Ideological Conflict and the Indirect Approach
Fred Burton has an excellent analysis up on Stratfor discussing the campaign against al Qaeda nodes outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. In his summary, Burton offers one of the best succinct descriptions of the challenge I’ve seen:
Though the campaign to disrupt the local nodes… has been very successful, it is important to remember that this is not so much a war against a group of individuals as it is a war against an ideology.
The problem for the United States is that it cannot fight this ideological war, and any efforts it openly supports — including the Arabic television station Al Hurra — are quickly tainted and discredited. The U.S. government, therefore, must sit on the sidelines while moderate Muslim scholars refute the theology of jihadism. Meanwhile, Washington can only hope the message gets through.
This realization gets overlooked in much of the day-to-day discussion of winning hearts and minds in Iraq or of fighting radicalism. Of course, direct and ham-handed attempts to do this are recognized as the sales jobs that they are and ignored. Which is why transparency has been such a theme in my posts. [1] [2] [3] We cannot directly influence the revolution within Islam, so all we can do is show the world as honest a portrait of ourselves as possible. Even when we may wish we could airbrush that portrait, it will be better to demonstrate that we’ll follow the principle of openess rather than try to fool the world and end up looking silly when the truth inevitibly comes out. Turning such inevitable embaressing incidents into demonstrations of principle, instead of the standard scandal narrative of cover-up and superficial fixes, will indirectly challenge closed societies to answer why they are not as open. This indirect approach won’t appeal to those with a penchant for direct action, but it may be one of our best tools in 21st Century conflicts.
[1] Knowing the Enemy Part II: Strategic Perspective
[2] Transparency, not Secrecy
[3] IO and PR
