Strategy, Values and Ideas

[davidbfpo]

There is a debate reported within the Muslim world about current events, but as a Muslim (Deobandi) colleague admitted there is no debate - in the UK - on the 'J' question. What is really Jihad? Have the extremists hijacked Jihad from it's traditional interpretation?

Is the "battle of ideas" one which non-Muslims can influence, even participate in? I have my doubts. So how can we as outsiders encourage and support the "battle"? By talent spotting those who will argue and providing covert support - shades of the Cold War.

How can we do that outside Western Europe / USA? Where I suspect spotting and covert support are far more difficult. Are there people ready to argue?

davidbfpo

[invictus0972]

Hi Davidbfpo,

Good news. . .yes! Muslim scholars like Shaykh Salman al Qadah have criticized the 9/11 attacks for their blatant killing of noncombatants (Rosenau, 1142). In fact, Qadah is in favor of open dialogue with the West, and he is not the only Muslim scholar who thinks this way. Many moderate Muslim scholars already have an online presence (Resaba et al, 133). At www.free-minds.org, Saudi Islamic scholars advocate peaceful variants of dawa as a counter to the violent salafist ideology. The United States should support these types of scholars as an alternative to the violent preaching of Islamic insurgents, but support for these types should be covert because the Muslim world would see their message as tainted if openly backed by the United States.

[walrus]

I think you have it right Invictus. Professor Michael Howard in his excellent work "The Invention of Peace" talks about this in his last chapter prophetically called "The Tomahawk versus the Kalashnikov".

He observes that in many countries (without naming names) the only people espousing western values are a very small elite of whom the majority of the population are deeply suspicious. Pakistan is, I think, a case in point.

But it still begs the question: "what are we doing to win over Muslim moderates?". Where are the "alternative" schools to the madrassas? Where are the scholarships for muslim academics to visit the West? Where is the covert and overt support of moderate muslim opinion-makers and clerics? Where are the friendship societies, muslim-american solidarity committees, leagues of democratic muslim youth and the similar panoply of outreach organisations we employed to great effect during the cold war?

I do not accept for one minute the "existential threat argument" since I have first hand expereince that the average muslim doesn''t give a damn about that - which is why many try and migrate (illegally) to the West.

The only "outreach" we are doing these days seems to be with the bullet, the waterboard, and secret prisons, at least to the muslim mind.

[invictus0972]

Hi Walrus,

Thanks for the reply. You are right to suggest that we are relying too much on "hard power" (bullets). The funny thing is that hard power is a COA that could work. Unfortunately, it would take a merciless application of "hard power" in order to achieve success. For example, we could completely destroy a village from which a bomb maker is from. If we razed three or four Iraqi villages, I submit that this would have an affect on the number of people volunteering to make bombs. We could say, "Bomb makers! If we catch you making bombs, we are not only going to kill you but we are going to kill your family, your friends, and your dog!" This is the tactic that Alexander and the Roman Legions used to pacify conquered populations, and it is effective to a degree.

The problem with this approach is that the American public, rightfully so, would not tolerate these tactics thereby dismissing them as legitimate COA. Public support for military action is a form of "soft power"; and in the 21st Century, "soft power" has become a much more critical component of military operations. A state can have the most advanced weaponry, the best trained military, and the most vibrant economy, all forms of "hard power", but still be rendered ineffective without the "soft power" of public support. Once policymakers grasp, which I believe they are, the reality of the importance of "soft power", we will be better able to develop and implement defense policies.

[JD]

I have been thinking hard on this issue for a while now and I've laid out an alternative way to conceptualize the struggle for legitimacy. I am trying hard to think as originally as possible so not every idea is going to be a good one but at least there is room for discussion.

Essentially, we are talking about fighting ideas - we are trying to bring about changes to peoples thinking to get them to act in ways we desire. In that case the battlefield is the mind of our adversary and this is where we make the conceptual leap. On this battlefield, we are the weak fighting the strong. If that is the case, we should employ classical insurgent philosophies where the currency is probably legitimacy rather than the classical measures of territory in the physical domain.

