Category: Daniel Serwer
Squishy is good
It may be a waste of substantial brainpower, but Daniel Byman and Jeremy Shapiro have produced a well-reasoned analysis of the threat of foreign fighters returning from Syria and Iraq as well as measures to counter that threat. Yes, it exists, they suggest, but no we shouldn’t overreact or react in ways that will make it worse.
They take a systemic approach to the problem, defining a series of steps that lead to eventual terrorist attacks in home countries and identifying steps that can be taken at each stage to provide “off ramps.” Their main policy conclusions are eminently doable:
- increasing community engagement efforts to dissuade potential fighters from going to Syria or Iraq;
- working more with Turkey to disrupt transit routes;
- improving de-radicalization programs to “turn” returning fighters into intelligence sources or make them less likely to engage in violence; and
- avoiding blanket prosecution efforts.
Dan and Jeremy usefully underlined a number of related points at their public presentation at Brookings this morning. This is a “small numbers” problem, given the size of the populations from which returning foreign fighters come. It is impossible to guarantee 100% security. We need to triage and play the odds.
They also emphasized that most of the potential terrorists are young males, which does not make them readily accessible to the US or other governments. Counter narratives need to come from sources with greater credibility to the target population. Their families and communities will have much greater influence. Giving them alternative ways in which they can contribute to the welfare of those for whom they might otherwise be tempted to fight may be useful. Putting them in prison may well radicalize them more.
I would underline this from the written report:
Efforts to promote a counter-narrative are valuable, particularly if they involve parents, preachers, and community leaders. Community programs deserve considerable attention.
Jeremy and Dan however focus most of their energy on advocating greater resources for security services, which they view as stretched thin trying to fulfill their responsibilities. Personally I’d rather waste a few more dollars on the softer Danish and Dutch community approach rather than the “identify and punish” French one. We already have in the US a pretty good indication that greater inclusion is itself a substantial barrier to radicalization. The numbers of “foreign fighters” originating here are remarkably small, particularly given the saliency of the US in the Middle East.
The White House will host a conference Feburary 18 on countering violent extremism. Indications are that the softer approach will play a major role. Press secretary Josh Earnest says:
Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) efforts rely heavily on well-informed and resilient local communities. Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-St. Paul have taken the lead in building pilot frameworks integrating a range of social service providers, including education administrators, mental health professionals, and religious leaders, with law enforcement agencies to address violent extremism as part of the broader mandate of community safety and crime prevention.
Sounds squishy, but it is the right approach.
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Here we go again
French Prime Minister Valls declared war Saturday:
It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.
I guess that was inevitable, but it brings back un-fond memories of George W. Bush declaring war on terror. At least this time the enemy is well-framed: Bush’s war on a means was a lot worse idea than war on the people who use it and the ideas that support it.
But Valls’ is still a bad frame, because declaring “war” makes military and paramilitary means the prime weapons. They are unquestionably necessary, but just as unquestionably insufficient, to deal with the problem. The stand-offs in Paris with three hostage-takers required the French security forces to use their impressive military capabilities. Police vigilance was vital to protecting today’s massive demonstration in Place de la Republique. But countering violent radicalism over the next months and years will entail far more than effectiveness on the part of security forces.
The murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff, several police and four hostages at a Kosher deli were horrendous. But they are still a small percentage of the almost 700 murders per year in France (which has a murder rate one-fourth that of the US). Yes, the numbers are important because of the political purpose and what the incidents may portend for the future. But a crackdown “against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom and solidarity” is far more likely to elicit a violent reaction than to calm the situation.
If you doubt the relevance of this point, read Jonathan Turley’s description in this morning’s Washington Post of the French government crackdown on free speech in recent years. He argues:
Indeed, if the French want to memorialize those killed at Charlie Hebdo, they could start by rescinding their laws criminalizing speech that insults, defames or incites hatred, discrimination or violence on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, sex or sexual orientation. These laws have been used to harass the satirical newspaper and threaten its staff for years. Speech has been conditioned on being used “responsibly” in France, suggesting that it is more of a privilege than a right for those who hold controversial views.
Ironically, Charlie Hebdo was founded in response to a government ban on a predecessor. It is also ironic that today’s demonstration included the presence of such stalwart defenders of freedom of speech as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Queen Rania, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That’s the kind of audience a war on Islamic extremism gets you. It should make us all wonder whether we’ve got the signals right.
