Citing the “tragic attacks in Ottawa, Sydney and Paris”, the White House on Wednesday is convening a summit on violent extremism. Its goal is admirable and ambitious: Neutralising terrorism’s root causes by stopping people from radicalising in the first place. Yet, the causes of violent extremism are poorly understood and programmes are often targeted at the wrong audiences. So to help the world leaders at the summit do more good than harm, let us dispel some of the biggest myths.
1. We understand radicalisation
The just-released US National Security Strategy warns repeatedly of the danger of extremism, citing weak governance, widespread grievances, repression and the lack of a flourishing civil society among other causes that allow “extremism to take root”. This list suggests that we know what motivates radicalisation — but almost every social malady falls into these categories. The difficult reality is that there is no single path towards radicalisation; it varies by country, by historical period and by person.
Experts have long searched for a useful psychological profile of terrorists, without much success. The problem, as terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman observed many years ago, is “how disturbingly ‘normal’ most terrorists seem”.
Nor does the answer lie in the realm of faith. Many volunteers for terrorist groups have little knowledge of religion. Their lack of religious knowledge makes them easy prey for recruiters who don the mantle of religious authority. The two British Muslims who bought “Islam for Dummies” before heading to Syria are more the rule than the exception.
And describing an entire religious group as potentially dangerous is not especially helpful. Britain’s Prevent programme, which included efforts to promote community cohesion and fight extremist ideology, made Muslims feel stigmatised and made it harder to gain their cooperation.
2. Moderate Muslims need to speak out
Whenever an attack occurs, commentators chide moderate Muslims for not doing enough. Fox News contributor Monica Crowley argued that Muslims “should be condemning” the Charlie Hebdo attack, but said that she hadn’t “heard any condemnation”. Bill Maher made a similar point when he claimed that “hundreds of millions” of Muslims “applaud an attack like this”.
Impressionable young people should know that their communities reject violence and Muslims should indeed speak out — and they do. All the time. They condemn specific attacks such as the Charlie Hebdo killings, and they condemn terrorism in general. As Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) emerged, more than 120 Muslim scholars from around the globe issued a point-by-point rebuttal of its religious arguments.
One problem for Sunnis is that they lack a single spokesperson. So, unlike Catholicism or the more hierarchical Shiites, Sunnis cannot condemn (or endorse) anything in a categorical way. Blogger Daniel Haqiqatjou mockingly called for an iCondemn app that would allow Muslims to efficiently denounce acts of terror around the globe and reassure non-Muslims as to where they stand.
Of course, we should not hold ordinary people responsible for what violent people do in their name. Catholics should condemn the killing of an abortion doctor, but I don’t blame them for the murder if they don’t.
3. The best response is economic development and education
It seems intuitive that poor people would be angry and that uneducated people would be more susceptible to terrorist brainwashing — a view that conservatives as well as liberals have embraced. Former US president George W. Bush declared that it was important to fight poverty “because hope is an answer to terror”. The 9/11 Commission also called for supporting public education and economic openness.
Yet, even a moment’s reflection shows the limits of this logic. Billions suffer poverty worldwide and discrimination and ignorance are tragically widespread. Yet, few among these billions commit acts of terrorism. Religious schools in Pakistan do educate terrorists, but so do Pakistan’s public schools — and western universities. Doctors and engineers are well represented in the ranks of international terrorists: Ayman Al Zawahiri, the current leader of Al Qaida, is a trained surgeon.
Promoting education and economic development is good in its own right — but do not expect it to combat terrorism.
Instead, we should think small, in part because in the West, the problem involves small numbers of potential terrorists: Thousands, not millions. The focus should be on high-risk communities, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Prisons, for example, are breeders of terrorists and ensuring that radicals do not dominate religious instruction behind bars and that there are programmes (and intelligence agents) in place to stop terrorist recruitment is vital.
Particularly important is targeting what terrorism expert William McCants calls “law-abiding supporters” — those who embrace terrorist ideas on social media or are otherwise clearly at risk of joining a terrorist group, but have not yet broken the law. Using community interventions and other means to move these people off the path of violence will prevent the stark choice of jail or Syria and give family members of potential recruits a reason to seek out government help.
4. The fighting in Iraq and Syria will spawn terrorism in the West
The flow of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria has understandably alarmed security officials around the world. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey expressed the views of many when he warned in May 2014 that “there’s going to be a diaspora out of Syria at some point and we are determined not to let lines be drawn from Syria today to a future 9/11”.
However, officials raised similar fears about foreign fighters involved in earlier conflicts, especially after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and those conflicts did not produce a surge in terrorism in Europe or the US. Many of the most dangerous foreign fighters die on the battlefield, blowing themselves up in suicide attacks or perishing in firefights. Others opt to continue fighting in the region. And those who return home are likely to be under the surveillance of state security services, inhibiting their ability to carry out attacks.
So far, the agenda of Daesh is first and foremost local and regional — killing Alawites and Shiites, toppling the governments in Iraq and Syria, and so on — not plotting attacks against the West. There remains a real threat, especially from “lone wolf” attacks, as the cachet of Daesh inspires Muslims around the world. But such attacks are unlikely to be on the scale of 9/11 or carried out in a sustained way.
5. Europe has a massive religious extremism problem
The attacks at Charlie Hebdo were indeed shocking. Afterwards, the head of Europol noted that “the scale of [violent extremism] has increased over the last 10 years”. Arrests for religiously-inspired terrorism in Europe more than doubled from 2009 to 2013.
Still, Europe has seen very few successful attacks by terrorists since the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people, and the 2005 London bombings, which killed 52. In the intervening years, Right-wing extremists have presented more of a threat. Europe’s most deadly attack in recent years was the one carried out by far-right Islamophobe Anders Breivik, who killed 77 Norwegians in 2011 when he bombed downtown Oslo and then slaughtered children at a nearby summer camp.
Though the potential threat may have grown because of the excitement Daesh has created among some young Muslims, so too has the response. The arrests and disrupted plots — as opposed to successful ones — attest to the professionalism of the European intelligence services, as well as the need to fund them properly. So while there is reason to be concerned, there is no reason to panic and overreact. Europe’s bigger problem is the divide between its Muslim and non-Muslim communities. This is less about counter-terrorism and more about the need for better political and economic integration.
— Washington Post
Credit: Daniel Byman is a professor in the security studies programme at Georgetown University and research director of the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
