The Aardvark's Ten Questions About Combating Violent Extremism

By John Ballard

Mark Lynch poses more questions than answers about how best to confront extremism. His list needs to be widely discussed by both laymen and policy makers. This timely list was published just in time for the tragedy at Ft. Hood to trigger another round of public consideration of the subject. As we hear an avalanche of opinions from sources great and small it might be helpful to consider these questions playing in the background.

The title does not indicate so, but this post eventually addresses yesterday's events at Ft. Hood. Interested readers continue after the break.

1. What replaces the GWOT? There is not yet a clear intellectual frame to replace the unmourned Global War on Terror. I find myself often saying "what used to be called the GWOT." If it isn't GWOT, what is it? "Combating Violent Extremism (CVE)", which appears to still be the term of art, is better -- but also enormously flexible, in a bad way. If CVE includes everything from COIN in Afghanistan to after-school programs in Birmingham, it just might be too broad. And if that mission is defined by CVE, then isn't this just the old GWOT under a new name? The Obama administration's conception of global engagement clearly wants to escape this trap -- helping to promote entrepreneurship, civil society, education economic change, and so on in order to build a new relationship between Muslim populations and America rather than because it will fight terrorism. But this is slippery, since the national security justification often ultimately comes back to terrorism, violent extremism, and those old categories. So I can see how USAID, for instance, can pitch what it is doing as a contribution to CVE. But what then is not CVE?


2. What does the definition of CVE mean for the �whole of government� approach which is all the rage these days? Everyone these days wants to see development agencies, domestic agencies, intelligence, public diplomacy, the State Department, the military and everyone else all integrated into a coherent whole of government approach to problems. But who defines the mission? Since budgets seem likely to remain skewed sharply in the Pentagon's favor for the foreseeable future, that isn't hard to guess. So is this just pressing other agencies into the service of a mission defined by the Pentagon, or does their inclusion actually change the mission? How much progress has been made in restructuring the government, coordinating inter-agency activities, and sorting out responsibilities and authorities? Can the NSC play the leadership role required to balance this out?


3. Is it time to abandon the "war of ideas"? We've spent so much time and effort over the last eight years fretting about how to fight AQ's ideas and how to promote moderate Islam. We should know by now that we (as a government) are really bad at trying to intervene in intra-Muslim debates. Is it necessary? Does it even help? How much? For instance, if the goal is to discredit the use of violence against civilians -- a good goal -- then it may make more sense to try and drive the kind of societal normative change which delegitimized smoking or child pornography (something about which people with a wide range of different ideas can agree) than to try to promote particular religious "ideas". More broadly, the "resistance" which I mentioned above is generally non-ideological, rooted far more in perceived political grievances than in the nuances of Islamist ideology. What may have been useful in delegitimizing a marginal, radical ideology may have little relevance for responding to a mass-based, political, non-ideological oppositional trend. But there are nearly a decade now of organizational competencies, budgets, and constituencies for the "war of ideas" -- which won't soon go away. Are they still playing an appropriate role in the new strategy?


4. Does AQ Central matter? The perennial debate over whether to think about al-Qaeda as a centrally directed organization or as a loosely connected network of like-minded individuals and groups continues. It will not likely be resolved, since there are elements of both going on. But for designing CVE strategy, it clearly does matter whether you think that AQC is the key. So to make this as blunt as possible: would killing bin Laden, Zawahiri, and the remnants of AQC --- which seems more plausible in the coming months and years -- decisively end, or even decisively transform, the nature of the struggle?


5. What to do with non-violent Islamist groups? The argument over how to classify different organizations, movements, and individuals has been going on for years. While the conceptual understanding of intra-Muslim nuance has grown dramatically over the years, it's not clear to me that clear decisions have been made. Are non-violent Islamists useful because they embrace democracy, eschew violence, and compete with AQ for recruits and space, or dangerous because they oppose US foreign policy and spread Islamist identity and ideas? Should they be engaged with as viable partners, tolerated but not engaged, or treated as part of the problem? How much should this vary by local circumstance? It's hard to construct a serious engagement strategy without an answer to this. And, perhaps of more immediate concern: what do we expect will happen if these organizations buckle under the weight of repression or pressure, whether in Gaza or Egypt or Jordan or elsewhere? Would this advance or set back American or Western interests, whether in CVE or more broadly?


6. Can local partners do the job? I hear a lot of talk these days about Western governments partnering with and helping to build up local Muslim groups which can carry on the fight inside their own communities. In general, that sounds good -- though nobody should expect that this can be done covertly without serious backlash risks, and there should be no expectations of control. But I'm also struck by the lessons of democracy promotion and civil society building efforts over the years -- and the limits of all those partnering and capacity building efforts. The CVE folks should learn those hard-learned lessons. In general, there are only a limited number of local partners with the capacity and willingness to deal with Western governments on these issue. They often can't bear the weight assigned to them. They may risk their local credibility by partnering with governments. And they may end up spending more of their time chasing the next government contract than doing the kind of community work which first made them interesting.


