(Ilan Berman, May 8, 2019)
Transcript available below
About the speaker
Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. An expert on regional security in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Russian Federation, he has consulted for both the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Department of Defense, and provided assistance on foreign policy and national security issues to a range of governmental agencies and congressional offices. He has been called one of America’s “leading experts on the Middle East and Iran” by CNN.
Mr. Berman is a member of the Associated Faculty at Missouri State University’s Department of Defense and Strategic Studies. A frequent writer and commentator, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post and USA Today, among many other publications.
Mr. Berman is the editor of four books – Dismantling Tyranny: Transitioning Beyond Totalitarian Regimes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), co-edited with J. Michael Waller Taking on Tehran: Strategies for Confronting the Islamic Republic (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America (Lexington Books, 2015), co-edited with Joseph Humire, and most recently, The Logic of Irregular War: Asymmetry and America’s Adversaries (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) – and the author of four others: Tehran Rising: Iran’s Challenge to the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), Winning the Long War: Retaking the Offensive Against Radical Islam (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), Implosion: The End of Russia and What It Means for America (Regnery Publishing, 2013), and Iran’s Deadly Ambition: The Islamic Republic’s Quest for Global Power (Encounter Books, 2015).
He previously spoke at Westminster on the subjects of Iran’s Global Ambition, The Drivers of Russian Strategy in the Middle East, and Russia in the Middle East.
Transcript
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, it’s a particular pleasure to welcome Ilan Berman back as he has been a friend and speaker at Westminster Institute before. He is the Senior Vice President at the American Foreign Policy Council, an ally institution which resides on Capitol Hill and which does such a great deal of terrific work on foreign policy questions. I happened to see Herman Pirchner last night, who’s the president and founder of the institution and Ilan kindly brought me Herman’s new book, Post Putin: Succession, Stability, and Russia’s Future, just a sample of the kind of work that AFPC does.
Well, back to Ilan and his work there in which he covers in depth the Middle East, Russia and adjoining areas, Iran, and so forth. He’s written four books, the titles of which I think you’ll find enticing; Tehran Rising: Iran’s Challenge to the United States – sounds quite contemporary, it’s an evergreen – Winning the Long War: Retaking the Offensive Against Radical Islam, Implosion: The End of Russia and What It Means for America, and Iran’s Deadly Ambition: The Islamic Republic’s Quest for Global Power.
Ilan has also edited four books and I’m going to just tell you the title of one of the four because it pertains to the subject he’s addressing tonight, The Logic of Irregular War: Asymmetry and America’s Adversaries. Tonight, he’ll be addressing, “The Future of the War on Terror — ISIS and After.” Welcome, Ilan.
Ilan Berman:
It’s really a pleasure to be back here at Westminster. This is one of my very favorite places to come and talk. I know some of you. I don’t know all of you. I do have to give a particular shoutout to my mafia, which is my students or my former students from the Missouri State’s Department of Defense and Strategic Studies. Free plug for the university, the dean will be very happy.
Let me start out by just saying, first of all, thank you, Bob. This is really a pleasure and a treat. I feel a little bit like a comedian, so if you guys have ever seen comedians, they have a life cycle to their acts. And so they go to the little clubs and work out their act and they go to slightly bigger venues when they have their minutes accumulated and it’s an iterative process because they’re refining their core arguments.
My core arguments don’t have nearly as funny punchlines, but I’m doing the same thing because my institute is working on a big project relating to strategic partners in the war of ideas against radical Islam. And the starting point of that discussion is precisely what we’re going to talk about today, which is what’s the future of the war on terror? Where are we now? We have to know where we are to know where we’re going or where we should be going and what the dangers are that lay ahead. So I think that’s a really good place to start.
It’s very easy in this media environment in which every day brings with it seventy-eight media cycles and nobody pays attention to anything for many than twelve minutes to imbibe what the press, the mainstream press, is talking about when it talks about the fact that ISIS is over, ISIS is done. That’s I think a misnomer. It’s also something that unfortunately has been perpetuated by a lot of triumphalism on the part of the administration, on the part of foreign officials, the Iraqi government for example, that are very eager to turn the page on the Islamic State. And so there is a perception that now that we have declared – arbitrarily I would argue – victory against the Islamic State, we’re done. And the real moving question is what comes next and do we care about what happens in the Middle East? Are we sort of turning our attention to other things. I would argue not so fast.
Look, I think it’s very clear that tremendous progress has been made and it’s even fair to say that the caliphate stage of the Islamic State is over. Over the last year we’ve seen what amounts to a catastrophic decline in the Islamic State.
At the height of its power in late 2014, early 2015, the Islamic State controlled a territory of roughly 81,000 square miles, which is geographically equivalent if you can picture a map, geographically equivalent to an expanse the size of the United Kingdom. And they controlled eight million citizens that lived on that territory, therefore they became the effective government for the people that live there. That’s a population on par with Israel, on par with Switzerland, and they generated a revenue of about one to one-and-a-half billion dollars a year. They were the single most well-funded threat group in history. These budgets obviously pale in comparison to actual nation-states but they are quite something when you look at ISIS as compared to other near peers, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, other groups.
Today, by contrast it has been almost entirely destroyed. It’s certainly been destroyed physically. As of late March we have rolled up – we and our dozens of partners in the global coalition against ISIS – have rolled up the physical caliphate and we’ve eliminated the last vestiges of ISIS control from Iraq and Syria, but there is a big ‘but’.
And this reminds me, I think the period we’re in right now in terms of counterterrorism policy reminds me of a famous quote by my friend Jim Woolsey. Some of you may know him. Jim Woolsey, the former CIA Director, Bill Clinton’s first CIA Director, at his confirmation hearing in 1993 in describing the post-Cold War environment that prevailed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “We have slayed a large dragon, but now we live in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes, and in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of.”
And I think that’s actually a really good way to describe the situation that we’re in now because for a long time, for three years, four years, ISIS has been the shiny object in the mirror. It’s been the organization, the threat actor, that has occupied the lion’s share of our attention. What we’re discovering now – and I’m going to make the case in a second that ISIS is down but it’s not out for a whole host of reasons – but we’re also beginning to notice that as we focused on ISIS, other threats have grown in the shadows and have done so in a material way that impacts our strategy moving forward in counterterrorism.
