The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  During the cold war, the old formula of the moderate center was revived. Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote in his 1949 book, The Vital Center, that American liberalism was the defender of a down-to-earth process of gradual reform, which was endangered by communism on the left and antidemocratic reactionaries on the right—both of which captured minds by exploiting the “darker passions.”57 Just as war on terror intellectuals would later look for the causes of terrorism in sexual frustration, so too did Schlesinger describe communism’s appeal apolitically, highlighting what he thought was a reliance upon “lonely and frustrated people” who were “craving sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society.”58 After the 1960s, when social movements came to be regarded as presenting threats to Western governments as great as communist states, the term “extremism” began to be used to designate the same ideological dangers in them that totalitarianism had pointed to in states. The war on terror continued this approach. “Extremism” referred to either the religious fanaticism of Islam itself (culturalists) or to the political ideology of Islamism (reformists). Since the term widened the focus from specific acts of violence to the ideas, values, or mind-sets assumed to cause the violence, a much wider set of trends, ideologies, and peoples could be subsumed under a single category of threat. Instead of analyzing political Islam in such a way that located its emergence within specific material circumstances, the only public discussion was of how its ideological content produced anti-Western violence.

  The Cultural War

  Just as the reformists turned to cold war theories of totalitarianism to make sense of terrorism, so too did they turn to cold war history for ideas on how to combat it. One approach was to oppose extremist ideology using the same cultural techniques that had been favored in the early cold war, in which the CIA had sought to recruit the noncommunist Left in an ideological battle against Moscow. Updated for the war on terror, this meant recruiting moderate Muslim leaders to speak out against extremism and funding those within Muslim communities willing to propagate a pro-Western argument. By 2006, some erstwhile neoconservatives, such as Francis Fukuyama, had joined liberals like Berman in favoring this approach. The talk in Washington and London was of the importance of “soft power.” Interventions by the State Department, the US Agency for International Development, and the National Endowment for Democracy were as important as those by the Pentagon, they argued.59 A year later, military planners at the RAND Corporation released a study that argued for an ideological campaign in which the West’s “good Muslims” would be counterposed against al-Qaeda’s “bad Muslims.” They recommended deriving “lessons from the experience of the Cold War” in order to “develop a ‘road map’ for the construction of moderate and liberal Muslim networks.”60 One of the most influential of the war on terror experts, Marc Sageman, a former CIA operations officer who had been based in Islamabad in the late 1980s, argued around the same time that governments should quietly partner with pro-Western Muslim leaders, advising them on the techniques of “political and cultural influence” in order to “battle for the soul of the community” and win the “hearts and minds of the Muslim community.”61

  In Britain, the newly installed prime minister, Gordon Brown, spoke of the need for a “cultural effort” against “Islamic extremism,” to be fought with the techniques used

  during the cold war in the nineteen-forties, fifties and sixties, when we had to mount a propaganda effort, if you like, to explain to people that our values represented the best of commitments to individual dignity, to liberty, and to human life.62

  Senior civil servants had been studying Frances Stonor Saunders’s book The Cultural Cold War, which examined the covert battle of ideas waged by the CIA and British Foreign Office to discredit communism in the postwar literary world.63 Rather than read her study as the critical account she intended, they adopted it as a manual.64 This methodology was presented on both sides of the Atlantic as the progressive and smart alternative to fighting an overly militarized war on terror. The war of ideas could not substitute for actual military force, but it was necessary and complementary.

  Another strand of reformist thinking drew on the cold war tradition of counterinsurgency theory, which is where the phrase “hearts and minds” had its origins. It had reportedly first been used by the British general Sir Gerald Templer to describe the counterinsurgency strategy he deployed during the so-called Malaya Emergency of 1948 to 1960. Counterinsurgency theorists’ founding principle was the need to isolate insurgents from the wider base of potential support among the population. The methods they recommended to achieve this included soft power (political measures, such as propaganda) as well as hard power (military force and coercive policing). What they considered essential for success was a coordinated government machinery that could act strategically across the military, political, judicial, and social spheres; emergency legal powers; an effective, integrated nationwide intelligence organization able to build up detailed information on the insurgents as well as the population the insurgents were trying to win over; and a communications strategy to address grievances and win popular support. In seeking to defeat communist guerrillas fighting against colonial rule in Malaya, the British army recognized that the insurgency’s strength was the political support it was able to attract among the population. Various techniques were deployed in response to try to isolate the population from the guerrillas: the forced resettlement of half a million people; mass arrests; the death penalty for carrying arms; detention without trial; censorship; arson attacks against the homes of communist sympathizers; collective punishment; and massacres of unarmed civilians. This bloody record was hardly likely to win over the population. Nevertheless, conquering hearts and minds came to signify an approach in which military force was subsumed within a wider political strategy. In the end, British colonialism was defeated in Malaya, but not before the communist insurgency had been sufficiently weakened for other political forces to assume power upon independence. Following the US defeat in its war against the Vietnamese communists, many military planners considered the Malaya model a superior alternative.65

