ISIS

by Jessica Stern

  The hindrance model discourages casual engagement with extremism on social media by increasing the cost of participation and reducing the reach of radicalizers. This yields benefits both in the realm of countering violent extremism, by shrinking the pool of available recruits, and in intelligence work, by removing some of the noise that is created by people who are only lightly engaged with ISIS’s ideology.

  We recommend that a conference be dedicated to airing these issues publicly, with participants from both the public and private sector, with an eye toward establishing some consistent, reasonable practices and clearly defining areas that require more study or the resolution of more complicated questions.

  HOW TO DEAL WITH ISIS’S MESSAGE CONTENT

  Governments around the world have invested considerable funds under the heading of countering violent extremism (CVE), which can be loosely defined as the use of tools other than killing and incarceration to combat terrorist and extremist groups.

  These initiatives take a wide variety of forms—too wide, as most practitioners would agree. After September 11, vast pools of money became available for CVE, which resulted in many people repurposing their pet projects under that heading.

  On top of that, well-intentioned efforts at community building have been generously funded as CVE despite a near-total lack of evidence that they actually prevent violent extremism in any meaningful way—town halls and soccer leagues, as the joke in the practitioner community goes. Similar dynamics apply on the grand stage of world politics, where nation-building exercises such as foreign aid, jobs programs, education initiatives, and democratic reforms are taken on faith as ways to inoculate countries and regions against violent extremism. The fact that Germany and the United Kingdom each appear to have provided more foreign fighters to ISIS than Somalia should call some of those assumptions into question.

  While there is arguably little downside in trying to do good works for communities and nations, there is a risk that promoting such projects as CVE will result in a future consensus that CVE as a general idea does not and cannot work, or worse, that it is simply a budgetary boondoggle for funding pet projects.

  There are many challenges in demonstrating that “positive” CVE initiatives work, but we can see very clearly the tools that ISIS uses to radicalize potential recruits and recruit those who are already radicalized. Rather than spending our resources on uncertain and potentially wasteful wagers on nation building, the more obvious course is to thoroughly catalog what ISIS is doing to achieve its goals and disrupt both its distribution, as discussed above, and the integrity of its messaging content.

  The State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications has worked to do this on Twitter by mocking and discrediting ISIS messaging and challenging ISIS supporters directly, both in Arabic and English. The initiative has received decidedly mixed reviews from many analysts.29 We believe it is a step in the right direction, albeit one that can be refined and improved.

  The ISIS propaganda machine is a calculated affair. It has five major goals, all of which involve an effort to simplify the complexity of the real world into a cartoonish battle between good and evil:

  •To project an image of strength and victory.

  •To excite those with violent tendencies by pairing extreme violence with a moral justification in the form of its alleged utopian society.

  •To manipulate the perceptions of ordinary citizens in its enemies’ lands to incite demand for military action, while at the same time planting doubt that such action can succeed.

  •To place the blame for any conflict that does result on the aggression of Western governments and the incitement of “Zionists.”

  •To recast any military action against ISIS as an action against Muslims in general, specifically by highlighting civilian casualties.

  Each of these goals is vulnerable to a messaging counteroffensive, but some Western messaging reinforces ISIS’s goals—such as news stories repeatedly describing ISIS videos as “terrifying” or overstated descriptions of the threat the organization presents. Such statements are an effort to combat ISIS’s message with a similarly (not equally) simplified narrative, and they ultimately serve to reinforce ISIS’s goal of framing its place in the world as part of a cosmic battle between pure good and pure evil.

  Therefore a first step in countering ISIS is to put it in perspective. We should not downplay its threat below a realistic level—that only sets up future hysteria by creating unrealistic expectations. But neither should we inflate it.

  ISIS relies on its projection of strength and the illusion of utopian domestic tranquility. Even under the coalition assault, it has labored to maintain its aura of invincibility and defiance. Changing conditions on the ground could cause ISIS to shift its message focus, which would offer a powerful opportunity for countermessaging. But regardless of whether that happens, the West should use every tool available to counter ISIS’s stage-managed illusions with the harsh reality.

  When Western policy makers discuss “degrading” ISIS, it should be in the context of forcing ISIS to make visible concessions in order to counter military pressure. Strikes designed to degrade the group’s real internal strength are good, but our targeting priorities should also aim to expose vulnerabilities.

  While we can make some progress amplifying the stories of defectors and refugees from areas ISIS controls, we can make even more by fully exploiting aerial and electronic surveillance and remote imaging to show what really happens in the belly of the beast.

  We should pay particular attention to documenting war crimes and atrocities against Sunni Muslims in regions controlled by ISIS. It is patently obvious that ISIS has no qualms about advertising its war crimes against certain classes of people—Shi’a Muslims primarily, and religious minorities such as the Yazidis.

  To simply highlight ISIS’s barbarity is inadequate to undercut its messaging goals; in many cases, it accomplishes them. There is no doubt that ISIS wants to send a message about its harsh treatment of enemies. Amplifying the very messages the group wishes may resonate with an audience that already opposes ISIS, but it may further energize those who are vulnerable to its radicalizing influence.