And what this new era in what used to be called the war on terror is more complicated and I would argue it’s more challenging and it’s really defined by at least five distinct traits. So with your forbearance, I’m going to try to walk you guys through them to give you a sense of what we’re looking at and how I like to slice and dice the threat environment that we have currently.
So the first challenge: we should start where we ended, which is the Islamic State. ISIS is down. It’s not out. Even though the caliphate stage is over, the group remains a global force for a series of reasons. First of all, it’s adaptive. The best analogy I’ve come up with – and it may not be great. I’m going to torture you with it anyway – is that ISIS is like a tube of toothpaste. So when a child grabs a full tube of toothpaste and squeezes really hard in the middle, the toothpaste doesn’t go away. It comes out of the top and it comes out of the bottom. We have squeezed ISIS really hard in its center, its geographic center of Iraq and Syria.
And what we’re finding is the Islamic State has begun to adapt because ISIS is a living, breathing organism and it’s begun to reposition itself and it’s repositioned itself to places like North Africa where they’ve declared Libya an important “second front,” second caliphate potentially. They have surged in southeast Asia. A year ago this month, there was a series of bombings throughout Indonesia that was carried out by ISIS returnees working as families. This wasn’t just isolated bombers. These were families of returnees. Indonesia has a serious ISIS problem now, so do the Philippines, so does Malaysia. ISIS is expanding into Africa. It has a new franchise in the Sahel region, which is just south of the Maghreb. ISIS is even poised for a comeback in the Middle East.
The latest DOD Inspector General Quarterly report regarding operations against the Islamic State ended with a judgement that given ISIS’s remaining strength, battlefield strength, and its ability to reorganize, it could reclaim lost territory and regroup in as little as six to twelve months in the absence of a continuing U.S. presence in Iraq and Syria. That is a remarkably short period of time and it suggests to us that everything that we’ve gained even though they’ve been hard fought gains are very transient in nature without continued focus and continued pressure.
The second major reason why we need to still worry about ISIS is that the organization retains significant force strength. And here, I’m not a numbers guy as my students know, but here are some numbers that I think are important because it’s useful to think about ISIS and the size of the cohort that ISIS managed to mobilize in historical context. So between its rise in early 2014 and the collapse of the ISIS caliphate in late 2018, the intelligence community judges that the Islamic State managed to mobilize approximately 40,000 foreign fighters from roughly eighty to eighty-two different countries around the world, countries in Europe, countries in Africa, countries in Asia, countries in the Middle East, that self-organized, self-mobilized, transitioned to the Middle East to join the ranks of the Islamic State.
By the way, in terms of historical analogy, it is useful to point out that that number, that figure that ISIS managed to generate in three-and-a-half years, is twice as large as the number of foreign fighters that joined the Afghan Jihad in the decade between 1979 and 1989. So I say that to point out that I know some people say that history repeats itself. I would argue it may not repeat itself, but it rhymes, and if you look at the trajectory of security in the 1990s, a lot of it had to do with returnees from the Afghan Jihad and the type of instability they brought with them when they returned to their countries of origin.
We are now looking at a trained, mobilized networked cohort that is twice as large as what we saw in the 1990s. In fact, Europe is petrified precisely because of this problem. When Europe talks about the returnee threat, this is precisely what they’re talking about. They’re worried about these mobilized, trained alumni now of the Syrian jihad that may return back into the eurozone.
And today, most of that care is still intact. The Pentagon estimates that only about – as of last fall – only about a quarter of that entire cohort, only about 10,000 out of those 40,000 had been taken out of commission, have been killed, have been captured, have been detained either by local forces or by coalition forces, and that there are 30,000 active potential militants that still exist. Now, they are dispersed, scattered, but they are resilient and they are networked and they communicate, and therefore, the rump strength of the Islamic State – I would argue – has been diminished far less in its constituent parts that it has been in the whole.
Which leads us to where they’re going. That’s the second trend because we’re seeing now, and I would argue we’re going to see over the next several years, is a resurgence of local jihad. Let me start this by saying it’s a truism in all things that everyone loves a winner and everyone hates a loser and it’s certainly true in terms of the War on Terror.
So what you saw when ISIS was rising was this heated intellectual tug-of-war between the Islamic State and the group that birthed it, Al Qaeda. And you had all these different affiliates that oscillated between the two. It’s the jihadi, superpower struggle if you will, and ISIS won that struggle handedly and by 2016, nearly three dozen separate, radical groups had made common cause or pledged allegiance, pledged bayah, to the Islamic State and to its self-declared emir, to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This included Boko Haram, Nigeria’s Boko Haram splintered and half of it became an ISIS affiliate. This includes most of the Caucasus Emirate, which is Russia’s main jihadist group, most of which affiliated with the Islamic State. There are some vestiges that have not yet, but most of it has. This includes radicals like Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, which was the local militant, Salafi militant group that operated in the Sinai Peninsula, separated between Israel and Egypt, which formally pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and became their Sinai Province. The list goes on.
So all of these groups, I would argue, have been deeply affected by the decline of ISIS, but they haven’t been fundamentally derailed by them and there’s a very simple reason for that. Almost without exception all of these groups if you rack and stack all of the different affiliates that at one time were part of the ISIS constellation, all of them existed before ISIS did, all of them had independent structures, all of them had independent funding, and all of them had independent leadership, and almost without exception, all of them still do. So what we’re actually seeing now is a splintering of a once consolidated Salafi-Jihadi goal and movement as these groups return back to their countries of origin, return back to their regions of origin, and engage in more localized activity there.
To be sure, they can still brand it as part of the global jihad as they did in Sri Lanka during the horrific Easter attacks that happened there, but make no mistake, this is a local campaign. This is now a local campaign that is being waged by all these different groups. And you’re seeing the manifestation of this in an uptick in violence in the Lake Chad region, an uptick in anti-regime violence in Somalia by Al Shabaab, and the list goes on. But this is the new complexion. We used to focus on the global nature of the Islamic State. The Islamic State has now fallen apart into its constituent parts. They still talk, they still communicate, they may be thinking globally, but they’re acting locally.
This gets us to the third trend, which is the terrain in which they are operating because I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but these groups now are operating in a more permissive strategic environment. There is a more receptive Arab polity today than at any time in the recent past to the type of political structures and ideology that these groups are promoting.
