Countering violent extremism

Remember when we were quickly and easily going to defeat Al Qaeda and prevent future terrorist attacks because we would have wiped terrorists from the planet?  As the years since 9/11 have shown, countering terrorism is much more like fighting an idea than a card-carrying, finite military force.  Over the last two years, the Obama administration has begun to adapt its approach to include the war of ideas in parallel to the kinetic war still going on in Iraq and Syria.  But will it last through the next presidency and become our new way of conducting diplomacy?

Diplomacy has long been an attempt to keep the lines of communication between nation-states open, not to engage local communities to create lasting partnerships.  Many of these new ways of thinking about how we engage abroad to reduce terrorism have been a long time coming, and most will not be implemented until a new president is in office.  As Congress considers next year’s authorizations and appropriations, it will have to act soon to get funding in place to catalyze efforts that to-date have comprised rhetoric that has outpaced action.

{mosads}In the years after 9/11, America responded with strength in military and law enforcement tools.  In parallel to that, limited digital communications sought to reduce the potential for tension by communicating to the Muslim world that America shared its values and that many Americans are Muslims.  The initiatives were relatively basic, and not a high priority within the larger counterterrorism strategy.  Then, with his speech in Cairo early in his Administration, President Obama expressed the need for partnership and understanding, rather than suspicion between Americans and majority-Muslim countries.

In this administration, the U.S. began increasing approaches to reduce radicalization and recruitment to terrorist causes.  In 2011, the government released its first strategy on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) – so-named because counterterrorism presumes that the target of efforts is already a terrorist, and therefore already a criminal or threat, whereas CVE addresses the ideology of violent extremism.  In this way, CVE is the prevention model, the initiatives for which might be messaging to prevent impressionable individuals taking on a violent extremist ideology, economic development, or community engagement; intervening with an individual who has already taken on the ideology to provide them with counseling; or to rehabilitate those who have served time for terrorism offenses and reintegrate them into society.

Our current investment in these mechanisms is relatively small, but it’s there – and it has the potential to become a tool prioritized similarly to harder security practices.

The fall of Mosul in June 2014 awakened terrorism-watchers everywhere to the idea that our post-9/11 struggle is not a finite fight against Al Qaeda, and not one that military or law enforcement on their own can defeat.  The U.S. had been countering terrorists’ messages online, providing development programs overseas, and holding roundtables here at home to open lines of communications between security organizations and local communities.  Valiant efforts for sure, but as ISIL created a caliphate that has attracted approximately 36,500 foreign fighters from 120 countries, inspired several attacks globally, and created an online apparatus to spread its message while perfecting horrific click-bait – our efforts, quite rapidly, became out of date and too small.

Last year, the president held a CVE Summit to encourage global prevention activities.  The product of the Summit was another Summit, whose product was… another Summit (and so on).  Meanwhile, the overall level of effort for prevention activities moderately increased, but did not fundamentally change.  Then late last year, the Administration announced a new office at DHS to expand “community partnerships” and then more recently that there will be an interagency “task force” to address the issue.  At the same time, President Obama sent several high-level officials to engage with Silicon Valley to explore partnership opportunities to counter online radicalization (among other issues), and expanded and revised the online messaging effort.  More recently, the State Department revealed that it will change the name of its bureau dealing with terrorism issues and increase its CVE efforts.  Then more recently, the President book-ended the Cairo speech at the beginning of his presidency with one at a mosque here in the U.S., issuing a call for inter-faith unity and assuring Muslim-Americans that they are part of the fabric of America.

Overall, these announcements are beginning that lay a foundation, but they’re not yet an accomplishment.  Only six percent of funding related to terrorism goes to our diplomatic and development communities, and only 7.5 percent of that funding is used for CVE.  We still need more people in our embassies with CVE expertise and focused on engaging local communities.  The CVE community also needs to better assess what is working and what has been ineffective, reaching out to related industries like the human rights and development communities to learn from them.  And mostly, there just needs to be more of this work.  But with each additional program, and each effort to increase programs’ quality, costs go up considerably.

Our diplomatic and development infrastructures were set up to prevent state-to-state conflict, and are still struggling to engage at the community-level and understand terrorism issues.  The threat of terrorism is not going away: ISIL has set up global franchises and inspires lone wolf attacks, and Al Qaeda and Boko Haram are far from defeated.  Congress has the opportunity with its upcoming budget process to lock in these types of initiatives for the first year of the next president’s administration; they can increase the overall funding and authorities for the State Department and USAID, or create opportunities for the Department of Defense to transfer funding to diplomatic and development counterparts.  However, winning the war of ideas and preventing future recruits has hardly been on the front-burner for the presidential candidates, so longer-term CVE’s fate remains uncertain.  If it is embraced and funded appropriately, it may well pave the way to a new era of diplomacy and development and stem the tide of worrying radicalization trends.

Greer is a consultant and a fellow with the Truman National Security Project. He served as the policy advisor for Foreign Fighters at the U.S. Department of State, and previously served on the White House National Security Council and on staff for two members of Congress.