Understanding the Enemy

[MikeF]

One thing that we seem to not yet have a handle on is what the true nature of our enemy is. After reading 3 Cups of Tea, I started given some serious thought to GEN Bashir's comment that the enemy was ignorance.

I'm not sure if you've ever watched a suicide bomber's video where he gives his testimony before martyrdom, but it is intense. In Zaganiyah, we started recovering the videos after the blast. These were our neighbors blowing themselves up so it became a bit personal. After we redeployed, non-religious teenage girls from Diyala River Valley began volunteering or being coerced. I wanted to understand why because that is the only way to stop it- not counter-IED measures- a holistic approach...I read through every translated document available on Open Source that I could find.

Here's my take:

In the same parallel that x is a function derived from y and depicted numerically on a graph, the Arab world is a wonderful, mystical land full of multiple paradoxes competing and contrasting directly with traditional western rational thought, norms, and values. This land that provided the world with Hammurabi’s law, algebra, and three religions coexists within the same mosaic that introduced honor killings, suicide bombers, and assassins. This cradle of civilization ebbs and flows in the persistent and unrelenting current of conflict with modernity while defying western utopian dreams of perpetual peace. This land contradicts and conforms in a beauty unresolved leaving most unfamiliar unnerved striving to determine some rhyme and reason to it all.

What is al Qaeda? The active absence of hope and passion skewed in anger. Tumbling, spiraling down, the Islamic Revolution unfolds in search of deep introspection. Nearly four score past, Sayyid Qutb questioned his isolation, unhappiness, and loneliness. Bitterness derived from grievances revealed, theorems proposed juxtaposed to uneducated masses; Muslim Brotherhood evolves. All for naught in distaste for compassion. Self-denial self-inflicted for naught in the lack of creativity, curiosity, and thought. No renewal of the mind, the martyr self-destructs. Who will teach the children to read? Temporal thoughts temper tolerance tolerant to teaching towards temperance. Anarchy ensues. Victims victimized verily refusing validation.

Most of this can be described by The Sayyid Qutb Reader by Albert Bergesen.

Today, two authors suggested a radical approach to defeating AQ.

How to Beat al Qaeda at Its Own Game

By Frank J. Cilluffo, Daniel Kimmage

You've probably never heard of Badr Mish'al al-Harbi, but to many, he's a hero. The star of a June 2008 Internet video called "The State of Islam [Shall] Endure," Harbi appeared under the nom de guerre Abu Omar al-Kuwaiti to sing the praises of martyrdom. Two months earlier, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas had profiled him, describing the young man as brave and pious. Today, there are 2,000 Google Arabic hits for his pseudonym.
Harbi's ticket to stardom came postmortem: On April 26, 2008, he blew himself up during a series of al Qaeda attacks in Mosul, Iraq. Soon after, Harbi's comrades in arms succeeded in turning him into an online hero. The victims, Iraqi Muslims, became a statistic.

The story of Badr al-Harbi is a case study of a battleground in the "war on terror" that has long been ignored: the struggle to control the narrative. Contrast the murderer-hero's popularity with the anonymity of his victims, and it becomes clear that al Qaeda has mastered and monopolized the storytelling.

Although elaborate tales such as Harbi's might appear to border on fiction, al Qaeda's control over the publicly told narrative has real consequences across the world. Terrorist radicalization and recruitment are a byproduct of the movies, songs, poetry, essays, and books that tell an emotionally charged story with distinctive vocabulary, clear-cut heroes and villains, and larger-than-life symbols. The story al Qaeda and its ilk tell is about a forceful response to victimization. It works by tapping into real and perceived grievances and peppering the narrative with analogies that fuse history and myth into a powerful sense of identity and purpose.

They may be onto something. The real question is- Is it really this simple?

v/r

Mike