There’s a very simple reason for this as well. Look, the Arabs are tired. The Arab majority countries of the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa, there are seventeen of them, we’re going to exclude Iran, which isn’t Arab, we’re going to exclude Turkey, which isn’t Arab, we’re going to exclude Israel, which certainly isn’t Arab, the majority Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa cumulatively, the median age is 26 for those countries. So what that means as a practical matter is that most of these populations have lived through conflict for their entire adult lives. With the exception of just a couple of years at the tail end of the 1990s, these people have grown up in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Arab Spring and the local conflicts that have erupted as a result of that, the Syrian Civil War. They’re tired.
So there are regional perceptions that ISIS was hazardous to your health. ISIS did itself a tremendous disservice by showing that it was really toxic to the environments that it was operating in and it bred a counteraction. It bred a reaction from groups like Al Qaeda and its affiliates that they were a more moderate – let’s be clear, they’re not moderate – they style themselves as more moderate, more authentic global variant, and they were less hazardous to local health than was the Islamic State. And so now, what you’re seeing is these groups, groups like variants and offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, groups like Hayat Tahrir Al Sham in the north of Syria, groups like Al Qaeda in Yemen, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Africa, all of these groups are experiencing greater receptivity than they have been before because the Arabs are tired and as a result of the fact that they’re tired, the appeal of models of political governance like authoritarianism or Islamism holds greater appeal to them than they would have in the past. They’re more receptive.
So put another way, the initial promise of the Arab Spring – we all remember the initial promise of the Arab Spring of democracy spreading throughout the Middle East and North Africa – has been replaced by the threat and I think the very real threat of an Islamist winter as these groups take hold in more and more places throughout the Arab and the Muslim Middle East. And so I know I at least am a big fan of Game of Thrones. I don’t know if you guys are, but I have to say, winter is coming. Winter is coming because this is a polity that is more receptive now than they have been in the past to precisely the ideas that these dispersed entities are peddling. And they’re peddling them in a number of different ways.
So the fourth trend, which is enormously concerning for a lot of us that work in the domain of public diplomacy, the domain of information warfare is that the jihadi message is resilient and it’s enduring. ISIS maintains a compelling ideological message that continues to resonate despite the territorial collapse of the caliphate. I was in Morocco earlier this year and in my government meetings, I repeatedly asked the same question, “What does the jihadi movement, the global jihadi movement, look like after ISIS?” And there answer was different variants of exactly the same answer, which is, “What are you talking about? What do you mean after ISIS? We’ve seen no change in mobilization, no change in radicalization, no change in the core patterns of indoctrination.”
Even though the unifying entity of the Islamic State as a territorial state may be gone or may be diminished, the intellectual appeal of the Islamic State is still there. It’s as prevalent as ever. The message is now, despite territorial losses, we are enduring and we are expanding. We don’t care about tactical losses because we have a strategy and the rationale for jihad is still present as a result of local grievances that exist in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world, and the decadence of our enemies. And that’s the message and it’s a message that still continues to resonate, and it’s succeeded.
And what we’re actually seeing is – and this is if you talk to professionals who work on digital media, who work on platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Telegram and they can really get into the nuts and bolts of this – but what you’re actually seeing is a democratization of radical messaging. So the Islamic State was the pioneer of digital indoctrination. They were enormously compelling, they were miles ahead of other groups in terms of the sophistication of videos that they promoted, of the way they leveraged social media platforms, the way they linked up messaging across platforms, but they’re increasingly not the only ones. We’re seeing more and more that there are groups that are learning from this example and they’re becoming more media savvy in their own local regions, in their own local conflicts becoming more media savvy, learning to leverage technology better to do end-to-end encryption, to do more complicated messaging, more compelling messaging, and this is amplifying the overall problem that we face.
And the internet here is the big equalizer. It’s allowed the global Salafi-Jihadi movement far greater resonance than it otherwise would have. Imagine if we had no internet. I can tell you having two teenagers in my house it would be a great thing, a great thing, but in terms of what we’re actually talking about, imagine the difficulties that these groups would have if they couldn’t just upload a video and disseminate their message across platforms. If they actually had to do it the old fashioned way by recording audio cassettes and sending them to mosques and things like that, they would have far less appeal, far less reach than they do now. The internet has been this force multiplier and this equalizer for these groups, and it’s aided in the mobilization of disaffected Muslims. There’s lots of documented and documentary evidence about the pathways of radicalization that the internet has facilitated and empowered, and internet providers are asleep at the switch.
Let’s be clear: we’re still having a debate about whether these platforms are platforms or forums or if they’re providers. This is the big discussion that we’re having now about Facebook. What responsibility do these companies have? To be sure, there’s been some remedial action that’s been taken by Google, by YouTube to de-platform known radicals, to blacklist videos. There have been companies like Jigsaw, which is Google’s think tank, which has worked on programs like Redirect, and the idea is to seed algorithms so if somebody searches for radical messaging on YouTube, they end up getting a video that says the opposite, but in a very subtle way. This is all good, but this is all fiddling on the edges. We are waking up to the reality that radical online messaging is here to stay, that it’s not possible to negate, to downgrade this message – or at least not in any meaningful way, which means that we need to focus on responding to the message and discrediting the message in a much more robust way than we’re doing currently.
And we can talk about all the horror stories relating to the U.S. government’s rather lackluster approach to counter ISIS messaging, counter Al Qaeda messaging, counter jihadi messaging. For those of you working for the government, I don’t think I need to tell you those stories. I think you know them already. But our messengers, our influencers have not acquitted themselves nearly as well as they should have at least so far.
Meanwhile, going back to what we just talked about, the Arab societies where these messages are proliferation are receptive to this message because of a confluence of events, because they’re tired, because they want stability, the allure of precisely what groups like the Islamic State and its fellow travelers are peddling is actually more appealing now than it has been in the past, and it’s being promoted through all these different platforms.
Okay, so the fifth trend is slightly different, but I think it bears discussing because it’s also a truism of counterterrorism that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. And we tend to forget this. We tend to think about counterterrorism as a binary conversation as in September 11th happened here and therefore it’s all about us and therefore, we are the ones who have to lead the response. But here’s the reality: the Islamic State wasn’t just an existential threat to the West. The Islamic State was also an existential threat to Shiite Muslims, in particular, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Iran, unlike the United States, was not separated from the Islamic State by a large ocean. And so, looking at what Iran has done as a countervailing response to the Islamic State is both fascinating and informative and quite alarming.
