ISIS
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For the Syrian opposition, the Assad regime and ISIS are two sides of the same coin, but with Assad being “the head of the snake” and ISIS merely “the tail.” The U.S.-led coalition’s failure to target the regime is therefore perceived as tantamount to a hostile act against the revolution. Moreover, while surprising to outsiders, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra is still to this day perceived by many as an invaluable actor in the fight against Damascus and as such, the strikes on its positions are seen by many as evidence of U.S. interests being contrary to the revolution. Although this perception may be subtly changing, with one Syrian Salafist commander admitting that “Nusra is going down the wrong path,” the strike on a headquarters of Syrian group Ahrar al-Sham late on November 5—confirmed to me by multiple Syrian and international sources—consolidated this impression that U.S. interests have diverged from those of Syria’s revolution.14
Even if Western voters could be convinced to support a full-scale invasion to remove Assad, what would happen in the ensuing vacuum? The cautionary tales of Iraq and Libya loom large. In the words of Lieutenant General Daniel P. Bolger (ret.), who served as a senior commander in Iraq:
The surge in Iraq did not “win” anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans’ unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today’s stalemate. Like a handful of aspirin gobbled by a fevered patient, the surge cooled the symptoms. But the underlying disease didn’t go away. The remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents we battled for more than eight years simply re-emerged this year as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. . . .
We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn’t understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We’re made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam. As a general, I got it wrong. . . .
Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren’t enough, we’re told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we’re there.15
General Bolger argues that we would have needed to occupy Iraq for three decades to create a viable state, echoing similar arguments made at the time by both Jim Webb and then Secretary of State Powell.16 The problem is that if we’re not prepared for a thirty-year occupation, we cannot create a viable state in Syria, and even that level of commitment comes with no guarantee of success. And if there is anything we ought to have learned from our mistakes in both Iraq and Libya, a failed state is the worst of all possible outcomes.
On August 14, 2014, Haider al Abadi took over from Nouri al Maliki as prime minister of Iraq. He faces a daunting task in stemming the chaos and healing a society profoundly riven by ethnic and religious strife, a fire that rekindled under Maliki and has been stoked continually since by ISIS.
We wish him well, but we do not—and should not—necessarily expect that the post–World War II boundaries of the Middle East will remain intact. The devolution of powers to the regions, with a limited central government, may be, as Leslie Gelb has long argued, the only policy glue that will prevent the outright breakup of Iraq.17 Gelb has proposed that Sunni, Kurdish, and Shi’ite regions each be responsible for their own domestic laws and internal security. To some extent, this is a fait accompli for the Kurds.
“The Middle East is clearly in one of those pivotal moments,” said General David Petraeus in July. “We’re in a period of history where the organizing principles, the lines on the map drawn by British and French diplomats early last century, are being erased.”18
How can we stop this carnage, without inadvertently assisting ISIS, Assad, or both? If a military operation only serves to create more insurgents than it takes out, it is not a useful operation. If we cannot practically impose a political and military solution on the region, we can at least learn from our past mistakes.
Instead of smashing ISIS in the same way we approached al Qaeda, Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute proposes, we should consider “letting them rot,” in some ways the modern equivalent of a medieval siege.19 The rot may already be setting in. Reports in December indicated that ISIS’s capitals in Iraq and Syria, Mosul and Raqqa respectively, are suffering under dramatically deteriorated living conditions.20
Rather than trying to displace ISIS with an external force, we should consider efforts to cut off its ability to move fighters, propaganda, and money in and out of the regions it controls, weakening its ability to use brute force and extreme violence to keep the local population in check. It would also force ISIS to fail based on its own actions instead of being displaced by outsiders, which would do much over the long run to discredit future efforts at jihadist nation building. Such a strategy would have to be probed for its own pitfalls and weighed against the moral conundrums it presents, especially as it pertains to the human costs that ISIS could impose on the population in the areas it controls. Targeted military action may be able to inhibit ISIS’s ability to carry out genocide with impunity, but it will not entirely remove that ability. Our military approach will unavoidably need to evolve along with the situation on the ground.
THE EXTREMIST MIND
Fundamentalists see religious texts as inerrant guides to life. But even for those who see scripture as the literal word of God, the people who read it and interpret it are human and fallible, a concept fundamentalists are often unable to conceptualize as it applies to themselves, although they happily apply it to others.
This is not particular to ISIS or to jihadists; it applies to many violent fundamentalists across a range of ideologies, whom we have spoken with and studied. Readers bring their prejudices and pain to religious texts.
