Counterterrorism Beyond Shock and Awe, Part II

December 23, 2007

George McFadden

To fight terror groups with such lineage, creative capabilities, and adaptability with military power alone is to ignore the lessons of history and ignore the realities of today’s world. The Iraq Study Group Report sought to bring our effort to realign our national interest in the Iraq conflict into a more integrated dimension in which all elements of national power are used to more effective ends. Extrapolated and expanded, the Report should be reworked to apply against the global war against terrorists and extremism. Increased multilateral diplomatic and economic initiatives, out-of-the-box analytical approaches, increased linguistic and cultural capabilities in government agencies are just a few of the subjects addressed by the recommendations included in the Report that are applicable to this war at large. Indeed the type of effort represented by the Iraq Study Group project in which bipartisan public sector practitioners with collective experience in all domains of government participate should be a regular feature of our policy establishment as we move forward in the 21st century. The addition of public and private sector personalities with appropriate experience would be a valuable innovation to U.S. foreign policy formulation. There are some signs that this may slowly be taking place.

The fact that we have been so flat-footed in this war is a sad commentary on our current abilities to manage complexity in the modern world. The national power element of information is an instructive example. We are the nation that invented the Internet and developed the fundamental techniques of mass communications. Yet in spite of this, we now face an adversary that makes maximum use of the Internet to promote a militant ideology, command and control forces, raise funds, and attract recruits. In addition, they use it to bring the war to our desktops in the way that television brought the Vietnam war into our living rooms. In a way that seems to elude us, they have managed to bring Marshall McLuhan’s vision of the global village to a new level. Much of the militants’ ideology gains traction by default simply because no one refutes it. Their most outrageous claims are believed because we have no systematic effort to put the lie to them. Despite years of a continuing problem in this regard, we still have no comprehensive interagency strategic communications strategy.

The absorption of the U.S. Information Agency into the State Department in 1999 left the country without an effective capability to promote our messages just as the need became the greatest. Multiplying adversaries and new communications technologies made the case for a new approach to strategic communications more important than ever. After 911, we paid a steep price for our inability to effectively communicate. Karen Hughes’ valiant efforts notwithstanding, public diplomacy in the face of such a skilled adversary demanded more than ad agency skills as she has painfully learned. It also costs money. Hollywood productions routinely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce but the government is loath to spend on a similar scale to exploit new and old media to promote U.S. policy.

There are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Public and private efforts are slowly taking up the challenge but not as fast as they should to counter our nimble adversaries. The Center for the Study of the Presidency is now laying the groundwork for the creation of a proposed Foundation for International Understanding which would harness all forms of media to promote understanding, respect, and shared learning across borders and cultures, with a special focus on reaching young people across the world. To reach broad and diverse audiences, the FIU would support a wide range of media productions including television and radio programming and new media applications such as webcasts, podcasts, educational video games, content for cell phone and other mobile media devices, and international video-conferencing. It would respond to new challenges in understanding and tolerance, and to innovations in today’s technology-driven media and entertainment markets. The FIU would not produce or distribute programming itself but would promote and seed efforts globally through grant awards. It would become to public and private diplomacy efforts what the National Science Foundation is to scientific research.

The Language Corps, an initiative announced in May 2007 by the Department of Defense, seeks to address the dire need for language and cultural capabilities throughout the government. In a three-year pilot program, DoD will take the lead in organizing a civilian volunteer program that will draw upon language skills of the general population. The Corps will be composed of members who volunteer to serve for a predefined period in times of national emergency for all agencies of government. Drawing upon the linguistic diversity that is an integral part of American culture, the Language Corps aims to bridge the language preparedness gap throughout the government, give citizens an opportunity to contribute in times of national need, and reinforce the importance of language skills in the United States, especially in the educational system. This creative program leverages America’s unique strengths and intellectual capital and is precisely the type of approach so sorely need in confronting our current unconventional adversary.

Other private NGO’s, or non-governmental organizations, are undertaking similar creative approaches. Bill Drayton’s Ashoka Foundation, which conceived of “social entrepreneurship” by applying the venture capital model to social innovation worldwide, is already a known quantity in the innovative development world. The Kroll Foundation’s Social Edge online community of social entrepreneurs and supporters is exploiting technology to create global networks to share ideas and best practices to further promote social entrepreneurship. Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Foundation is forging partnerships with locals under the most demanding circumstances in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other Central Asian locations to build girls’ schools. Mortenson has been so successful that graduates of his first schools have now trained teachers for newer schools educating newer generations of female students.