So there’s a fundamental difference here. When Sunni radicals radicalized and mobilized and traveled to the Islamic State, they did so mostly by themselves. They were self-starters. They radicalized online, usually independently. They found facilitation networks. They had to do the heavy lift of mobilizing themselves, of leaving their comfort zones, of traveling to the Middle East. But when they got to the Middle East there were facilitation networks that moved them into the Iraqi-Syrian battle space.
So contrast this to what Iran has done. During the same period that those 40,000 Sunni fighters were joining the Islamic State, Iran succeeded in building a countervailing Shiite irregular force, what I would call a jihadi legion, made up of Shiites from Afghanistan, from Pakistan, from Yemen, Iraq – we know these Iraqi militias as the Hashd al-Shaabi.
We will be hearing a lot about them over the next half-a-year or so, I would argue, and this force is as significant, perhaps more so than what we saw on the Sunni side. It depends on who you ask. The U.S. Intelligence Community estimates that the Iranians succeeded in mobilizing about the same number of Shiite fighters as the Islamic State mobilized Sunnis, so about 40,000. The Israeli government, which I argue is somewhat closer to the problem set, tends to estimate about double that. They will give you a number but they say, if you press them really hard like I did the last time I was there, somewhere between fifty and seventy thousand foreign fighters. And then you have private sector analysts who say that that number – it depends on how you rack and stack. It depends how you stack up your threat, but the number could be if you take in not just active militants who are deployed in theater in places like Syria and Iraq, but also reserve forces that can be marshaled, additional brigades and battalions that can be mobilized. The number could be as big as 150,000, which is a huge number. I suspect it’s less than that, but just by way of comparison, 150,000 fighters is the same size as the standing army of Great Britain. That’s a big number, that’s a big force, and unlike what’s happening with the foreign fighters that joined the Islamic State for a time, these guys aren’t going anywhere.
The problem that we’re facing now with Sunni foreign fighters is that they’ve lost and they’re seeking greener pastures. The whole migration problem has been exacerbated by the potential that foreign fighters from the collapsing Islamic State would find their way into migration patterns, would work their way into the eurozone or even into Canada and the United States, Latin America, and transit away from what they saw as a hopeless conflict, and we’re dealing with that problem. I would argue not as well as we should, but we’re dealing with that problem.
But the Shiites, the Shiite irregulars that Iran marshaled to deal with this very same threat, don’t have that problem. They are centrally organized, they are still being funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they are trained and consolidated, and they are vertically integrated in a way that Islamic State’s foreign fighters never were. So the real question that we have moving forward is something that’s very concerning to the intelligence community and the military is where do Iran’s irregulars go next because Iran has seized upon this asymmetric force as being a key component of its strategy. They have paid Iran enormous dividends in places like Syria, where they’ve managed to capture and then hold territory in a way that is not only assisting Iran’s ally, the Assad regime, but has also begun to change the demographic complexion of Syria.
So if you’re Iranian and if you’re an Iranian strategist, you understand that your strategy is working, so we need to be thinking about where the Iranians are going next. Maybe they’re going to Yemen to fight against the Saudis. Maybe they’re going to assist in other theaters, but this is something that is of concern and should be of concern to our national command authority.
And this gets us to U.S. counterterrorism policy. U.S. counterterrorism policy right now, today, is at a crossroads. There are two interlocking problems that I would argue are going to define everything in terms of how we address these five threats. The first is resolve. There is no substitute for seriousness and it doesn’t look like we’re serious, really. Here’s what I mean, and not to disparage the government, but to point out that the government has for some reason imbibed a false strategic choice. Embedded in every single national security document that this administration has put out is the idea that the U.S. can engage in counterterrorism or it can engage in great power competition with Russia and China, but not both. I’m a big fan of walking and chewing gum at the same time and I would argue that this is a false dichotomy, that the U.S. has both the resources and the requirement to do both, but this makes a tremendous amount of difference both in terms of what we do and the strength and durability of our alliances.
The second thing that I heard when I was in Morocco from every official that I met was ‘are you guys leaving’ because we had declared war, but we had declared victory against the Islamic State. Are we still at war or is this now someone else’s war? It’s a good question and it’s a question for which we have not yet posited a good answer, and that’s why our regional allies, the ones that are not separated from these threats by a large ocean are increasingly hesitant and nervous about that’s going to come next because they think increasingly they are going to be left to confront this new garden filled with poisonous snakes on their own.
The second problem is target. There’s a truism in mass media that if it bleeds it leads, so we have spent the lion’s share of our attention over the last three-and-a-half, four years on just one group, the Islamic State, and done so to the detriment of understanding what’s happening to other actors. So today, Al Qaeda has captured more territory than at any time in its history since 1979, in the south of Yemen, in pockets of Afghanistan, in the north of Syria. The reason it’s been able to do that is we’re not paying attention. We’ve been paying attention to the Islamic State. We’re paying far less attention to how these guys move around, how these guys operate. Other groups, ancillary groups, either affiliated or opposed to the Islamic State are operating. So we’ve addressed the Islamic State to the detriment of looking seriously at other Islamist actors around the world.
More broadly, I would argue, and this is where the war of ideas component comes in, we aren’t postured to compete in the realm of ideas, either organizationally or, I would posit, intellectually. Today, bureaucratically, the U.S. is horribly disorganized. It’s the idea of counter-messaging against the Islamic State and al Qaeda is run by, today, something called the GEC, the Global Engagement Center, which is based out of the State Department. The Global Engagement Center today also has competence for counter propaganda against China and counter propaganda against Russia, and also I think a little in North Korea because they don’t have enough to do. So what we’ve actually done is made one, I would argue, underfunded bureau of the State Department responsible like a Swiss army knife for all of our counter messaging against all of the bad guys that we’re now trying to address globally. This is an inefficient response.
Here’s another thing: for those who work with the military, you’ve heard this phrase before, but I think it’s very apt, it’s very useful. There’s a difference between measures of performance and measures of effectiveness. The people who work at the Global Engagement Center and in other parts of the U.S. government that do counter messaging, that do serious intellectual strategy can talk to you all day long about measures of performance. We’ve put out this many tweets, this many videos, this many Facebook posts, this many YouTube uploads, and they do it. By the way, they do it on a regular basis when they go to testify before Congress justify their budgets. But when you ask them about measures of effectiveness, the silence is deafening because it’s very hard to quantify how effective this messaging actually is.
