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CQ WEEKLY - IN FOCUS
Sept. 10, 2007 - Page 2600

Taking a Cue From Britain: Fighting Terrorism With Engagement
By Elaine Monaghan, CQ Staff
With last week’s uncovering of another terrorist plot, this time in Germany, the enemy in the worldwide campaign against terrorism appears to be very much a moving target. The three main suspects are reportedly affiliated with Islamic Jihad Union, a militant Sunni group with ties to al Qaeda. Two are German nationals who converted to Islam; the other is a Turkish-born resident of Germany. All had reportedly trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan and were allegedly protesting German involvement in the occupation of Afghanistan as well as the new secular government of Uzbekistan.

Experts who study Islamic terrorism say this is increasingly its new shape: Far from representing a unified “ideology of hatred,” as the Bush administration has repeatedly insisted, Islamic terrorists in the West are homegrown recruits, hewing to a militant theology capable of adopting a shifting - and growing - range of targets. Frank J. Cilluffo, a former homeland security adviser in the Bush White House, says there has been a wrong-headed mindset within the administration, dating back to the post-Sept. 11 era, “that we can kill and capture our way to victory.” And, he says emphatically, “That’s simply not the case.”

It may have been understandable that, right after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the United States pounded almost exclusively on the operational capabilities of al Qaeda, says Brian Jenkins, a terrorism analyst at the Rand Corp. But he argues that, six years later, the United States needs to start shifting its focus “to the front end of the jihadist cycle” - the point at which potential future terrorists are radicalized and then recruited.

And many independent foreign policy experts are looking to the experience of the closest U.S. ally, Britain, as a model for such a changed emphasis. The strategy emerging in British policy is to face down a threat that exploits a religious worldview by cultivating religiously based alternatives to the theology of extremist terrorism. British authorities have specifically sought to counter “individual radicalization” among young Muslims by forging tentative alliances with Islamic fundamentalists whose views they may not share but who oppose violence.

Outreach to the Fringes
The British began their struggle to understand the extreme fringes of the militant Islamic world with a forbiddingly steep learning curve. Britain has long pursued an open-door policy of granting political asylum to people complaining of rough treatment by their governments - a policy that also opened the door to many terrorist recruits. The attacks on the London Underground of July 7, 2005, and the abortive attacks on a London nightclub and the Glasgow airport this summer were bitter reminders of the scale of the threat in Britain.

At the same time, however, recent law enforcement successes in thwarting terrorist plots have underscored a growing strength of the British anti-terrorist initiative: its strong reliance on full-scale study of terrorist cells - including the ways Islamic beliefs are manipulated to support them.

After the 2005 London subway bombings, H.A. Hellyer of the University of Warwick in England, who has been analyzing Islamist and Muslim groups for years, helped convene a government-appointed task force in Britain that suggested a fresh approach to the radical violent Muslim threat. It emphasized outreach and engagement, including a nationwide “roadshow” featuring popular religious scholars and programs designed to assist Muslim communities tackle extremism themselves.

Hellyer then headed to the Brookings Institution in Washington to study U.S. terrorism policy, an experience he says has only bolstered his belief in the task force’s proposals. By harping on the terrorism conflict as an outgrowth of the “clash of civilizations” - Samuel Huntington’s famous characterization of the encounter of the Muslim world and the secular West - Americans are missing a crucial element for understanding how to combat the global spread of politicized Islamist belief, he argues: outreach to more moderate Muslim groups to counter the recruiting efforts of violent jihadists. What’s more, Hellyer says, the deeply ideological view of Islam tends to paralyze such outreach by suggesting that any engagement with the Muslim world on its own terms would be enabling or coddling the terrorist enemy.

Other experts also suggest that the monolithic view of Islam that has taken hold in U.S. government circles has had the unintended consequence of making the enemy sound more powerful than it is. Stripped of the notion that they are part of a world-conquering religious crusade, the typical Islamic terrorist plotters are little more than “thugs and criminals,” Cilluffo said.

Yet to acquire this less ideologically fraught view, U.S. policy makers need to venture beyond their own reassuring ideological comfort zones, critics of the current approach say. As Hellyer notes, one of the foremost experts on Iran and the spread of Shiite belief in the West is Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University, a short stroll from the White House. “When the administration decided to go into Iraq, they never bothered to talk to him until after the invasion,” he said.

The Think-Tank Gap
With a few exceptions, such as the civil liberties division at the Department of Homeland Security, much of the U.S. policy establishment bypasses first-hand expertise like Nasr’s. Instead, Hellyer and other critics contend, the government’s grasp of the Muslim world tends to arise out of foreign policy think tanks, some of which have a misleadingly unified view of religious Islam. A senior Middle East expert at a Washington think tank, who insisted on anonymity while criticizing his colleagues, put it this way: “There’s a large strand of conservative opinion that paints Islam with a very broad brush and a very alarmist view of what’s happening in Islam as a whole, and lumps terrorism together with the faithful.”

