Part 9 (2/2)

THE STATE OF TERROR.

ISIS traces its lineage back to the founding of al Qaeda in 1988, but the heirs to Abu Musab al Zarqawi have wrought a creation that feels both old and new. It is a millenarian group whose goal is to ”return Islam to an imaginary ideal of original purity,”1 while creating a worldwide caliphate. Like all fundamentalist movements, it is an inherently modern movement. While they see themselves as turning back time to practice a truer, purer version of their religion, ISIS is reinterpreting its religion in an ”innovative and radical way,” to use Karen Armstrong's description of fundamentalism,2 and exploiting every opening it can find. ISIS aims to cleanse the world of all who disagree with its ideology.

But ideology is not all of its appeal. ”Some are flocking to ISIS not because of its ideology, but also because it represents to them a rallying force against establishments that have failed them, or against the west,” Marwan Muasher explains.3 There have been many millenarian groups like ISIS throughout history, although ISIS trumps most for wealth and violence in the world today. While its military has had successes in Iraq and Syria, it is quite small compared to the world's real powers. No nation in the world has recognized it as a state.

ISIS flaunts its cruelty, and that literally shameless practice is perhaps its most important innovation. Its public display of barbarism lends a sense of urgency to the challenge it presents and allows it to consume a disproportionate amount of the world's attention.

President Obama has laid out a mission for an international coalition to ”degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. ”We can't erase every trace of evil from the world,” Obama said, emphasizing that the effort would ”not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”4 The coalition's policy, for now, is limited to air strikes paired with a train-and-equip mission for Iraqi forces and the increasingly ephemeral ”moderate Syrian rebels.” In our view, the mission described by the president cannot be accomplished with the limitations he has set out. Less than a week after President Obama spoke, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hinted that he might feel the need to recommend ground forces.5 Even ground forces would likely not be enough to completely destroy ISIS. Absent a military invasion that would somehow-improbably, magically-transform both Iraq and Syria into truly viable, pluralistic states in which Sunnis and s.h.i.+'a both feel secure, ISIS would likely remain, at least as a terrorist group, for many years to come.

Beyond the necessity to oversee political change in both Iraq and Syria, a tall order indeed, the international impact of ISIS must also be considered, as it inspires oaths of loyalty and acts of violence in nearly every corner of the globe. As with its military might, ISIS's potential to wreak terrorism has been limited until now, although the alignment of regional terror groups such as Jund al Khalifah in Algeria and Ansar Bayt al Maqdis in Egypt raise serious concerns going forward.

The broader problem is that jihadism has become a millenarian movement6 with ma.s.s appeal, in some ways similar to the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and '70s, although its goals and the values it represents are far different.

Today's radicals are expressing their dissatisfaction with the status quo by making war, not love. They are seduced by Thanatos rather than Eros. They ”love death as much as you [in the West] love life,” in Osama bin Laden's famous and often-paraphrased words. In this dark new world, children are seen to reenact beheadings with their toys, seduced by a familiar drama of the good guys killing the bad guys in order to save the world. Twitter users adopt the black flag by the tens of thousands. And people who barely know anything about Islam or Iraq are inspired to emulate ISIS's brutal beheadings.

ISIS has established itself as a new paradigm, one that is more brutal, more sectarian, and more apocalyptic in its thinking than the groups that preceded it. ISIS is the crack cocaine of violent extremism, all of the elements that make it so alluring and addictive purified into a crystallized form.

ISIS's goals are impossible, ludicrous, but that does not mean it can be easily destroyed. Our policies must look to the possible, which means containing and hopefully eliminating its military threat and choking off its export of ideas.

Circ.u.mstances will almost certainly have changed in between the writing of these words and their publication.

But certainly the history of ISIS and al Qaeda before it show that overwhelming military force is not a solution to hybrid organizations that straddle the line between terrorism and insurgency. Our hammer strikes on al Qaeda spread its splinters around the world. Whatever approach we take in Iraq and Syria must be focused on containment and constriction, rather than simply smas.h.i.+ng ISIS into ever more virulent bits.

We can speak more authoritatively about efforts to counter ISIS as an extremist group and ideology. Here we have specific suggestions that are likely to remain relevant despite whatever happens on the military front.

ISIS's military successes are formidable. But the international community has dealt with far worse. ISIS does not represent an existential threat to any Western country. Perhaps the most important way to counter ISIS's efforts to terrify us is to govern our reactions, making sure our policies and political responses are proportionate to the threat ISIS represents.