7. What about human rights? The GWOT frame tended to encourage a cavalier approach to public freedoms, human rights, and the rule of law in the name of counter-terrorism and security. It is not clear whether the CVE frame makes the same leap. After all, a whole of government, long-term approach to CVE should recognize the importance of legitimate, accountable, and transparent governments which deal respectfully with their citizens. But will that in fact be the case? The way that many Arab governments have achieved "success" has included a lot of torture, arbitrary indefinite arrest, and repression of all sorts. Will a CVE paradigm under Obama go along with this or challenge it?


8. Is this really a "Long War"? We've grown used to thinking of this as a "generational struggle" -- but is it? Does it make more sense to think of this as a transitional [ed. transnational?] moment, in which al-Qaeda and its ideas could be decisively marginalized and rendered politically irrelevant? How would we know if this is a generational or transiational conflict? What kinds of programs, strategies, and resourcing would each require?


9. Where are the crucial zones of CVE? Arguably, the focus is shifting away from Arab heartland -- but to where? Is it the active combat zones (Iraq, Afghanistan) which consume so much of the Pentagon's budget? Is it the ungoverned spaces like Yemen or Somalia? Is it the Muslim communities of Europe? What do each of these demand -- and should they be brought together under the same conceptual framework? And what do we absolutely have to do to avoid the most catastrophic, unacceptable outcomes in each: do we have to bring legitimate governance and health care reform to Yemen? I sure hope not, but if so, where exactly are those resources to come from?


10. And finally -- you knew this was coming: is AfPak central to CVE or marginal? Does its relative importance justify the ever-growing resource commitment? Would maintaining the status quo (as opposed to U.S. withdrawal) render AfPak more marginal or more central? Would escalation render AfPak more marginal or central?

(It makes me feel smug when Firefox reveals typos and misspellings from such an eminent source, but after cleaning up a variety of mistakes in nearly every group of questions, I can't decide if "transiational" in #8 should be transnational or transitional. The context favors transitional, but transnational works in both places as well.)

In any case, nearly every commentary I come across regarding not only this big issue (combating violent extremism) but most everyday questions regarding popular topics is rendered muddy because the speaker or writer fails to clarify underlying suppositions. 

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The aftermath of yesterday's tragedy at Fr. Hood will be another study in stupid comments and muddy thinking, inflamed by misconceptions, ignorance, bigotry and demagoguery. Just watch. 

As Ron already pointed out some logorrhea never ceases. That goes without saying. But as more nuanced analysis bubbles up Mark Lynch's questions deserve consideration. Treating yesterday's events as the unfortunate behavior of just another lone gunman with mental problems, tempting though it may be, is no longer acceptable. It is important to separate events from trends. And my question this morning is: How many events such as this does it take to be recognized as a trend?

Whoever imagines that yesterday's event is unrelated to US foreign policy and our national response to the events of 9/11 is in deep denial. It is bitterly ironic that Major Hasan was an undergraduate of Virginia Tech, scene of another mass killing just two years ago. That event seems was a clear example of the failure of deinstitutionalization, a misguided and sloppily executed national trend that over several decades turned many thousands of mentally deranged patients out of large, often poorly-run hospitals for after-care by local mental health resources most of which never materialized. The result has been the REinstitutionalization of many of those same cases along with new ones in the nation's prisons as well as among the homeless. 

But the case of Major Hasan is clearly different. Early reports indicate that he was deeply opposed to US policies in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And as a first-generation American with Palestinian roots it takes no  fertile imagination to guess his opinions about the Israel-Palestine conflict as well. But his political and social opinions are irrelevant against the greater reality that at some toxic level he was led to externalize those thoughts and opinions in a homicidal rage. 

So my second question this morning is: What are we doing as a people, as policy, as rational human beings, to ameliorate and prevent future tragedies similar to what happened yesterday?

I hope this morning to get ahead of an outpouring of bigotry that will be forthcoming this morning.
My hope is that responsible journalists will handle it responsibly, recognizing and sympathizing with the sources in a way that calmly corrects ignorance with a minimum of insults.

Our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan are Muslim.

Our allies in Arabia are Muslim.

Pakistan, the US ally on the other side of Afghanistan, is predominantly Muslim.

Our children in uniform are dying in defense of Muslims.

We cannot have it both ways. Either Muslims are evil liars and deceivers or there are significant numbers of Muslims who are our friends and deserve to be defended by spilled American blood.

I have seen ugly words and suggestions trotted out before. They are without meaning in the real world of global politics.
And they mean even less in domestic politics which is infested by ignorant people with agendas.