This type of development activity is what democracy is made of. In their groundbreaking work on the impact of culture on political and social development, Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Christian Welzel of the International University Bremen have quantified the effects of economic development on social change and the evolution of democracy in traditional societies. One of their most significant findings is that survival level needs must be met on an individual level before the group dynamics of civil society can begin to manifest themselves as a prelude to the adoption of democratic systems. Inglehart, the Chairman of the World Values Survey Association, presides over a network of social scientists who have carried out surveys measuring social values and attitudes in over 80 countries since 1981. It is this data on which their work is based. The implications of their work are staggering because it shows that our foreign policy obsession with elections as a prelude to democracy adoption puts the cart before the horse. It show that individuals must feel secure and be open to interpersonal trust before they can begin the civil society implementation that leads to open and reliable institutions that, in turn, lead to democratic elections. This is a reality our adversaries know all too well. By providing the social services lacking in many parts of the world, militant Islamists and others create a feeling of individual security that they then manipulate for political ends. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have managed to do the opposite. We have violated almost every element of the survival imperative and then forced elections which paved the way for election victories by Islamic radicals and warlords who are enforcing the peace locally, as harsh as their methods may be.

Our traditional method of elite-to-elite diplomacy is clearly not up to the task of countering our adversaries in the post-cold war world. Conducting this traditional type of private diplomacy from embassy and consulate fortresses far from the public eye, many embassy staffs appear remote and distant from the citizens of the countries in which they serve. One of Condoleeza Rice’s first actions as Secretary of State was to issue a directive assigning more State Department personnel further out from the capitals of their countries’ missions. This was a good start but more needs to be done to match the comprehensive social and cultural depth of our adversaries. While we dispense more foreign assistance than any other nation on earth, we often hand it over to host country governments or organizations like the UN who dispense it while the U.S. government remains invisible. There must be more direct involvement by U.S. representatives at all levels to demonstrate that American foreign policy involves more than writing checks and, as our adversaries claim, bullying innocent populations with military force.

One enduring institution that accomplishes this objective is the Peace Corps. Since 1961, it has sent Americans to the developing world where they serve at those levels of society in which traditional diplomatic efforts were absent. Originally conceived to win hearts and minds during the cold war, over 187,000 Americans have passed through its ranks and served as volunteers often under the most trying circumstances. As a public diplomacy asset, the Peace Corps is probably the most cost effective tool in the U.S. soft power tool kit. And as a Brooking Institution brief noted in 2003, “its cost is miniscule.” Today there are 7,749 volunteers serving in 73 countries, with an annual budget of $318.8 million. That works out to a net cost of $41,140 per volunteer – a bargain compared to other government programs. Despite the Bush administration’s proposal in 2003 to double the size of the Peace Corps to 14,000, it has remained static since then. Its effectiveness is constrained by this limited scope despite the fact that it is an established “brand” in the limited U.S. repertoire of people-to-people public diplomacy.

The Peace Corps yields other benefits that are perhaps its strongest suite. The third objective of the Peace Corps states that returned Peace Corps volunteers share their experiences and knowledge of their countries of service with their fellow citizens once they return home – and this is a lifelong commitment. In this era of globalization, citizens with intimate knowledge of foreign cultures and languages are crucial to an informed electorate in our own democracy. Kevin Quigley, the President of the National Peace Corps Association, which is the national association of Peace Corps veterans, hopes to use the power of modern communications technologies to put this collective experience to greater use. He proposes to establish online communities to facilitate communications between current and former Peace Corps volunteers and people in their countries of service in a dramatic digital people-to-people initiative. This type of public diplomacy is exactly the type of creative effort needed to put the lie to the type of anti-American misinformation that is so central to our adversaries’ propaganda. If people in their target audiences could immediately verify the veracity, or lack thereof, of the numerous canards that are promoted daily by adversarial information conduits, it would foster a wholesale exchange of ideas that could greatly benefit forces of moderation and diminish extremists’ arguments.

Asked recently about the disjointed governmental activities in the war on terror, Center for the Study of the Presidency President David Abshire – a man with over 50 years of experience in the military and foreign policy establishments – responded by pointing to a passage from Abraham Lincoln’s second annual address to Congress in 1862: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew."

Indeed, an integrated approach marshalling all instruments of national power and the creativity of the nation is required if we are to prevail. Hard military power, necessary to this effort and carried out by the brave few, needs to be matched by soft power efforts from all corners of government. Former Australian Army colonel and current US advisor David Kilcullen recently wrote an incisive analysis of our current security challenge in an article entitled New Paradigms for 21st Century Conflict. In it, he argues that our current adversary challenges almost every paradigm upon which our foreign policies and security policies are predicated. He concludes that “finding new, breakthrough ideas to understand and defeat these threats may prove to be the most important challenge we face.” More importantly, these breakthroughs need to be managed and synchronized with a coherency that matches the task so that our ideas and policies are effective through attraction rather than coercion.

George McFadden is a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and a former Peace Corps volunteer who served in Morocco