Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From J. Scott Carpenter

This past Friday, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released its report, “Rewriting the Narrative: An Integrated Strategy for Counterradicalization” (download here). The report offers important policy recommendations for continuing the fight against radical extremism, making a clarion call for a conceptual leap away from a primary focus on violent counterterrorism to a broader concern with confronting extremist ideology.

The importance of the report lies not only in the breadth of views represented in the bipartisan list of endorsers but also in its key recommendations, the first one in particular:

Expand focus from violent to non-violent extremism. The Obama Administration needs to view the spread of an ideology of radical extremism with urgency and seriousness comparable to its view of the spread of violent groups animated by that ideology. Obviously, the first priority for the government is to prevent and deter radical extremist groups from using violence to achieve their goals. But in addition the government needs to elevate in bureaucratic priority and public consciousness the need to prevent and deter the spread of radical extremist ideology. At the same time, the United States will need to make very clear that it does not consider Islam itself a danger, but only the distorted version of Islam perpetrated by radical extremists.

This is no small recommendation, and it will likely make many in the Washington policy community nervous. The report essentially says that an end state in which people remain extremist in mentality but are simply non-violent doesn’t go far enough. As conveyer belt groups like Hizb al-Tahrir and others demonstrate, the path to violent extremism often lies in the radicalizer’s ideology and his ability to connect perceived global grievances to local ones. Violence then is a switch that can be turned off and on if the person is not fully deradicalized.

Deradicalization also presents its problems, however. The Saudi deradicalization program, as the report points out, offers jobs, wives and homes as enticements for the violent jihadist to stop killing. Efforts are also made to teach a purer Islam but the program “works” because it relies heavily on coercive policies towards families of the radicalized, essentially making them their brothers’ keepers. When it fails—and recidivism rates are reported at 10 percent—the radicalized person reverts back to violent action.

Clearly, providing alternatives before it gets to this stage is critical, and the report offers a number of practical means for doing so. Among these is another key task force recommendation for the Obama Administration:

Rejuvenate efforts to promote prosperity, reform, and democracy in Arab countries. As a strategic response to extremism, the United States and its allies must offer a viable and attractive political alternative to the dark vision offered by radical extremist groups. Prosperous democratic societies which respect the rights of their citizens are more resilient and less susceptible to political instability and radicalization. If grievances can be peacefully expressed and mediated through democratic institutions, citizens are less apt to turn to more extreme options. Efforts to promote prosperity, democracy, and respect for human rights should, therefore, remain key aspects of this administration’s foreign policy agenda, even if the rhetoric describing it changes. The key is to do it better.

That a bipartisan group would endorse such a recommendation in the post-Bush era reveals a lot about the consensus that exists in Washington over the long-term strategic importance of systemic political and economic change in the region. In the long run, as Keynes reminds, we’re all dead, but avoiding revolution in the region and a further radicalization of European and Middle Eastern populations is clearly in America’s national security interest.

The leitmotif of the report’s analysis and recommendations is that countering extremist ideology must rely chiefly on helping mainstream Muslims provide hopeful and practical alternatives to jihadist ideology. The United States can’t do it on its own. Whether in Europe, the Middle East or Southwest Asia, mainstream Muslims within their communities are the ones on the front lines, and if we can’t find ways to support them, we are left with military force which cannot create a sustainable solution as we have learned in Iraq and are struggling with in Afghanistan.

“Rewriting the Narrative” is endorsed by a distinguished group of policy practitioners: members of Congress Jane Harman (D-CA); Sue Myrick (R-NC), and Adam Smith (D-WA); former 9/11 commissioner Timothy J. Roemer; former U.S. ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg; former deputy assistant to the president for homeland security Frank J. Cilluffo; the presidents of the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute Kenneth Wollack and Lorne W. Craner, respectively; prominent scholars Bruce Hoffman and Mohammed M. Hafez; former Kennedy School dean and Clinton administration official Joseph S. Nye, Jr.; former Bush administration officials Randa Fahmy Hudome and M. C. Andrews; president of the Henry L. Stimson Center Ellen Laipson; Freedom House executive director Jennifer Windsor; Hudson Institute vice president S. Enders Wimbush; president of the Progressive Policy Institute Will Marshall; Johns Hopkins SAIS adjunct professor Joshua Muravchik; and Washington Institute executive director Robert Satloff.

Full disclosure: I was co-convener (with Matthew Levitt and Michael Jacobson) of the task force and I co-wrote the report. Which perhaps explains in part my enthusiasm for it…