I would argue that given what we’re seeing in the counterterrorism sphere, we’re not being very effective because the threat is more distributed today and more resilient today than at any time in the recent past at precisely the moment where we are beginning to shift our attention away from Islamic radicalism to great power competition with Russia and China. And if you think that doesn’t make a difference, I have news for you. U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, is already revisiting their deployment guidelines to focus less on counterinsurgency, to focus less on asymmetric warfare, and to focus more on force-on-force competition with great power competitors, meaning Russia and China. That leaves a tremendous area, an arena of competition, unaddressed and it’s something that we’re going to have to grapple with in the years ahead.
So this is very gloom and doom. I’m going to leave you with the silver lining. The silver lining is that we’re not alone. We tend to think about counterterrorism as a binary conversation. ‘We have to deal with all of these problems, it’s just us,’ that’s not true. Other countries are looking at precisely this problem set and they, frankly, have more skin in the game than we do.
I’m sure some of you know him, my good friend Mike Doran who is now at the Hudson Institute. On September 11 he was an Assistant Professor at Princeton and he wrote what I would argue is the single best article describing what September 11 was all about. He wrote it for Foreign Affairs and its title was Someone Else’s Civil War because that’s precisely what it is. It’s someone else’s civil war acted out through hostility to the West, but it’s really a conversation that’s happening within the Muslim world between competing ideas. And this is very good news because there is that competition that’s going on today.
So if you look around the Muslim world, I’ve spent the better part of two decades traveling around the Muslim world and I haven’t learned much, frankly, but I’ve learned that there’s no such thing as the Muslim world. There’s a lot of different Muslim worlds. Muslims in North Africa want very different things than Muslims in Central Asia, very different things than Muslims in Indonesia.
And so, looking at the variegation that you see in the Muslim world, you see pockets of excellence and pockets that can be useful to U.S. counterterrorism strategy. The Kingdom of Morocco where I was earlier this year; I was there because they have erected a very elaborate soft power strategy, ranging from programming for television all the way to early elementary school textbooks all the way to Qur’anic tomes that rebuke and refute the ISIS interpretation of Islamic scripture.
In Indonesia, you have a Muslim movement that has rejected the Islamic State, that has rejected the idea of Islamic supremacy vis-a-vis the West and that numbers 90 million members. They’re called the Nahdlatul Ulama and they are the single, largest Muslim entity, most important Muslim entity that you’ve never heard of.
In Uzbekistan of all places, the last two years have seen a very far reaching reform campaign initiated for political reasons because the Soviet and post-Soviet strongman died in late 2016, and they’re reforming to open up to the West for a whole host of reasons. Among other things, they’re worried about becoming a vassal state of China, but the important part of this equation is that as part of those reforms they are redoing the way the country addresses religious authority. They have set up centers of Islamic learning in places like Bukhara, in places like Tashkent, and they are trying to reclaim the narrative of political Islam from radical groups that have previously proliferated.
And for those of you who have spent time working on post-Soviet space, you understand that this is a really high stakes challenge and also a really important one because it hasn’t been done before. These and other examples demonstrate pretty compellingly, as far as I’m concerned, that we’re not alone. The U.S. has partners in this conflict, but we need to identify them, we need to engage them, and most of all, we need to contextualize the fight that we’re going to ask them to engage in because we haven’t done any of that so far. I’ll stop there.
Q&A
Audience member:
Okay, thank you for your presentation. As a matter of fact, most of the ISIS fighters that came from [unintelligible] they came in and out through Turkey. They are distributing the leftover fighters to all the hotspots all over the world. If you were looking for the future after ISIS, you have to look for what Turkey is doing. This is the first point.
The second point is that the philosophy behind ISIS that generated Al Qaeda and ISIS and all the similar groups is Islamic radicalism. How are you thinking to change this philosophy, teaching like Morocco did? This should be done all over not the Islamic world, but all over, all over the world because it is existing in the Untied States, in Britain, all over. Thank you.
Ilan Berman:
I’m glad you asked me easy question, right, because I have the answer. Very quickly, on Turkey, you’re absolutely right. I would only point out that this is a double-edged sword. The Turks have made a geopolitical tool out of Syrian refugees and foreign fighters from the Islamic State. And the conversation that they’ve had with the Europeans has been this tacit threat that unless the Europeans come up with an economic modus vivendi that the Turks like, that the Turks will sort of open borders and you know they will allow this flow to happen, but what the Europeans have actually done has been the opposite, right? European-Turkish relations are not going very well and Europeans have begun to clamp down on their borders.
So now, what you have in Turkey is a really interesting problem. President Erdogan is, for lack of a better term, the dog that caught the car. He has all of these Syrian refugees in his country, most of them by the way in Istanbul and surrounding areas, right? Three-and-a-half million of them. He doesn’t know what to do with them and he can’t export them the way he thought he was going to be able to export and weaponize, and a lot of the turbulence that you see in Turkey this week, last week when I was there, the turbulence that you’re going to see economically and politically in the next several weeks, that has a layer that has to do with precisely this game that Erdogan has played. It’s a very risky game. I’m not sure he’s playing it that well.
On the second point, you’re absolutely right, but what your question is really about is religious authority. Who has the standing to change doctrine? Who has the ability to message in a way that’s authentic? It’s not us, so one of the cardinal problems that we have in the war of ideas is nobody is going to listen to us, right? That’s why I think these examples of moderation in the Muslim world become so important.
The King of Morocco, right – we were talking about Morocco – the King of Morocco is a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. He’s one of very few people that can actually claim direct lineage. He has the authority to say what you are saying – PJD, the Party of Justice and Development, which is the Islamists that now occupy the majority in Morocco’s Parliament – that’s unacceptable. Who says so? I say so. I have the authority to say so.
He’s not the only one, right? There are other examples like this and the more we focus on them, the more we figure out who is messaging in this way and who has the standing to message in this way, frankly, the better off we’ll be because we don’t have the authority to tell them what you’re doing is wrong, you shouldn’t listen to ISIS, you shouldn’t listen to these other groups. We have no standing in this conversation. We should find people that do.
Audience member:
I heard from you two theories on why the Islamic State metastasized too much and they are opposites, and I was wondering which point you come down.
Ilan Berman:
What do you mean?
Audience member:
One point you stated explicitly. We focused on it and didn’t pay attention to the other point. The other is the theory you implied, that because we took three-odd-plus years to eliminate the territorial caliphate of the Islamic State, therefore tens of thousands of people were given time to keep coming in, affiliates were given time to keep affiliating with it, and Iran was given time to mobilize tens of thousands or more of Shiite militia.