  While ISIS does not completely suppress information about its massacres against uncooperative Sunni tribes in the region, neither does it highlight them. And such stories have impact. In August, global jihadists on social media were enraged by an ISIS massacre of hundreds of Sunni tribesmen. By documenting such crimes, we can make a significant impact on how ISIS is perceived by those most susceptible to its ideology.30

  We can also degrade the perception of ISIS’s strength and its claims of victory by revealing its failures, particularly within its borders, such as incidents in which local people rise up against its control, failure of infrastructure, corruption, poverty, or other forms of domestic disintegration. The sources-and-methods trade-off will certainly favor disclosure in at least some of these cases.

  Finally, we can offset ISIS messaging priorities by refusing to play into its apocalyptic narrative. As seen in Chapter 10, ISIS wants to enact specific prophecies regarding the end times, such as a victorious confrontation with the “crusaders” in the town of Dabiq. Our policies and military actions should not rise to the bait. For both military and messaging purposes, it is foolhardy to show up at the exact place and time that an enemy most desires. Whatever ambush lies in wait at Dabiq, let it rot there unfulfilled.

  AGAINST ISIS OR FOR SOMETHING?

  Finally, we would raise the question of what we are fighting for.

  In the years since September 11, the West in general and the United States in particular have embraced a “war on terrorism” without stated limits. In the name of that war, or as an unintended consequence of its policies, we have vastly increased surveillance authorities, militarized domestic police forces, and used air strikes and drones to dispatch lethal force virtually anywhere that al Qaeda operates. Many of these actions have been taken in respons
e to fear.

  Osama bin Laden once said, “All that we have to do is to send two mujahideen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there.”31 ISIS has exploited this tendency, in part following the blueprint in The Management of Savagery and in part to serve its apocalyptic dream of a confrontation with the “Crusaders” in Dabiq.

  We must find better ways to balance our security against common sense and widely accepted ethical principles. That means refusing to rush into war every time we are invited by someone waving a black flag, but it also means taking a closer look at our strategies and tactics, and asking how they can better reflect our values. In the conflict with ISIS, messaging and image are half the battle, and we do ourselves no favors when we refuse to discuss the negative consequences of our actions.

  We must be involved in a visible process of continually evaluating and improving the way we conduct war, asking if our responses are not only proportionate and economically responsible, but ethical. For instance, the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Clint Watts has tried to tackle this challenge as it pertains to drones, arguing for a judicial process similar to that currently used by the FISA court, an idea we endorse.32

  In December 2014, the release of a Senate report on the use of torture by the United States after September 11 provoked a national debate on the morality of our tactics to fight terrorism. Beyond the argument over the results produced by such techniques lies a fundamental question of values and our standing in the world. The use of torture helps validate jihadist claims about the immorality and hypocrisy of the West. We must not fight violent extremism by becoming the brutal enemy that jihadists want. While painful, the process of publicly disclosing and confronting such incidents is, as David Rothkopf argues in Foreign Policy, “very American”33 in its transparency, which, in our view, is something to embrace.

  We should be seen, constantly, as balancing the scales of justice and individual freedom rather than letting the weight of groups like al Qaeda and ISIS constantly drag us toward an irrevocable mandate for more action, more compromise, and less concern for innocent people caught in the crossfire.

  “The Second Coming,” a poem by W. B. Yeats, is often quoted (maybe too often), because it feels so relevant to many modern situations. But its apocalyptic tone and cutting observations could have been written for the challenge of ISIS.

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  The dilemma of Syria and Iraq finds full-throated expression in the poet’s words, written as a comment on wars and politics nearly one hundred years ago.

  Perhaps these problems are universal in history, relevant again for each generation. Or perhaps they are iterative, situations repeating and refining until the reality of the world is distilled to the razor-sharp essence that the best poetry provides.

  It is hard to imagine a terrible avatar of passionate intensity more purified than ISIS. More than even al Qaeda, the first terror of the twenty-first century, ISIS exists as an outlet for the worst—the most base and horrific impulses of humanity, dressed in fanatic pretexts of religiosity that have been gutted of all nuance and complexity.

  And yet, if we lay claim to the role of “best,” then Yeats condemns us as well, and rightly so. It is difficult to detect a trace of conviction in the world’s attitude toward the Syrian civil war and the events that followed in Iraq. Why do we oppose ISIS and not Assad? There are pragmatic reasons, among them the explicit threat ISIS poses to Western allies and interests in the region, as opposed to the less overt risks to Western allies associated with Assad. But it is difficult to explain the dichotomy between our approaches to each of these villains on the basis of a clear moral imperative. Syria poses a profound dilemma, more so than Rwanda or Bosnia. Our moral impulse is to act on behalf of the Syrian people. But an intervention that simply removes Assad, as the Libyans removed Gadhafi, creates new and different problems for the Syrian people, and these new problems may be even more intractable. Strengthening ISIS would be just one of the possible unintended consequences, but likely the most dangerous—both for the Syrian people and the region.