  The counterinsurgency techniques that had been tested in other British colonial territories were further refined during the conflict in Northern Ireland, in a context where democratic institutions had to be accorded greater respect. Less emphasis was placed on the use of the British army than in Malaya and more on emergency policing and a rigged judicial process, which involved no-jury courts and confessions extracted under duress. But the key objective remained the isolation of insurgents from their base of potential support through a coordinated military, political, judicial, and communications strategy.

  By 2005, a number of influential military thinkers in the US and the UK, such as David J. Kilcullen (who worked for the US Department of Defense beginning in 2004 and helped the Pentagon rethink the war on terror after Donald Rumsfeld’s departure as defense secretary) and John Mackinlay (a fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and the Department of War Studies of King’s College, London, both of which are closely linked to the Ministry of Defence), were arguing that the war on terror was failing because it did not include the lessons of counterinsurgency theory. They claimed that winning the ideological allegiance of Muslims around the world—the prize in a battle of ideas, or an information war—was as important as killing or capturing terrorists. Success, Mackinlay said, as with the anticommunist counterinsurgencies fought during the cold war, “lies in having a genuine political counter strategy and being able to co-ordinate a campaign that embraces all the organs of the state.”66 In his influential 2005 article for the Journal of Strategic Studies, Kilcullen redefined the war on terror as a global counterinsurgency in which the emphasis should be on the disaggregation of “local players” from “global sponsors” by discrediting the latter’s ideological authority, winning the hearts and minds of target populations, “countering Islamist propaganda” with a counterextremist political narrative, creating alter
native institutions, engaging influential community leaders as allies, amassing information on Muslim populations to an anthropological level of detail, and seeking to effectively manage grievances and other drivers of popular support for the insurgents.67 Given the global nature of the insurgency, such a strategy was thought to be needed as much in Bradford as in Basra.

  The US rediscovery of counterinsurgency theory came at a moment of crisis in its war on terror. In Iraq and Afghanistan it became clear that the US was fighting colonial wars in all but name. The US military found counterinsurgency theory a way of connecting with a longer European tradition of colonial warfare that promised victory through the smarter application of power. These ideas were reflected in the influential US Army and Marine Corps’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published in 2006, which was key to restoring the war on terror’s legitimacy, particularly among a section of liberal critics. The cult of General David Petraeus rested largely on his associating himself with such ideas and presenting them as an alternative “intellectual” strategy for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan: the “graduate level of war,” as the army’s counterinsurgency manual described it.68 Winning, he argued, meant fighting a political battle of ideas as well as a military battle of physical force. US forces would need officers who were as good at mounting a political defense of “the virtues of market-based economics” as they were at directing military campaigns.69

  To a compliant US media, Petraeus appeared as the savior of the war on terror who would channel the lessons learned not only from twentieth-century European counterinsurgency campaigns, but also from US colonial wars in Indo-China, the Caribbean, and Latin America. (As a graduate student at Princeton he had written a paper entitled, “The Invasion of Grenada: Illegal, Immoral, and the Right Thing to Do.”)70 A series of articles in Time magazine by Joe Klein, with titles such as “The Return of the Good Soldier” and “David Petraeus’ Brilliant Career,” described the general as the “exemplar of the creative new thinking” that would transform the US military “from a blunt instrument, designed to fight tank battles on the plains of Europe, into a ‘learning institution’ that trains its troops for the flexibility and creativity necessary to fight guerrilla wars in the information age.”71 Klein’s account presented the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan as engaged in a kind of benign educational exercise whose main aim was to understand local cultures. The reality of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, masterminded by Petraeus, was that it achieved a form of pacification through entrenching sectarian divisions, sponsoring local militias, and disempowering populations. Later, as director of the CIA, Petraeus became “one of the most experienced operators of and thinkers on lethal drones for targeted killing.”72 The proponents of US counterinsurgency strategy, like British colonial planners who, with a strategy of “define and rule,” constructed their subject populations as a multitude of “tribes,” started from the assumption that tribes were the basic unit of Iraqi society.73 The political component of counterinsurgency meant in practice reducing local political structures to a mosaic of tribes whose leaders could be bought off to suit military and political exigencies. Ethnographic knowledge of these tribal structures was therefore essential. For Kilcullen, counterinsurgency is “armed social science.” Clever manipulation of local culture was thought essential to defeating insurgencies.74 In 2007, a US military program known as Human Terrain Systems was introduced; it sought to embed anthropologists and social scientists with combat units, using them to develop knowledge of local cultures in order to engineer the “trust of the indigenous population.”75 As in Malaya, the application of counterinsurgency techniques in Iraq and Afghanistan brought with it large-scale programs of torture and targeted killings (often carried out by private military contractors) of those thought to be members of oppositional tribes. Meanwhile, US journalists reporting on the war on terror increasingly referenced the tribal codes prevalent among Arabs and in the region US military planners dubbed “AfPak,” recalling Orientalist fantasies of the past. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, for example, regularly bemoaned the “oft-warring Arab tribes” who could only be disciplined by an “iron-fisted leader” or the presence of “150,000 US soldiers to referee”—as if the US occupation of Iraq was the solution to Iraqi violence rather than its cause.76 As we shall see in later chapters, these tropes also found their way back to the domestic national security apparatus and shaped the FBI’s approach to countering homegrown Muslim radicalization.