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Three links here for further consideration.

?Preeti Aroon, also from FP, in 2007. A couple nights ago one of the many reports about troop deployment made reference to the fact that this group of soldiers were still children when the World Trade Center was destroyed. Think about it. That not only made me feel older, but our thirty-year-old children also got a wake-up call about aging. As adults we tend to forget the impact of world events on those who were children when those events unfolded.

Emphasis is mine. But in the case of Major Hasan, this piece may have been prescient. At thirty-nine he was a young adult child of the second intifada (see link) on September 11, 2001.

A time bomb of trauma in Iraq

There's a time bomb ticking in Iraq, but it isn't made from chemical explosives. It's made up of traumatized children.

U.S. newspapers have given extensive coverage to the mental health issues faced by U.S. veterans of the Iraq war. Most recently, the New York Times published a lengthy account of women's struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and earlier this month, we blogged about a video-game treatment for traumatized troops.

If grown adults who are in Iraq for just a few deployments suffer such mental health problems, then what about the children there who have grown up surrounded by nothing but war and violence?

A recent CNN report brings attention to these "silent victims." CNN cites a World Health Organization study that found that 30 percent of children surveyed in Mosul, and 10 percent of those surveyed in Baghdad, showed signs of PTSD. Examples of traumatic experiences children have suffered include a fourth-grader whose father and uncle were killed before his very eyes, and a 16-year-old girl who was abducted, raped, and forced to sleep next to a dead body.

Traumatized children grow into very troubled adults. What does that say about the future of Iraq? In the coming decades, it will become a nation run by psychologically damaged people, if the country isn't stabilized soon.

For a preview of what to expect, just look west to the children of the second intifada. Today, they are a nihilistic generation of young adults, filled with little hope and much despair.

The Middle East is filled with demographic time bombs. The latest may be the Iraqi trauma time bomb.

The second link is to a professional site for clinical reference.
A question crying out for attention is whether Major Hasan has a history of explosive outbursts and if so, were they interpreted as problematical or evidence of machismo behavior, traits becoming to warriors in training?

Intermittent Explosive Disorder

Many psychiatric disorders are associated with impulsive aggression, but some individuals demonstrate violent outbursts of rage, which are variously referred to as rage attacks, anger attacks, episodic dyscontrol, or intermittent explosive disorder. Intermittent explosive disorder was first formally conceptualized as a psychiatric disorder.

On several occasions the patient has lost control of aggressive impulses, leading to serious assault or property destruction.

The aggression is markedly out of proportion to the seriousness of any social or psychological stressors.

No other mental disorder or personality disorder better explains the symptoms.

These symptoms are not directly caused by a general medical condition or substance use, including medications and drugs of abuse.

Although the prevalence of intermittent explosive disorder is unknown and considered to be rare, the disorder is probably more common than realized and may be an important cause of violent behavior. As presently defined, intermittent explosive disorder is more common in men. However, women also have problematic impulsive aggression, and some women have reported an increase in intermittent explosive symptoms when they are premenstrual.

Treatment:
These patients often need psychological treatment along with medication treatment, and it is often very helpful to base their psychological treatment on addiction-based models.

And finally,a comment by Fred Clark, one of my favorite observers of human behavior and how high profile events intersect with mythology, secular policies and what sometimes passes for religion.This was written in response to the Virginia Tech killings.

Just awful.

The tragic facts stream through the prism of cable news. The studied somber tones that barely mask the eager excitement over the Big Story. From every outlet, giddy superlatives. "The worst shooting massacre in U.S. history," said The Washington Post, and CNN, and ABC and even NPR.
What is it that makes us need events to be superlative?

The horror of Monday's tragedy is neither enhanced nor diminished by whether or not some other tragic event was quantifiably "worse," so why this insistence on ranking tragedies like some macabre Top-40 countdown?

Partly, I think, it's the lazy trend of quantifying and ranking everything, from box office returns to fallen soldiers. The deadliest day, the biggest opening weekend, the worst massacre.

And partly, I think, it's the desperate need to believe we're special people living in special times, in "the most critical time in the history of the world."

In today's paper, the very same paper in which we reprint the "worst in U.S. history" description, we also preview a lecture tonight at the state university. The speaker will by Larry Colburn, who helped to stop the killing at My Lai. The monument at My Lai bears the names of 504 victims.

That massacre, it seems, does not count in the rankings. Nor does Balangiga, or Marias or Mountain Meadows. And so the rankings, it seems, involve some unspoken qualifications, the unpacking and exploring of which might be fruitful, but not just now.

Just now I don't much care about the ranking of sorrows.

It doesn't matter to anyone whether this was the "worst" event of its kind, it was worse than bad enough. Sorrow, death and tragedy are not a competition. Comparisons may be helpful as an exercise in empathy. But rankings are utterly pointless.