And this could be seen as a deliberate strategy. Obama said we should not defeat ISIS with our own forces, we should take several years, and his strategy was largely continued under Trump under the pressure of his military advisers who he inherited from Obama, so those are two opposite theories and I wonder which one you happen to think. You sounded as if you were really saying we shouldn’t be as involved as much.
Ilan Berman:
Well, that last part, we absolutely should be involved. That’s my thesis, right?
Audience member:
But you did say a couple times that because we were focused on that, we missed other things.
Ilan Berman:
Yes, I think that’s correct. Look, I think there’s a couple things here, I don’t think they’re diametrically opposed. It’s absolutely fair to say the Obama administration was far too timid in its understanding of how rapidly this threat was evolving. I think there are reasons that justify why the Obama administration took this backseat, hands-off approach, right?
Look, the Islamic State was not built to last. There has been no threat group in recorded history that has fought a seven front war and survived, right? The Islamic State fought more than a seven front war, right? They were fighting with us, they were fighting with the Syrians, they were fighting with the Iranians, they were fighting with the Turks.
They didn’t build their caliphate to exist for centuries despite what they said publicly, and so if there were folks in the administration, the last administration, that were complacent about this, I don’t like the outcome, but I sort of understand their reasoning, that this would all sort of you know implode on their own.
Should they have nudged it along much sooner? Absolutely, because of all these second and third order effects that happened because weren’t engaged. Because we took our time in curbing the caliphate, in containing and constraining the caliphate, others took matters into their own hands, right? Nature abhors a vacuum and we created a vacuum, and that’s on the last administration. I think this administration is grappling with a different problem.
So I was at the Republican Convention in the Summer of 2016 when the candidate Trump was formally made the Republican Party’s candidate and I heard all of his speeches and he would talk a lot about foreign policy. He talked about three things, right, pertaining to the world beyond our borders.
He talked about a better relationship with Russia, and we sort of know that conversation, right, not great, he really disliked the Iran deal and he said he was going to get out of it, which is why anybody who thought that we were going to stay in the Iran Deal really wasn’t paying attention at all, and the third was articulated subtly by him, but much more explicitly articulately by the t-shirts that I almost bought for my kids on the outside, which said – pardon my French – ‘bomb the crap out of ISIS’.
Right, so a great t-shirt not a great strategy. Right, not a great strategy, but it goes a long way toward explaining why the president made the decision suddenly – or it seemed suddenly – in December of 2018 that we were done because he hadn’t articulated the end state that he wanted to see against the Islamic State.
What he had articulated was the American people are tired of forever wars, so those two things combined, they gave him the opportunity to say arbitrarily, ‘we’ve done enough’, right? They’ve also injected a lot of doubt, as I said, among our allies about what happens next. Will the U.S. remain committed to, you know, policing activities, to counterterrorism activities, the same way it was before, now that the U.S. has said, well, they’ve had enough? Right?
That’s a judgement call. I tend to think the administration hasn’t really made up its mind yet. The fact that the administration has partially reversed course and we’re now not fully pulling out of Syria, but we’re only partially pulling out of Syria, and by the way, the place in Syria where U.S. troops are staying is in the south of Syria where they interrupt supply lines coming across land, across Iraqi territory from Iran to Iranian irregulars, is actually a big deal, it’s important, and it suggests that we still have a dog in the fight, but how much of a dog I think remains to be seen.
Audience member:
I’m going to ask a politically incorrect question. You mentioned today – which is the first time I’ve heard that Iran or Shias in general – managed to recruit more volunteer fighters for this war than even ISIS or any other Salafi or Sunni movement. My question is why wouldn’t we let them to sort it out among themselves? That would do a great favor for everybody else by killing each other. Thank you.
Ilan Berman:
Again, not a politically correct question, but I actually heard this question about ten years ago or maybe more than ten years ago at the height of the Iraq War. I was sitting at a reception in New Delhi and an Indian politician actually asked me precisely this question. He said when the Sunnis hate you and they hate the Shiites and the Shiites hate you and they hate the Sunnis, but they hate each other more and they’re killing each other, so what’s the problem, right?
You know, again, very politically incorrect, but not without a certain element of logic in the sense that what if we cordoned it off? What if we just sort of contain it and allow this to sort itself out? So I would argue that there are at least two things that mitigate for a more activist U.S. approach.
First of all, because Iran is expanding, right, and what’s happening this week with Iran and the escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Iran is part of a larger conversation that the Trump administration’s been trying to have for the last year, which is essentially just trying to put Iran back in a box.
One of the problems that we had with the core problems that we had with the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is that the deal was tactical. It dealt only with one aspect of Iranian behavior, its nuclear development, but the benefits Iran got were strategic: billions upon billions of dollars in either direct or near term sanctions relief and Iran received it in a way that empowered rouge activity throughout the length and breadth of the Middle East.
You can argue about whether the Trump administration is doing it correctly, but they are trying to address this. They’re trying to put Iran back in a box, and you can’t really do that from the outside, and you countenance a very bloody not civil war, but regional war if you step back and allow others to do it for you.
The second problem that we have is that you have to be present in order to shape outcomes. One of the problems that we have and we’ve been countering is that Russia is in Syria and Russia knows what it wants in Syria and Iran is in Syria, and Iran knows pretty much what it wants in Syria. We’re not really in Syria and we absolutely have no idea what we want in Syria. The end result of that is that outcomes are shaped by those that are present and those that know what they want.
There is an argument to be made for a laissez-faire foreign policy, that was also an argument that was made by the last administration and it uncorked a lot of very negative dynamics that this administration is trying to deal with. I’m not sure that they’ve come up with a proper solution for dealing with everything in the Middle East, but I think the center of gravity and the way the White House is thinking about it is they can’t just pull out entirely.
They don’t want forever wars, they don’t want to unnecessarily escalate conflict, but they know they need to be present in order to compete. The National Security Strategy that the administration released a year-and-a-half ago was all about that. It was all about competition. That’s the core theme that weaves throughout the 54 pages of the document, and I think they figured out that at least in the Middle East, you have to be present in order to compete. Whether we’re doing that well, whether we’re doing that effectively is a different conversation, but my sense is that the center of gravity in that debate is sort of moving more in the interventionist direction.
