with 800 of their members.¹³ Political opposition in and of itself is, of course, healthy. However, the departure point from which a resistance turns violent is when victims have no effective legal redress and start to become disillusioned with the established political process. Moral outrage is followed by aggression and the activation of a militarized social identity.

After studying thirty-four campaigns of political violence over 200 years, former CIA officer, psychiatrist, and sociologist Marc Sageman found that in 80 percent of the campaigns he examined, militancy was a response to a community threat. Sageman gives the example of a peaceful school protest over cafeteria food, which escalates with the school administration calling the police and responding with force and violence. The conflict now becomes over the escalation of violence and not over the food.¹⁴ This is why it is necessary to understand the context and point of escalation during the Western-led colonial and imperialist violence, which predated Islamist terror groups.

Journey to Extremism concluded that improved public policy and the delivery of good governance by African governments confronted with violent extremism were far more effective counterterrorism responses than the current disproportionate focus on security interventions.¹⁵ As former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted, “Missiles may kill terrorists. But good governance kills terrorism.”¹⁶ Another popular counterterrorism measure with an adverse effect on good governance is the use of economic sanctions. Intended to disrupt the financing channels of terrorist organizations, sanctions have, in some cases, been successful in exerting pressure on countries to renounce their support of such militant groups. Sudan’s eviction of Osama Bin Laden in 1996 is one such example. However, the overall effectiveness of using sanctions to inhibit terrorism has been mixed.

Sanctions often lend to government and state instability, which in turn promotes a terror-prone environment by unfavorably affecting individuals with no ties to terrorism. As one might imagine, the rulers of countries subject to sanctions are typically neither “law-abiding” nor democratic. Therefore, they can deflect the costs of sanctions onto the broader population. These measures then foment anger and resentment, which may incite retaliatory violence.¹⁷ Moreover, when a weak state cannot, or does not, provide for its people, it provides an opening for other organizations to emerge as ad hoc social welfare providers. Naturally, this increases the political legitimacy and social capital of these fringe groups.

Similarly, state-imposed measures intended to cut terrorism finance also impact local populations. For instance, anecdotally, a peacebuilder working in Somalia recalls how the government literally shut down the ocean to deal with piracy and Al Shabaab activity, and simultaneously stifled the economic livelihood of fishermen. While there may be plenty of fish in the sea, this was of little use to the fishermen who were restricted from access. Subsequently, those without terrorist sympathies previously now had a major gripe against the government, and limited options. I should acknowledge that governments and security forces are under tremendous pressure and often make impossible decisions most of us wouldn’t envy. Nonetheless, it is essential that we expand our scope and consideration of unintended consequences, rather than viewing our interventions as siloed and disconnected from a wider web of complexity.

LOVE AMERICA, HATE THE GAME

Rumsfeld’s Defense Science Board Task Force was also more than likely surprised to learn that Muslims had no cultural diatribes against the US, nor its ideals of freedom and democracy. Rather, the issue was far less ethnocentric. Muslims hate American policies. In particular, they abhor America’s one-sided support of Israel and its prejudice against the legitimate rights of Palestinians. Another source of ire exhausting America’s credibility is the hypocrisy behind the US’s support of certain authoritarian regimes, while it asserts democracy rhetoric elsewhere. Especially when the US’s spreading of liberty and freedom comes with self-serving national interests and at the expense of Muslim self-determination—like the anarchy and suffering ensuing from the occupation of Iraq.