  With President Obama, the emphasis on winning hearts and minds came fully to the fore. His speech in Cairo in 2009, addressed to “Muslims around the world,” rested on the assumption that multicultural recognition of mainstream Islam could win over moderate Muslims and help isolate and defeat extremism. At the same time, Obama sought to rebuild partnerships with governments in the Middle East that had been undermined by neoconservative unilateralism, and which would be needed in a global antiextremist campaign of soft power. Unilateralist talk of exporting democracy had already reverted to a more conventional, pragmatic approach in the last two years of the Bush administration, following Hamas’s election to the Palestinian Authority in 2006 and Hezbollah’s success in elections in Lebanon around the same time. Obama continued this trend by shoring up international alliances with autocratic regimes and outsourcing security to regional clients. As he pointed out: “The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan.”77 What was new was a belief that, alongside the hard power of US military violence, cultural recognition of Islam could play a soft power role in reducing Muslim opposition to American foreign policy.

  The Home Front

  The reformists’ emphasis on opening a cultural front went hand in hand with a turning inward of the terror war to the domestic sphere. Commentators and policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic had begun to focus heavily on the perceived threat from Europe’s Muslim communities; in contrast, American Muslims were counterposed as embodying a story of successful assimilation. In late 2005, Francis Fukuyama warned that European Muslims were as serious a threat to the US as Muslims in the Middle East. Europe’s multiculturalist policies had failed to assimilate the Muslim population, he argued.78 He went on to comment: “Europe’s failure to better integrate its Muslims is a ticking time bomb that has already contributed to terrorism.”79 Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center and the Brookings Institution wrote in Foreign Affairs of Europe’s “angry Muslims, [who were] distinct, cohesive, and bitter [and] eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.”80 Marc Sageman wrote in 2008 that the “individuals we should fear most” are “homegrown wannabes—self-recruited, without leadership, and globally connected through the Internet,” mostly living in Europe, whose “lack of structure and organizing principles makes them even more terrifying and volatile than their terrorist forebears.”81 In what has become a familiar ideological maneuver in the war on terror, attributes that would normally be considered reasons to downplay a threat (the absence of competent training by a terrorist organization or direct access to an experienced leadership) were themselves taken as evidence of an even greater threat. The question of how Muslims in Europe could be brought to identify more closely with European nation-states became a hot topic in Washington national security circles.

  The answer from policy-minded reformists on both sides of the Atlantic had three parts. First, unlike the culturalists, whose outlook led to an alienation of Muslims from national life, the reformists wanted a mainstream Islam to be recognized in Europe as a valid identity within an official discourse of cultural tolerance. This would, it was thought, facilitate political assimilation. They argued that European governments needed to foster moderate Muslim leadership within their own nations that, in partnership with the state, could promote acceptable ways to be Muslim and publicly speak out against extremism. The liberal commentator Timothy Garton Ash, whose reputation had been establi
shed through his reporting on Eastern European dissidents in the 1980s, became a major advocate for a reformist agenda that involved searching for what he called the “dissidents within Islam.”82 Europe’s Muslims were presented as balanced on a knife edge between good citizenship and terrorism:

  An invisible front line runs through the quiet streets of many a European city. Like it or not, whether you live in London or Oxford, Berlin or Neu-Ulm, Madrid or Rotterdam, you are on that front line—much more than you ever were during the cold war … The larger part of this struggle … is the battle for the hearts and minds of young European Muslims—usually men—who are not yet fanatical violent jihadists, but could become so. All over our continent, and around its edges, there are hundreds of thousands of young Muslim men who could go either way. They could become tomorrow’s bombers; or they could become good citizens, funders of our faltering state pension schemes, tomorrow’s Europeans.83