Studies on radicalization & comments

[Dayuhan]

But as the airwaves and print are full of the same steady drum beat of a majority opinion that has us 8 years into a war, and strategcially worse off and an economy in tatters and a national reputation at arguably an all time low to show for it.

I could be wrong, its theory and I have no metrics to prove my case.

There are strong metrics however that the majority opinion is wrong.

There are certainly strong metrics to suggest that current strategy is misguided... though the relationship between "GWOT" strategy and our economic issues is pretty tenuous. I'm not convinced that this strategy is built around a majority opinion on radicalization, though: it seems to me to have derived more from a poorly considered backlash after 9/11, an impulse that was exploited by a relative minority who had long believed that US military force could be used to reshape the Middle East.

It seems to me that the fundamental flaw in current strategy was inaccurate assessment of capacity: we believed we could do things that we did not in fact have the capacity to do. We believed that we could remove governments, and we were right. We believed that we could quickly replace those governments with fully functioning alternatives that would be accepted by the various populaces involved, and we were wrong. We also significantly underestimated our antagonist's capacity to muster opposition to our operations in the countries involved.

It seems to me that your proposal suffers from many of the same problems. You suggest that we can use the threat of withholding aid to move countries to govern better, satisfy their own populaces, and reduce the motivation for insurgencies that target both host nations and the US. For this to even be possible, 4 conditions have to be met:

First, there has to be a government: we can't press a government to reform if there isn't one. Won't work in Somalia or in the various ungoverned spaces in our target areas.

Second the government has to have the capacity to implement the reforms we want. If a government lacks the capacity to perform, pressing it to reform is like threatening to stop feeding a paraplegic who refuses to walk: all you get is starvation. Misgovernment is not always a consequence of willful neglect or exploitation by despots. It also happens when a weak or ineffectual central government is unable to control exploitive or abusive local clans, tribes, power brokers, military units, or other elements of a factionalized populace. I think you'd find that these conditions apply in a number of our target countries.

Third, the government in question has to be dependent on US aid. Many of the countries involved are not. The insurgency in southern Thailand, for example, could certainly be resolved with reform, but the government does not rely on US aid and the threat of withholding aid is not likely to have any effect. We might want to influence the Saudis but we can't do it by withholding aid, because they don't get any aid from us, nor are they in any way dependent on us. Libya, Kuwait, Syria and Sudan are not on our aid list.

Fourth, we have to apply pressure in a way that is not going to provoke a backlash against us. As I've said before, many countries are extremely sensitive to anything that could be perceived as American interference in domestic affairs, and our efforts are likely to be interpreted as self-interested meddling. Populaces are anything but uniform, and substantial parts of any given populace may see our pressure as an unwelcome threat. A country where a portion of the populace opposes the government may also have a portion of the populace that supports the government and resents are pressure. We've recently seen this problem in action: the US put its weight behind a fatally flawed "peace agreement" in the southern Philippines that was supposed to placate one restive segment of the populace, totally failing to anticipate the response of another segment of the populace. Good intentions are not necessarily interpreted as such by the intended beneficiaries. The road to hell, they say, is paved with 'em.

(Oh, and 5 minutes of google research on foreign fighers and and insurgent movements will show you the clear connections that I speak to.

After rather more than that, I don't see a connection. Correlation, perhaps, but no solid evidence of causation, and even the correlation is tenuous. Looking here:

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/jou...p/49-watts.pdf

Ranking by foreign fighter intensity (fighters/100k Muslims) we see that by far the most intense sources of fighters are Libya and Saudi Arabia. Both countries face internal dissent, but in neither case has it reached a level that could credibly called insurgency. The Libyan government is hardly a creation or a tool of the US, and since neither country receives aid from the US it isn't likely that we can change their policies by withholding aid. In Saudi Arabia in particular any suggestion that we are applying pressure toward a move away from monarchy would almost certainly inspire far more resistance than sympathy among the populace.

Next down the list we have Yemen. Substantial US aid, but it's very doubtful that the government has the capacity to initiate significant reform, and the most probable consequence of aid withdrawal is a collapse into full ungoverned-space status. Not a desirable outcome.

Then we have Kuwait, Syria, Tunisia, Jordan... Kuwait and Syria aren't getting aid from us, no leverage there. Tunisia and Jordan, possibly, but now we're getting into environments where the number of foreign fighters is really pretty small and unlikely to be significantly influenced by the policies suggested.

On top of all of this, where is the compelling evidence that foreign fighters are part of a populace driven to insurgency by misgovernment? Experience shows us that religious or ideological fervor, personal discontent, and testosterone can drive some individuals to violence in virtually any governance environment. There's a significant difference between distributed discontent and insurgency.

And I have NEVER, EVER said we should impose our values on others, quite the contrary. In fact, I beat a steady drum that we need to stop the hubris, and stop trying to control every outcome, and to help enable populaces everywhere to enjoy their own self-determination, and that in so doing we will turn down the heat on a global security environment.)

Isn't self-determination one of our core values? Aren't we assuming that populaces want structures that allow for regular changes in government? Don't we tend to let our definitions of these values guide our evaluations of governance in other countries?

Suppose we have a country where .05% of the population is radically disaffected and willing to use violence to express its disaffection, 30% are substantially discontent, may provide indirect support to violence but not participate, and the balance have some gripes but aren't all that opposed to the status quo. Are we going to come in and demand changes that may not satisfy even those who are angry... and who may want to see changes very different from those we are trying to promote?

Certainly the desire to control can cause problems, but it's not the only cause. For much of the 1990s, when our current problems were brewing, our policies seemed driven less by a desire to control than by a desire to deny and ignore.