  In the past, the United States has gone terribly awry in its efforts to promote electoral democracy around the world. ISIS is only the latest example of the failure of democracy promotion, although it may be the starkest.

  One of the goals for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war on terrorism more broadly was to spread democracy, in the belief that “replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope” would “deny the militants future recruits,” in President Bush’s words.34 Democracy promotion—and the claim that it was a critical component of the war on terrorism—became a theme of his presidency. But people in the Middle East were, and remain, deeply skeptical that this was his goal or a U.S. goal more broadly.35

  Thomas Carothers, a leading expert on democracy, characterized the policy dilemma this way: The imperative to degrade terrorist capacities tempts policy makers to put aside democratic scruples and seek closer ties with autocracies willing to join the war on terrorism.

  On the other hand, some policy makers have come to believe that it is precisely the lack of democracy that breeds Islamic extremism in the first place.36 But these policy makers are wrong in imagining that promoting electoral democracy is a panacea against terrorism. Many studies have shown that it clearly is not. Economist Alberto Abadie found that countries with intermediate levels of political freedom are even more vulnerable than those with the highest or lowest levels, which suggests that the transition from authoritarian rule is a particularly dangerous period.37

  Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder warned in 2007, “When authoritarian regimes collapse and countries begin the process of democratization, politicians of all stripes have an incentive to play the nationalist card.”38 This is precisely what happened in Iraq: After the collapse of Saddam’s regime, due to their majority, Shi’a groups had the upper hand. Sunnis felt abandoned and resentful, and were able to mount a fierce insurgency. The elements that led to the violence had not been rectified when U.S. troops left.

  Long before the war on terrorism, Fareed Zakaria warned that constitutional liberalism is not about the procedures of selecting a government, but the government’s goals. “It refers to the tradition, deep in Western history, that seeks to protect an individual’s autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source—state, church, or society.”39 Constitutional liberalism argues that human beings have certain “inalienable” rights, and that governments must accept limitations on their own power.40

  Electoral democracy, which can lead to domination by the most populous ethnic groups, has to be held in check by something like a bill of rights that protects minorities, allows religious freedom, and guarantees freedom of the press. This is the long-term goal for Arab countries, Marwin Muasher argues.41

  King Abdullah of Jordan, who has shown himself to be extraordinarily courageous, argues that fighting ISIS will require the Muslim world to work together. He calls it a “generational fight” and “a third world war by other means.” In the long term, he said, the fight is ideological. As threatening as ISIS is to the West, more than anything else it is an existential threat to Sunni Islam. “This is a Muslim problem. We need to take ownership of this. We need to stand up and say what is right and what is wrong,” he said.42

  Perhaps most important, we must embrace the idea that what we seek is continual progress toward these goals rather than their institution by fiat. Insistence on the latter is the way of dictators, the way of ISIS, of all extremism, and its hypocrisy is self-evident. The West has spent decades trying to impose structures of politics and governance in the Middle East, and the resul
ts sadly speak for themselves.

  This is work that will never be finished; it is a mission to span generations. It requires patience and attention to detail. It requires humility. We in the West must continually ask if we are living up to our own values of human rights and the importance of self-determination, and we must correct our course if we go astray. Like al Qaeda before it, ISIS derives far more strength from our response to its provocation than from the twisted values it promotes.

  APPENDIX*

  Jihadi Salafism is not a monolithic ideology. Despite our sense that movements like al Qaeda and ISIS share a single agenda, there is incredible diversity among such militant groups. On many issues, they simply do not agree: they embrace different religious beliefs and practices, they adopt different standards of conduct in war, and they pursue different strategic objectives. Importantly, these differences often have deep roots and long histories. As a result, making sense of ISIS requires looking at both the past and the present. It requires understanding some of the early history and core components of Islam, tracing the evolution of jihadi Salafism in the twentieth century, and exploring the issues that continue to divide these groups today.

  ISLAM: A (VERY) BRIEF HISTORY

  MUHAMMAD AS A MESSENGER; HIJRA FROM MECCA TO MEDINA

  Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 CE. Orphaned as a young child, he was raised by his paternal uncle and belonged to the powerful Quraysh tribe. He had a relatively unremarkable childhood and early adulthood, but around the age of forty he began to have visions in which he received a series of messages from God. Though initially reluctant to talk about these experiences, he was ultimately persuaded by his wife to share the revelations with his family and community. Muhammad gathered followers slowly, but after a few years he found himself at odds with the people of Mecca since his message—encouraging reform, emphasizing the oneness of God, and declaring polytheism to be sinful—challenged their religious practices and traditions. Growing tensions compelled Muhammad and his followers to leave Mecca and travel to Medina. This move, known as the hijra or migration, marked a turning point as the new community transitioned from an oppressed minority movement to a self-governing religious and political community.1 The years spent in Medina were important ones, and Muhammad used this time to clarify his message, expand his community, and extend his regional influence. He died in 632 having successfully done all three but without having appointed a successor.