If the top findings of the 2018 Arab Youth Survey are any indication, young people across the Middle East—who are overwhelmingly anti-Daesh—are increasingly viewing America as an adversary. The survey gathered insights through 3,500 face-to-face interviews across sixteen of the twenty-two Arab countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates [UAE], Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen). For the first time in the survey’s history, the United States has fallen out of the top five allies named by Arab youth, whereas Russia has assumed the position as the top non-Arab ally for the second year in a row. Russia’s influence is notably evident in the Levant (Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon), where 31 percent looked to Moscow as a friend.¹⁸

What may be counterintuitive for Americans is that from an aspirational point of view, the US comes second (after the UAE) as the country young Arabs would most like to live in and want their own country to emulate. Throughout the survey’s history, America has consistently ranked in the top five, which further reaffirms that anti-American sentiment is an opposition towards policies, rather than against its people and culture.¹⁹

Territorial encroachment is another point of contention shared by Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs. After the controversial 2018 US Embassy opening in the international holy city, a Westernized, highly educated Saudi friend of mine lamented on Facebook, “Jerusalem today, tomorrow Medina, then Mecca.” Without entering into a debate on why the embassy move was so heavily contested, suffice it to say that it amplifies a cause worth fighting for and garners considerable public support and outrage for terrorist organizations. It also corroborates Islamic prophecies foreshadowing a degenerate era, before Jerusalem is liberated by the return of the Messiah, following which peace and justice finally prevail on Earth. Daesh adeptly exploits these aggregated resentments and offers a “noble” alternative. Causes like Palestine and Iraq become symbols of oppression and occupation, and every action becomes a direct attack on all Arabs and Muslims.²⁰

Having built loyalty among Saddam’s Baathists as a prisoner during the US occupation of Iraq, Baghdadi unambiguously claims that where Iraq’s rulers failed, the Islamic State will deliver. The government’s failures, according to Baghdadi, included the inability to reclaim Jerusalem and not preventing the 2003 US-led invasion that delivered the country into the hands of Shi’ites, who were unwilling to mount a jihad against Alawite minority rule in Syria.²¹

As the Rumsfeld report itself concluded, American diplomacy is not facing a problem of communications messaging, but rather a fundamental problem of credibility. ²²

ELIMINATING THE GRAYZONE

Jiujitsu is known as a “gentler” martial art for employing tactics that neutralize an enemy by using the attacker’s own energy or weight against them. It is a tactic that Daesh employs adeptly—particularly pertaining to polarization. When I first came across The Management of Savagery, I made an assumption regarding the savagery to which the author refers—that of the United States and the West. In fact, the book outlines in blunt and prescriptive detail a comprehensive strategy for the Islamists to incite a state of savagery and total anarchy and to polarize Muslim and non-Muslim populations until the world is neatly divided into one of antagonistic fundamentalists. They call this “Eliminating the Grayzone”—a tactic that ranks so high on the terror group’s agenda, it even graced the cover of the January 2015 issue of their online magazine Dabiq.²³

Gray refers to the space between the stark binary spectrum of black and white—in this case, where diversity, inclusion, mutual respect, and coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims are safeguarded without coerced conformity. Far-right leaders like Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders—stoking anti-Muslim sentiments and inciting Islamophobia in their constituencies—inadvertently serve as de facto recruitment officers for terrorist groups. And between burkini controversies in France, Danish cartoons insulting the Prophet Muhammad, and the Dutch documentary Fitna in which Quranic verses are juxtaposed with violence and terrorism, opportunities to effortlessly capitalize on friction, hate, and fear are not in short supply.

An example of how this influences violent extremists—which came as a surprise, by the following researchers’ own admission—is demonstrated in the findings of a study entitled Radicalization, Laïcité, and the Islamic Veil ²⁴ In this study, William McCants and Christopher Meserole asked this question: Why do individuals radicalize? For the purposes of the research, they used data focusing on Sunni Muslims who actively support violent extremist groups and applied machine learning algorithms to identify the “non-linear” and “interactive” relationships between different factors.