Salafism, like all fundamentalisms, is a response to the pain of modernity. Karen Armstrong, a former nun, has studied fundamentalism across different religions. She observes:
Fundamentalist movements in all faiths . . . reveal a deep disappointment and disenchantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. They also express real fear. Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied is convinced that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out.21
What seems to be most appealing about violent fundamentalist groups—whatever combination of reasons an individual may cite for joining—is the simplification of life and thought. Good and evil are brought out in stark relief. Life is transformed through action. Martyrdom—the supreme act of heroism and worship—provides the ultimate relief from life’s dilemmas, especially for individuals who feel deeply alienated and confused, humiliated, or desperate.
Although ISIS, like many fundamentalist groups, claims to be practicing the religion in its purest, most original form, this represents a longing, not a reality.
Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist and researcher, has studied the role of complexity in conflict, including how it plays into extremist narratives. His work and that of others supports our own observation that violent extremist messaging and narratives are less complex than similar messages from nonviolent movements, stripping narratives down to their bare essentials with little qualification or elaboration. (His research compared al Qaeda and AQAP messaging to that of nonviolent Islamists.)22
Integrative complexity, defined by Suedfeld as being able to examine problems from different perspectives and make cognitive connections drawing on those different perspectives, is not the same thing as intelligence. Extremists are sometimes exceptionally intelligent. Rather, it applies to flexibility of thought and the ability to see things from someone else’s point of view. Studies have fou
nd that integrative complexity and empathy are closely correlated, with empathy being the emotional equivalent of the cognitive process.23 Research by Jose Liht and Sara Savage of the University of Cambridge suggests that it is possible to promote integrative complexity among people vulnerable to extremist radicalization.24
This suggests two possible avenues for countering the appeal of ISIS and groups like it. First, we can attempt to continually reinforce messages that flesh out the nuance and complexity of the situations and conditions that extremists use to recruit, undermining the incorrect thesis that the problems faced by communities vulnerable to radicalization are easily reduced to absolutes.
In practice, this means refusing to characterize our conflict with ISIS in stark, ideological terms, an uphill battle in the current media and political climate, which tends to incentivize simple explanations. It is further complicated when ISIS theatricalizes dreaded risks such as beheadings to evoke a stripped-down primal response. In many ways, The Management of Savagery outlines a specific psychological campaign designed to provoke enemies into the same simplistic thinking that dominates jihadist thought—al Naji refers to the process as “polarization,” and that is why those who argue that ISIS’s public displays of brutality will backfire are wrong (up to a point). The object of ISIS’s extreme displays of violence is to polarize viewers into sharply divided camps of good and evil, not to rally the general public around its actions.
The second prescription follows from the first. Our policies must not lend credence and support to ISIS’s simplistic and apocalyptic worldview. When ISIS began beheading Westerners on video in September 2014, it did so with the intention of prodding the United States into an ever-deeper engagement in Iraq, consistent with the blueprint in The Management of Savagery. ISIS made its intentions even clearer with the November video announcing the execution of hostage Abdul-Rahman (Peter) Kassig.
“We bury the first crusader in Dabiq, eagerly awaiting the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said “Jihadi John,” the anonymous executioner, in the conclusion of that video.25 It was a transparent ploy to goad the West into a military confrontation in Dabiq, in fulfillment of a key apocalyptic prophecy to which ISIS has alluded again and again. If we take the bait, we arm ISIS with evidence that the end of the world—the ultimate moment of simplification—is indeed at hand. Aggressive military action by Shi’a militias, whether Iraqi or Iranian, also contributes to the apocalyptic narrative and plays into ISIS’s desire for a simple, Manichean divide between good and evil, actualizing its narrative of an all-consuming battle between true believers and apostates.
One arena where we can fight the battle for nuance, however, is on the messaging front, the beating heart of ISIS’s campaign to reduce the world’s complexities to fit its black-and-white narrative. ISIS has devoted unprecedented resources to its messaging, and the West has thus far failed to craft a cohesive and comprehensive response.
MESSAGE DISTRIBUTION
For the first decade of its life, al Qaeda was publicity-shy. For the first five years of its existence, barely a handful of people in the U.S. government even knew its name.
ISIS, in contrast, is a publicity whore. While it is extremely important to keep its propaganda and social media activities in the proper perspective—no one was ever killed by a tweet—it’s clear that ISIS considers messaging one of the most important fronts in its war with the world, and it’s also the primary method by which ISIS extends its influence outside its physical domain. Western efforts to counter ISIS must account for both the content and distribution of its message.