Using Maoist philosophy for a physical campaign:
"In China, the Maoist Theory of People's War divides warfare into three phases. In Phase One, the guerrillas earn the population's support by distributing propaganda and attacking the organs of government. In the Phase Two, escalating attacks are launched against the government's military forces and vital institutions. In Phase Three, conventional warfare and fighting are used to seize cities, overthrow the government, and assume control of the country." [Yes, it’s from Wikipedia but it will do]

Imagine instead a domain or battlefield occupied only by ideas with the government of those ideas being legitimacy becasue legitimacy sets the framework in which all other ideas operate. In the first phases, you erode the legitimacy of the opposition by attacking certain ideas that can be easily defeated. In the second phase, you develop your own legitimacy as an alternative to those of the opposition. In the last phase, your legitimacy enters into primacy and becomes the primary referent or government of the other ideas on the battlefield.

Obviously this is all linked to acting in the physical realm.

I throw this up as an alternative model mainly to get ideas so please let me know what you think.

JD

[Rex Brynen]

The resignation of Karen P. Hughes as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy gives President Bush an opportunity to fix one of the most glaring blunders in his administration's response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- a failure to prioritize ideological warfare over public relations.

How to Win The War Of Ideas
By Robert Satloff
Washington Post
Saturday, November 10, 2007; Page A17

[walrus]

JD, I agree completely with you. After all, assuming that an Iraqi population is going to continue to exist in Iraq, and we are one day to leave, the only thing we can live behind are institutions based on our values and ideas. There can be no "victory" without this.

For example, when Britain left India, they left behind their institutions, a civil service, and their values which still exist today as the fight in Pakistan between the High Court and the military is showing today.

To my mind, the use of hard power in an insurgency is to defend the population, and especially the opinion leaders, from insurgents, so that ideas can spread, and the possibility of adopting Western patterns of behaviour (such as democracy) becomes thinkable, in that the consequences of the voicing of such sentiments is no longer a certain death at the hands of the insurgents.

The problem of winning an insurgency situation then reduces to:

1. What are the ideas, values, beliefs we wish to take hold and how do we model and promote them?

2. How is our military force going support the modeling and promotion of our ideas, values and beliefs?

You can then "chunk" the problem down from there.

The policy blunders that have me tearing my hair out for the last five years all relate to our complete failure to model and promote our belief system (absent the one "purple finger" episode), starting by living up to it ourselves, in all our actions, even at cost to ourselves.

To put it another way, why would an Iraqi sign up to a new and unfamiliar system of Government that admits the possibility of torture (waterboarding), detention without trial (Guantanamo, rendition), and a lack of personal privacy (FISA)? These things may have "saved" us from further attacks (although personally I doubt it), but at the cost of completely undermining our credibility as the high priests of Freedom, Liberty and Human Rights, and without that status, what are we offering Iraqis that Saadam didn't offer them?

[St. Christopher]

You are right to suggest that we are relying too much on "hard power" (bullets). The funny thing is that hard power is a COA that could work. Unfortunately, it would take a merciless application of "hard power" in order to achieve success. For example, we could completely destroy a village from which a bomb maker is from. If we razed three or four Iraqi villages, I submit that this would have an affect on the number of people volunteering to make bombs. We could say, "Bomb makers! If we catch you making bombs, we are not only going to kill you but we are going to kill your family, your friends, and your dog!" This is the tactic that Alexander and the Roman Legions used to pacify conquered populations, and it is effective to a degree.

Mike Scheuer has said before that this type of brutality is the only way to truly defeat the current threat. I also have a professor at JHU that likes to use the Roman example of not just burning the city to the ground and killing all the people, but poisoning the earth so no crops could ever grow there again -- hard power but with a brutally symbolic message to others who would contest the empire.

The problem with this approach is that the American public, rightfully so, would not tolerate these tactics thereby dismissing them as legitimate COA. Public support for military action is a form of "soft power"; and in the 21st Century, "soft power" has become a much more critical component of military operations. A state can have the most advanced weaponry, the best trained military, and the most vibrant economy, all forms of "hard power", but still be rendered ineffective without the "soft power" of public support. Once policymakers grasp, which I believe they are, the reality of the importance of "soft power", we will be better able to develop and implement defense policies.

That's pretty perceptive. "Policymakers" is the key to that thought-- most of them are still conventional thinkers and conventional warriors and would not understand the value of, say, buying all the ad-space on a particular TV station in a particular region instead of the latest F-22 heads-up-display gadget.

I would take your description a step further and say that there are very few folks in government today who understand the total requirement for all-out ideological combat. I keep getting laughed at every time a general asks me for suggestions, and I tell him to get his soldiers out of uniform and into local indigenous clothing, take away all their Oakleys, and make them pray five times a day on the streets.