Protecting Western societies from violent Islamic extremism is a worthy cause. But it should not be conceived as war. Quite to the contrary. The essential tools are those of peacebuilding: a culture of lawfulness, inclusive governance that ensures wide and non-discriminatory distribution of economic benefits, protection of human rights, integration, good understanding and dialogue among diverse social groups, security forces committed to protection of citizens, and citizens committed to maintaining a society they perceive as just and free. There may still be terrorist incidents in such a society, but they will be far less frequent than in one that discriminates against those who wear the hijab and populates vast suburbs with unemployed Muslim youth.
I imagine that the French security services are among the most capable in the world. But they missed the radicalization of the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo and Kosher deli murders. Someone in Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, managed to reach deep into French society to find and mobilize extremists. Even in the most alert and just of societies, that could happen. But I don’t know anyone who would suggest that most Muslim youth in France feels it has a fair stake in the success of the country. Making that a reality will be far more important, and far harder, than the war on Islamic extremism.
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Libya at swords’ points
I was going to write up this event, but as my highly efficient colleagues at the Middle East Institute have already got it up on the web, maybe you should look at it:
Then read this at The Economist for the narrative version.
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Who has gas?
President Putin’s cancellation of the South Stream pipeline project leaves parts of the Balkans vulnerable to a supply disruption and without sufficient future gas supplies. This is a rare opportunity for the European Union and the United States. South Stream would have tied Serbia, Bulgaria and others umbilically to a Moscow that is hard to like and unreliable. Sanctions and lower oil and gas prices killed the project. Finance had already killed its Western-backed competitor, Nabucco. Now what is needed is some active diplomacy to ensure that any future projects undermine Russian pretensions in the Balkans.
So where else might the gas come from? The planned TANAP/TAP (Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas/Trans-Adriatic) pipeline will bring gas to the Balkans (Turkey, Greece, Albania and Bulgaria) as well as Italy from Azerbaijan and eventually Turkmenistan. Construction is supposed to begin in 2015. This is a good but partial solution for 2020 and beyond.
There are many additional options, at least in the long term: Croatia and Montenegro have contracted for exploration in the Adriatic, where it is known deposits exist. Libyan gas already enters Europe through the Italian peninsula not far from the Balkans. Eastern Mediterranean gas lies not far away, and Iraqi gas not all that much farther.
Of these options, Libyan gas is in principle the quickest and easiest, not least because it is already flowing close by. Caveat emptor, as always: Libyan gas production has not recovered to prerevolution levels, though ongoing political instability has affected gas supplies less than oil production. Once Libya achieves a modicum of stability, it might be possible to build a pipeline from Italy to the Balkans that could be fed in the future by Adriatic gas, once that is developed. Israeli/Greek/Cypriot gas is a longer shot, but not impossible if the political knots ever get untied. Iraqi gas, shipped either from Kurdistan or the Sunni-majority provinces of Anbar and Ninewa, would be geopolitically a great way to tie Iraq to Europe, but shipment to Turkey may well prove the more economical proposition.
In the meanwhile, the Balkans have quite a bit to worry about if Russian gas is constricted or cut off anytime during the rest of this decade. That is unlikely this year because of lower prices, which increase Moscow’s incentive to export in order to maintain revenue (and commitments have already been made). Liquefied natural gas, which might come from Qatar or eventually even the US, may provide some insurance. The EU is backing a terminal in Croatia,but that option is expensive and won’t be built for years.
For the near term, the EU has been encouraging a market-based approach as well as pipeline interconnections and storage, so that gas can be stored and shipped more readily to and around the Union, including to the Balkans, should the need arise. That is the kind of solution that has worked so well in the US, which has built enough interconnections to make the entire country a single gas market:
Europe isn’t so far off from that, but the Balkans clearly need more connectivity:
There is no one solution to the gas problem in the Balkans. Wise heads should be pondering how to make sure that whatever menu of options is chosen is economically viable and has the kinds of geopolitical impact the US and Western Europe will find beneficial. That means diversification and resilience above all, with reduced dependence on Russia. Moscow would make far less trouble in countries like Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro if the Balkans had alternative sources of gas.
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Hello Kurdistan!