According to the study’s standardized foreign fighter scores—that is, those who left their native countries to join groups like Daesh in foreign lands—the top five countries producing radicalized individuals were Tunisia, France, Belgium, Jordan, and Lebanon. The latter two are both Muslim-majority countries bordering Syria, so these were not outliers by any means. Tunisia, however, ranked the highest among the top five, and the other two were France and Belgium. Apart from being Francophone countries, these three nations seemed somewhat more random and unconnected. It turned out “Francophone” was a proxy for something else, the researchers deduced—the French approach to “forced secularism,” or laïcité.²⁵

Both France and Belgium had public national debates around whether or not to ban full-face veils, which they ultimately both outlawed. In Tunisia, Ben Ali’s secular regime had banned headscarves from being worn in government offices as far back as 1981, but it was unevenly enforced. After Ben Ali’s ouster in 2011, the legacy of the veil dominated political discourse in the lead-up to the October 2011 elections. So the three countries with the highest foreign fighter score that do not border Syria were all Francophone, and all had caustic and divisive national debates about legislation enforcing secularism in the immediate period prior to the onset of the Syrian civil war.

Paradoxically, in seeking to nurture nationalism through homogeneity, such policies and debates essentially became a form of self-sabotage. The nature of this political discourse and the narrative it perpetuates—that it is not possible for one’s identity to be both pious and Western—plays right into the hands of terrorist recruiters in sending the message that the West is against Islam. At these starkly contrasting outskirts, you cannot be both Muslim and Western. Wearing a veil or a burka diminishes—even nullifies—your Frenchness. You cannot be both against the Charlie Hebdo massacre, which killed twelve people, and against the vulgarity of the satirical paper itself.

Dabiq’s magazine cover features a photo of Muslim men holding “Je Suis Charlie” signs and the caption reads “From Hypocrisy to Apostasy, The Extinction of the Grayzone.”²⁶ In this state of extinction, society is polarized and devoid of respect, understanding, compromise, and justice. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” is met with “The West doesn’t understand the language of ethics and morality, only force and brutality.” This creates an impossible and intractable struggle. Accordingly, we need to cultivate and restore this grayzone and have the moral humility and sobriety to consider the perspective and intentions of our opponents, as opposed to acting with self-righteous intoxication.

Since Daesh allegedly orchestrated and/or inspired several terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom, I imagine the group’s leaders were bewildered when Sadiq Khan, the Muslim son of a Pakistani immigrant, was democratically elected mayor of London. If a young immigrant is able to see himself in a leader like Khan, and the possibility—the opportunity—for upwards mobility, equality, and acceptance, it makes for a formidable rebuttal of the “us and them” narrative. Similarly, community and interfaith groups rallying to counter the nefarious “Punish a Muslim Day” (which gamified acts of violence against British Muslims using a rewards system) with #LoveAMuslimDay, rewarding points for kindness towards Muslims, reinforce the grayzone.²⁷

So while it may have appeared to be insensitive—inflammatory even—to “build a mosque over Ground Zero,” which was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, and rather a YMCA-like Muslim community center in downtown Manhattan, true victory for the terrorists was not the proposed construction of the center itself. Rather, victory for the terrorists was in the divisive zoning policy.²⁸ Had America unanimously embraced the center, Islam, and Muslims— disassociating them from the horrific actions of 9/11—that would have been a truer victory over extremists of all religions, races, and political orientations.

And, reluctant an advocate as I am of “click-tivism,” in recognizing our interconnectedness, those in the West can help mitigate polarization through broadcasting their acknowledgment of suffering in Muslim countries. For instance, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the world marched in solidarity and the ubiquitous #JeSuisCharlie hashtags and photo filters permeated social media. A few months later, when Ankara suffered its third high-fatality attack in five months, there was a deafening silence, prompting many to question Where is the public outcry: ‘Je suis Turkey’? When we are outraged and show solidarity with Paris, our silence is formidably more deafening when there is no outcry for other mounting Muslim human deaths tolls.

In mitigating fundamentalism, one may adopt one of two approaches: counter-balancing with an equally extremist approach as we wildly see-saw in a constant state of flux; or come to a more moderate center that may be less popular, requires greater compromise, greater concessions and discussions—and quite frankly, takes more work. We are partially responsible for the rise of extreme leaders if we choose to alienate those who attempt to rise in a somewhat lonely middle. We may consider supporting and celebrating candidates who are able to embrace bipartisan agendas. We are more different than we are alike, said no one who peacefully and sustainably resolved a conflict, ever.