Audience member:
You talked about organization, but you never mentioned the Brotherhood, which is the mother of all these organizations. Why is the United States not designated it a terrorist organization because this overcomes most of the organizations.
Ilan Berman:
I’ll repeat it, so you noticed that I skirted the issue of the Brotherhood. Okay, so I was hoping nobody would notice. Okay, so I would answer it this way. Do you remember in the first six months of the Trump administration where there was this abortive attempt on the part of the White House to simultaneously designate the Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and at that time it didn’t happen because for some reason in the media or elsewhere the two things got conflated.
They’re not the same thing, so we have now designated the Revolutionary Guard and we are thinking about designating the Brotherhood. They’re still not the same thing and the problem that I see – by the way, I do not contest for a minute that the Brotherhood is an enormously problematic entity and a lot of their worldview has seeped.
They’ve become a conveyor for much more radical and overtly violent groups, but the Brotherhood is also not a consolidated entity. There’s sixteen different branches of the Brotherhood worldwide, including in places like Morocco, which we spent a lot of time talking about tonight, where they make up the majority in Parliament
It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t designate the Brotherhood, but it does mean that you have to do it if you’re going to do it, you have to do it carefully or you threaten to detonate your relationships with all these different countries because the Brotherhood is not one thing in all these different countries, it is a different thing in these different countries. If you’re talking about the Brotherhood core in Egypt, that’s a different conversation entirely, but that’s not what the administration is talking about currently, so I would not argue against, I would argue refining a little bit.
Audience member:
Every country if you designate them as a terrorist organization, you help the rulers of these countries, but they cannot announce that they are against the Brotherhood because of the-
Ilan Berman:
Right, so here is an interesting problem, a secondary problem that I think the U.S. government has: you have to talk to somebody. I had this really fascinating experience in my interactions with the NU, the Nahdatul Ulama, the Indonesian mass Muslim movement, where we, my institute, hosted a delegation of members of the NU, a couple of years ago. And they spent a week talking to Islamic scholars throughout Washington, talking to different think tanks. The idea was to sort of socialize them throughout the beltway policymaker community policy influencer community. And then we had this farewell dinner with them. And the head of their delegation said to me something off the cuff. He said, “You know, I’ve been to Washington many times. I never realized how much of an intellectual grip the Brotherhood has on American Islamic thinking.”
Again, not me saying this, this is him saying this, but it speaks to I think a larger problem: the administration is at an inflection point, which it has figured out that the Brotherhood is not a benign entity, but it will at some point need to replace them with somebody, which is why that conversation about alternative models that exist in the Muslim world becomes so important, because you can’t fight something with nothing. You can’t say we don’t want you to affiliate with these guys, but we have no idea who you should talk to instead.
So this is an important conversation. It’s something that paradoxically almost two decades into the War on Terror we haven’t had yet, but it’s long past time for us to have it because at a moment where the administration is beginning to make those hard choices, they need to have the information to then make better ones. That’s all I’m going to say on the Brotherhood.
Audience member:
Just on the subject of Iran as you brought it up, is there any tangible evidence that the increased sanctions have changed Iranian behavior or constrained their options?
Ilan Berman:
So it’s a good question. Look, Iran has ranked pretty high on the misery index fairly consistently over the last, well, forty years, but in particular over the last decade, and it’s clear that the economic pressure that the administration is applying is exacerbating those things, right, exacerbating the rate of inflation, exacerbating the percentage of the population that lives below the internationally-recognized poverty line, things like that, right, is destabilizing the currency market, is effecting the bazaar class. The one thing that I find paradoxical to me is – not that I recommend that any of you do this – but if you watch any of the mainstream media channels, right, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, whatever, for a 24 hour cycle – and you totally should not – but if you did, you would find not one news report about what’s happening in Iran.
Iran is a year-and-a-half into a simmering counterrevolution, right, and the reasons for that are being exacerbated by what the administration is doing, certainly, right, because people are feeling economic hardship. But what’s interesting is that the protests that are happening on a recurring basis in Tehran and Isfahan and other cities aren’t against the United States. They’re against the bankruptcy of the regime, right?
So something fundamental has happened, right? Ten years ago you had the Green Movement, but the Green Movement was a protest against a chronological thing. It was a protest against the fraudulent reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian Presidency, right? It was the moment where Iranians sort of pulled back the curtain and said, oh, you know, there’s a guy sort of pulling the gears, right? The republic is not really a republic, my vote doesn’t really count, and this brought people out in millions in major cities, but they weren’t advocating – at least not all of them – were advocating fundamental change, an end of the Islamic Republic, right?
They were talking about behavior modification. In fact, if you look at the leaders, the titular leaders of the Green Movement, Mehdi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Mousavi, they were reformists, right? They talked about reforming the system not jettisoning the system, right? The people that are on the street now are actually talking about a much more fundamental thing. They’re talking about moving beyond the Islamic Republic.
Now, as Westerners would say, they’re all hat and no cattle, right, because they know what they’re against, but they don’t know what they’re for. They haven’t articulated an agenda for a post-theocratic Iran, and they don’t have any leadership, right? So one of the reasons this really hasn’t caught fire the way it has in other places is that we recognize and sympathize with the subject, but there’s nothing to grab onto, there’s no people, there’s no sort of agenda, there’s no mission, right, and so we’re not really paying attention, but what is happening in Iran today, I think, sort of hints at this potential future, right, which isn’t a future behavior modification, it’s a future of sort of fundamental transformation of Iran.
The real question to me is what the administration thinks about it because we have an administration strategy that is mostly front loaded in the sense that – so there’s not one strategy, there are at least three that I can tell. The first is the Pompeo strategy that he articulated a year ago at the Heritage Foundation, right the twelve demands that are prerequisites for behavior normalization with Iran. They’re not regime change criteria, they’re just to normalize relations. By the way, they’re also not going to be achieved because the Iranian regime looks at them like capitulation, so it’s not going to happen.
The middle road is what the POTUS talks about all the time. He has said repeatedly that he wants a better deal with Iran, right? He doesn’t like the 2015 nuclear deal, but he’s willing to negotiate without preconditions for a better deal with Iran. To which I would say, maybe a few preconditions wouldn’t be such a bad idea? But, nonetheless, that is what he’s talking about, and then there’s the John Bolton approach, which isn’t a regime change approach, it’s a regime collapse approach, which as John Bolton has said, we want to place enough pressure on the Iranian regime because they’re bad actors, and if the regime collapses… The problem with that of course is if the regime collapse is not a thing, it’s many things. It can be Tunisia or it can be Libya or it can be Venezuela, right?
