The final theme I’ll examine in George Packer’s Knowing the Enemy is how radicalization occurs. That is, how do non-combatants turn into active members of the global Salafi militant movement?

Australian LTC David Kilcullen, the primary figure in Packer’s article, references Marc Sageman and Olivier Roy’s work as he argues that:

“There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’ ” Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.” He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

This perspective leads to different metrics for success from what day-to-day press reports imply. The global struggle against the militant Salafi movement is not a popularity contest, rather it is a struggle over ideas and systems. Darren Kaplan made this case three years ago over at strategypage. Or, as Kilcullen puts it,

…winning hearts and minds is not a matter of making local people like you—as some American initiates to counterinsurgency whom I met in Iraq seemed to believe—but of getting them to accept that supporting your side is in their interest…

Looking at the issue from this perspective produces a need for different strategies for confronting individuals within the movement. Active members of the militant global Salafi movement need “counter-subversion, which Kilcullen compares to helping young men leave gangs.” In other words, there is a convergence between international security considerations for the Long War and domestic strategies for addressing urban violence.

Incidentally, this line of thinking leads Kilcullen to make a connection that might be familiar to long time readers of Opposed Systems Design:

In a lecture that Kilcullen teaches on counterterrorism at Johns Hopkins, his students watch “Fight Club,” the 1999 satire about anti-capitalist terrorists, to see a radical ideology without an Islamic face.

Without a clear understanding of these dynamics, we will lose the ability to think strategically. We need reach a level of insight sufficient to define a lasting strategy that will be neither Democratic nor Republican, because this struggle transcends domestic partisan concerns. To be sure, there are plenty of factions within our strategic debates but to attempt to organize these factions into the domestic political spectrum is a recipe for incoherence.