I haven’t actually watched this video of a discussion last Friday with Namo Abulla of Kurdistan’s Al Rudaw and Tzvi Kahn of the Foreign Policy Initiative. I hope it isn’t too far off the mark. Stay tuned also for Stephen Mansfield, discussing his book, The Miracle of the Kurds:
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Charlie Hebdo
It is all too easy to think of many valid reasons to denounce the murder of 12 staff members of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. But the event should also give us pause and make us think about what is going on in the minds of the people who do such things and how to prevent them from happening in the future. It may be necessary to label the perpetrators as evil and it is certainly appropriate to call for their quick capture and fair trial. It is likewise necessary to defend the right of anyone to laugh at whomever they want. But it is not sufficient.
We may never know precisely the motives for this massacre. Even if they eventually stand trial, the perpetrators may not say much. So we’ll have to go with the flow: this looks like an act of retaliation against Charlie Hebdo for it satires of Mohammed, Islam and Sharia. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that is correct.
The passionate defense of one’s religion we should all understand. It wasn’t all that long ago that New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani was cutting off funding to the Brooklyn Museum because it displayed an artwork known as “Piss Christ” (and it was eventually attacked and destroyed, in France).* I’m with Mohammad Fadel when he notes here that Giuliani’s attitude was frighteningly hostile, even if the means he had the privilege of choosing were more genteel:
My own folks are fond of the slogan “Never again!” when it comes to people who say they want to be rid of us. And we mean it. But Jews and Catholics in the United States have a lot of levers of power to wield before it comes to murdering our assailants. Even if we are deeply offended, we know that retaliation using political, economic, moral and social instruments will be more effective than violence.
That is what some people doubt. Extremists are extreme: they believe only violence will make their point and enable them to get their way. They feel under attack and want to fight back. They don’t think they are doing evil. They think protecting their own is doing good.
Why should Muslims feel under attack? Let me count the reasons:
- They are under attack from nationalists, especially but not only in France, who view them as foreigners, alien and undesirable.
- Aspects of Western culture that we regard as normal (kissing in public, scantily clad women, drinking alcohol) are offensive to many Muslims.
- Some Western countries, including France, have tried to prohibit some Muslim practices, in particular the hijab but also the call to prayer.
- They see us as applying double standards: vigorous concern for our own victims of violence, but indifference or worse towards theirs (witness Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere).
- Muslims share the legacy associated with the Old and New Testaments, but Christians and Jews reject (or ignore) the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed.
So when Charlie Hebdo takes shots at Mohammed, Westerners see it as a joke, maybe one in poor taste, but not something to get upset about. Some Muslims see it as part of a pattern of hostility, and a few want to retaliate but lack imagination and means other than an AK-47 and a rocket launcher.
So what do we do about it? First, we hope the French police catch the perps and see that they get a fair trial and appropriate sentences in a French court. All you need to know about Guantanamo you can learn by imagining what would happen if the murderers were caught, not put on trial but jailed indefinitely and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques. The extremists would certainly gain, not lose, if that happened.
Second, we need to restrain the nativist reactions of non-Muslims, who will be calling for (and voting for) expulsions of foreigners and crackdowns on immigration. That is precisely the wrong direction to go in. I don’t expect any mainstream Muslim organization not to denounce these murders in the strongest possible terms, even if they think Charlie Hebdo went too far in its satire. It is important to make it easier, not harder, for them to stick with the majority view, in France and elsewhere, that free speech has to be protected from murderous thugs, no matter how offensive the scribblings.
Third, we need much more understanding of the Muslims who live among us. Americans think Muslims are 15% of the population. In fact they are less than 1%. In France, they are thought to be 31% of the population but are in fact 8%. I can only imagine what other distortions lie harbored in our brains. Christian/Jewish relations have improved enormously since I was called names on the playground I won’t repeat today (some of you might never have heard them). We need to commit to the same kind of improvements with the growing Muslim population in our midst, ensuring that we know what is offensive and why as well as underlining our own commitment to freedom of speech.
I’ve got no beef with Charlie Hebdo. It was doing what it was invented to do. But let’s try to make things better, not worse.
*PS: Sorry: I confused two old stories here. Piss Christ was attacked in France, but Giuliani’s complaint was about The Holy Virgin Mary, a work featuring a Black Madonna sprinkled with elephant dung and images of female genitalia. A distinction but not much difference.
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