So we are front loaded how we’re approaching Iran. We’re spending a lot of time looking at the screws that we can turn to turn up the heat on Iran, to increase the pressure on Iran. We’ve spent far too little time talking about the end state of those tactics, right, because those are really tactics. What do we want to achieve in Iran, right? My sense is the sooner we start talking about where we want Iran to end up, the better off we’ll be in terms of formulating our approach.
Audience member:
Assuming a collapse, at least a partial collapse in Iran, does the Iranian diaspora have a role in the future of Iran and do the liberals, the Green Movement type, do they have a role in the future of Iran? In other words, can we construct a modern state there that the diaspora would have a much greater role in it?
Ilan Berman:
I think that’s a great question and the answer is we don’t know, and there are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, I am a firm believer in the fact that regime change is not always a panacea, right? First of all, America is not really good at regime change, right, we’re not generally good at following through. We’re good at precipitating events, we’re not good at following through. There have been success stories, right? Japan, post-war Germany, you can sort of point to it, but the reality is, particularly in the Middle East, we’re not so good at this.
There’s also a cadence. There’s a rhythm to all this. So if you think about the Iranian diaspora and the Iranians who remain in Iran, the generation that came of age during the last years of the Shah, they’re the ones who almost uniformly left Iran, they’re established, they’re settled either in Europe or the United States, they’ve done very well for themselves, and they tend to be monarchists.
The first generation educated under the Ayatollahs has given you the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right, true fire breathing radicals, true believers in Khomeinism. The generation that came after that? Not so much, right, but my point on all this is it’s not that ‘regime change is a constant, it’s just a thing that happens and then things will get better’, [no], there’s a rhythm to this. You can do it too early or you can do it too late and your outcome becomes totally different, but the real answer is we haven’t really thought about it at all.
The third rail of American Iran policy is precisely what you asked, which is let’s talk about the Iranian opposition, let’s talk about regime change. What we have as a result is a very simplistic vision of the opposition, right? We hear a lot of talk about the Marxists, and we hear a lot of talk about monarchists, and really, not even a good understanding of what they each stand for or if there are other factions as well, right? So I agree with you completely, but we need to get smart on this very quickly.
I can’t answer your question because we don’t know enough and the U.S. government doesn’t know enough about whether these guys are viable alternatives, whether the models that they have for a successor regime in Iran, if they’re actually a real thing, if they’re popular in Iran, if these personalities are popular within Iran, right? We need to get smart really quickly because the administration is very quickly turning up the heat on Iran and it hasn’t yet answered any of those questions.
Audience member:
Coming back to the gentleman in the back about the Islamic teaching and how to view that, so you said repeatedly that jihad has a strong resilience in the Muslims populations, there is a lot of sympathy or favor for them. So the Islamic teaching that jihad is obligated, according to some scriptures you cannot even go to paradise without participating in jihad, so the organizations like Al Qaeda, ISIS, they may come and go, their names change, but the basic movement that fights against the crusaders, that does not go away.
The second point is that according to Islamic theology, nobody has the right to say that I speak for Islam whether it is a descendant of the prophet does not mean anything, so the King of Jordan or King of Morocco cannot now stand up and say, “I tell you what Islam is.” Al Azhar can say more about Islam than the descendants of the prophet, so how is that element overcome because unless and until we do that, there is no way that the movement or the jihad machinery can stop.
Ilan Berman:
Listen, I think that’s right and so I think there’s a couple of answers, particularly to your second question. Certainly, formally, right, Islam is flat in terms of hierarchy. It’s one of the reasons why a mid-level cleric on a certain day in 1989 woke up in the morning and by the end of the afternoon was declared the Supreme Leader of Iran. Right, sort of flat. He was sort of the consensus candidate.
But culturally, there are gradations of authority, right? I mean I think particularly in Arab countries that have had more exposure to the West and have sort of had more of a compatibility with the West and the ability to interact with the West, there is that hierarchy. I’ll give you a great example of this.
So Zine Abidine Ben Ali, right, the avowedly secular president – former president – of Tunisia tried to ban fasting on Ramadan. He tried to say for precisely this reason, he said, ‘look, any Muslim can sort of say it, I’m in a position of authority, I’m going to ban it’. And because he was a secular leader, because he didn’t have that cultural claim to authority, nobody listened to him. If the King of Morocco says this, the outcome would be controversial, but it would be framed a different way, so I actually think that sort of societally there is a balance there.
There is though even if you get away from personalities, get away from sort of the King and, you know, Osama bin Laden, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, whoever, there are in many pockets of the Muslim world, there is a baseline consensus, right? So we talked about Morocco a lot, so let me go all the way on the other end of the world.
Indonesia is 270 million people, right? Very few non-Muslims, right? It’s almost overwhelmingly Muslim, but every Muslim there believes in the Islamic faith and simultaneously in the pancasila. The pancasila is the charter of five principles, which essentially boiled down talks about nationstate over caliphate, right? That’s a big thing, right? There is variegation in the Muslim world.
Within this rigidity there are different interpretations that have been overlaid, right? The point that I’m trying to make is not necessarily to pick and choose which ones we like but for goodness sake, we should at least know what they are. We’re very newborn I think in our understanding of the fact that the Muslim world is not a monolith.
And here, it might be slightly partisan, I put a lot of blame on the last administration. When President Obama, his first major trip to the Middle East, what his detractors call his apology tour, if you may remember, he traveled and he gave a major speech at Al Azhar University in Cairo. And the speech was titled, “A New Beginning” and the message was essentially that, a new beginning, meaning you have problems with us, Muslims, we have problems with you, let’s fix things, let’s make it better.
The Muslim world is 1.7, 1.8 billion people, right, it’s a fifth of humanity. They don’t all want the same thing. Muslims in Indonesia want different things than Muslims in Morocco, and so the problem that we have is when we lump this cohort altogether, we lose these nuances, we are not attuned to these nuances, why Muslims in Indonesia are different than Muslims in Morocco, right?
And so we spent two terms looking at it from 60,000 ft, right, and this administration has not yet zoomed in to start looking at these different silos, different models, so if anything, that’s my appeal, which is, you know, sort of celebrate the differences, take a closer look at what’s happening because otherwise you know the War on Terrorism will be a really lonely place.