That situation extends to the American public as well, as reflected in Gallup polling in January showing that 57 percent say they know either “nothing” or “not much” about the beliefs and opinions of people in Muslim societies; a 2006 survey found that 55 percent responded with “nothing” or “I don’t know” when asked what they admired most about Muslim societies.

As an example of think-tank ignorance, Hellyer cites attitudes toward Tablighi Jamaat, a proselytizing, revivalist movement originating in India. In his time in Washington, he says, he saw the group characterized as a close ally of al Qaeda. Instead, according to him, it’s a conservative movement that rejects political interpretations of Islam - and any academic paper likening it to al Qaeda would never be published in a reputable journal. But, he laments, such a depiction in the Washington policy community would be regarded as “opinion.”

Actually, Washington experts appear split over whether Tablighi Jamaat is a threat. On the one hand, a militant orthodoxy has taken hold among some former members, including the would-be 2002 shoe-bomber Richard Reid and two of the London subway bombers. And Alex Alexiev of the conservative Center for Security Policy says the estimated 15,000 of the group’s missionaries active in the United States are a “serious national security problem.” On the other hand, Reid and the London plotters became terrorists after leaving the group - presumably, some experts say, after rejecting its less politicized interpretation of Islam.

Diversionary Tactics
While Britain cannot claim a perfect record in thwarting terrorists, Hellyer says, its security services have done much more than the U.S. government to differentiate between clearly dangerous groups and those that oppose the West but also eschew violence. British law enforcement and intelligence agents are reaching out to Muslim communities, he says, “in ways that are unthinkable” in Washington. Other experts also praise Britain’s efforts in this regard - though they note that the country has a much larger homegrown problem. The United States has attracted a more elite Arab population that has assimilated more successfully and is consequently less vulnerable to extremism, many experts say.

“I do get a sense when I sit down with my colleagues from the U.K. that there’s a more sophisticated look at some of these issues,” says Cilluffo, now a homeland security expert at George Washington University.

Among other moves, the British security establishment has engaged fundamentalist Muslims in the fast-growing puritanical, and apolitical, Salafi movement. The thinking there, Hellyer says, is “to divert susceptible youngsters on the streets and prisons from al Qaeda.” Cilluffo, in sizing up the British model, draws a parallel with the way the United States has recruited former gang members to help divert young people away from gang life. “We can’t isolate. We’ve got to engage,” Cilluffo says. “Ultimately, it’s going to be Islamic scholars who will be able to make the case from the Quran that others have hijacked its interpretation.”

Bruce Hoffman of the Rand Corp. says there has been “no progress” by the Bush administration in building a thorough understanding of the terrorist threat since early last year, when his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee’s terrorism subcommittee characterized the government as ignorant. To gain a better understanding of the enemy and reach out to potential extremists, Hoffman advocates significantly stepping up a positive U.S. presence on the sprawling Islamic areas of the Internet, where most experts agree that recruiting is most likely to take place, particularly in the United States.

“For the past six years, we’ve been either guessing or using conjecture seen through an American prism,” he says.

Last month, President Bush sought to counter such criticisms by stressing that the United States had built new institutions to coordinate homeland defense and intelligence collection. At the same time, however, he stressed the lurid image of Islamic extremists as “cold-blooded killers” who would “wreak havoc through death” on U.S. shores. Jenkins, Hoffman’s Rand colleague, says such pronouncements mistakenly cast the enemy in cartoonish terms. “If you have a two-dimensional perception of your foe, it’s very difficult to have a sophisticated three-dimensional strategy,” he said.

But based on his time in Washington, Hellyer argues that rethinking the U.S. approach to the problem of Islamic terrorism will mean more than revising White House rhetoric. It’s a matter, he suggests, of reorienting much of the capital’s foreign policy establishment. “You have people with no credibility spouting all these sexy Arabic words that give them an air of authenticity,” he said. “It’s blatantly clear that they have no idea what they’re talking about, and are simply trying to lump all movements and groups that are not 100 percent pro-American with al Qaeda.”

Nasr, the Iran scholar, says this knowledge gap feeds Islamic distrust of the West as well. “Washington talks about democracy all the time,” he said. But many Muslims view that version of democracy as little more, he says, “than the right to eat apple pie for breakfast.”

FOR FURTHER READING:
Homeland security challenges, CQ Weekly, p. 2266; U.S.-Turkey relations, p. 2097; outreach to Muslims, p. 1894; U.S.-Pakistan relations, p. 1816; administration rhetoric, p. 1016.