As the discussion of social media in Chapters 6 and 7 suggests, there is a robust debate about how to handle terrorist use of social media in general. The problem lies at the center of an uneasy intersection of constituencies—corporations, governments, citizens, and extralegal organizations.
All media is social, but mass social media is a relatively new development in society. Throughout the twentieth century, there was a sharp distinction in the use of communications technology—platforms for broadcasting to large audiences were mostly monopolized by governments and corporations, while peer-to-peer communications infrastructure such as the postal service or telephone lines came with relatively clear expectations about privacy. Platforms that fell between these poles—such as anti-Semitic ham radio broadcasts26—had only a limited reach.
Today, social media platforms straddle the line between broadcasting like a television station and communicating peer-to-peer as if by phone. In most countries, neither the laws nor the expectations of the people have fully assimilated the difference.
Users of social media often expect that the same privacy and freedom they enjoy in their living rooms will extend to conversations they broadcast publicly over social media. Governments, generally, deal with social media using laws designed for telephone carriers, which usually exempt corporations from responsibility for how customers use their platforms—as opposed to a television station or even a newspaper, both of which face certain legal liabilities for content they broadcast.
The complexities and future challenges of this intersection go well beyond extremism, but they are particularly acute in that arena, in large part thanks to the aggressive ways in which ISIS has exploited gray areas and cutting-edge techniques for distribution.
The most obvious way that this plays out in the ISIS context is suppression, namely the suspension of social media accounts that distribute extremist content. Debates about how to deal with extremists on social media suffer from a chronic framing problem. Advocates of free speech see it as a censorship issue, as do some social media companies.
But most Western definitions of free speech do not include the right to unrestricted use of broadcasting platforms. There was little controversy in 2006 when the U.S. government designated Hezbollah’s Beirut-based Al-Manar television station as a terrorist entity.27 If al Qaeda Central set up a newspaper office in Manhattan, few would step forward to argue it should be allowed to run its presses.
But when ISIS broadcasts unsolicited beheading videos to thousands from Syria using the infrastructure of a company based in San Francisco, some free speech advocates object to any effort to suppress that activity—whether led by government or by social media companies themselves.28
As noted in Chapters 5 and 7, the same objections are rarely voiced when it comes to other crimes, such as posting child pornography on YouTube or hiring contract killers on Craigslist. While it is certainly true that ISIS is engaging in a form of political speech, its content also exceeds the bounds of the contract every user agrees to when he or she signs up for the service. Each social media platform sets terms of service for its users. When a company denies a user access to its platform for violating those terms, it’s not exactly censorship. Or is it? Everyone participating in new technologies is engaged in a process of exploring these questions and defining the debate.
With concessions to the complexity of all of these considerations, it seems to us uncontroversial that ISIS’s social media activity should—at a minimum—be subject to the same restrictions as any other antisocial user, especially when it commits violations that would put a nonterrorist user in danger of suspension, such as deploying spambots or threatening violence. While we believe additional study is necessary to fully evaluate the impact of such suppression techniques, the early data is very encouraging and ISIS supporters online certainly believe that suspensions degrade their ability to accomplish their terroristic goals.
That said, it is not so easy to implement a policy of suppression. Social media platforms are run by multinational corporations, not by any individual government, and they must navigate a bewildering morass of laws and regional customs in determining both their legal responsibilities and their ethical stands.
The problem of devising a consistent response is also complicated by a lack of transparency from both governments and companies, with the United States and Twitter as highly visible offenders. It is clear from Twi
tter’s transparency reports that some accounts are suspended (or allowed to remain online) due to secret government requests. But Twitter’s steadfast refusal to discuss details of its suspension polices—a tactic likely indicating its desire to make suspension decisions on an ad hoc basis—is also an obstacle to transparency and to open airing of the issues involved.
Despite these complications, ISIS has chosen to fight much of its battle with the West on social media. Through a combination of public infrastructure and private companies, the West effectively owns this battlefield, and our failure to control ISIS’s messaging is a direct result of our failure to understand and act on that fact. Never before has there been a war where one side controlled the operating environment. Our power over the Internet is the equivalent of being able to control the weather in a ground war—it is not a complete solution, but it should offer an overwhelming advantage if used correctly.
There is a legitimate intelligence interest in allowing extremists to use social media up to a point, and equally legitimate concerns about allowing them to openly radicalize new followers without interference. It is not difficult to see that some balance between these competing interests is desirable. The best outcome for policy makers is an environment that hinders extremists’ efforts without forcing them to abandon social media entirely. The current environment on Twitter is arguably approaching that ideal, which allows Internet service providers to accommodate some of their also-legitimate concerns about censorship and free speech.