We asked Steven Pinker, who has written extensively on violence in society, to compare the atrocities of ISIS to those of the past. He wrote in an email: In terms of the sheer number of victims, they are nowhere near the n.a.z.is (six million Jews alone, to say nothing of the exterminated gypsies, h.o.m.os.e.xuals, Poles and other Slavs, plus the tens of millions of deaths caused by their invasions and bombings). Mao and Stalin have also been credited with tens of millions of deaths. In the 20th century alone, we also have Pol Pot, Imperial j.a.pan, the Turks in Armenia, the Pakistanis in Bangladesh, and the Indonesians during the Year of Living Dangerously.7 None of this minimizes the impact of ISIS. They kill their enemies and minorities who offend them with deliberate and brazen cruelty. They sell women and children into slavery and subject them to abominable s.e.xual abuse. They kill anyone who opposes them and anyone who refuses to accept their bizarre system of belief, which has been rejected as morally wrong by jihadist clerics we once considered the worst of the worst.

Neither its leaders nor its bloodthirsty adherents see the slightest problem in publicizing and celebrating their atrocities. Some of this is calculated, at least at the leaders.h.i.+p level, to frighten potential victims and to attract new psychopathic recruits. But this violence is now pervasively ingrained in the society ISIS is trying to build, with disturbing ramifications for the innocent children growing up in its charnel-house ”caliphate.”

Our horror and revulsion are appropriate responses to this regime of atrocities, and we can and should do what is in our power to help ISIS's victims, but we should measure our actions to avoid spreading its ideology and influence.

ISIS evokes disproportionate dread. As we have shown, the ”availability” of ISIS's crimes, together with its evil, makes us p.r.o.ne to exaggerate the risk, and p.r.o.ne to react rather than strategize.

Political leaders and policy makers are particularly susceptible to ad hoc policy making with little regard to competing interests, in large measure because ISIS is so good at manipulating our perceptions.8 Decision makers are pressured by a bias toward action, the understandable desire to respond swiftly and visibly to threats. Our political system and security bureaucracies incentivize theatrical action over caution and consideration of unintended consequences and the long term.9 ”Action is consolatory,” Joseph Conrad tells us in Nostromo. ”It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.”

Any effort to make the world a better place can have the perverse effect of creating new risks-just as an aspirin can aggravate a stomach ulcer.10 We need not look as far back as the 2003 invasion of Iraq for a lesson in perverse effects. The 2011 intervention in Libya provides a more recent example. There were profoundly compelling humanitarian reasons to support the popular rebellion against Moammar Gadhafi. But it is nearly impossible to argue that either Iraqis or Libyans are better off than they were before our interventions. These military actions, which seemed imperative at the time, introduced a new risk, and an explosion of jihadism has engulfed both countries. In both places, ISIS has staked its claim to territories and mounted fighting forces.

The only thing worse than a brutal dictator is no state at all.

The rise of ISIS is, to some extent, the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power, but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will, and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. What remained were ruins.

If there is a final nail in the coffin of a full-scale military intervention to defeat ISIS, it is the incongruity of targeting the jihadists while Bashar al a.s.sad remains in power. a.s.sad's regime has tortured thousands of political prisoners to death. He has bombed hospitals and schools. An average of 5,000 Syrian refugees are fleeing every day, totaling more than 3 million registered refugees, most of them in neighboring countries. Jordan is overwhelmed by the refugee burden, and it is clearly inc.u.mbent on other nations to shoulder more of the burden. An additional 6.5 million people are displaced inside Syria.11 Arguably, the Western-led intervention against ISIS has already aided a.s.sad. With the rebels fully engaged in infighting, a.s.sad's forces have hit the same targets bombed by the coalition.12 U.S. strikes against Jabhat al Nusra and Ahrar al Sham have resulted in more infighting among rebel factions and further marginalization of the secular groups.13 As Charles Lister of the Brookings Inst.i.tution wrote in December 2014 after interviewing dozens of rebel faction leaders: For the Syrian opposition, the a.s.sad regime and ISIS are two sides of the same coin, but with a.s.sad being ”the head of the snake” and ISIS merely ”the tail.” The U.S.-led coalition's failure to target the regime is therefore perceived as tantamount to a hostile act against the revolution. Moreover, while surprising to outsiders, the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra is still to this day perceived by many as an invaluable actor in the fight against Damascus and as such, the strikes on its positions are seen by many as evidence of U.S. interests being contrary to the revolution. Although this perception may be subtly changing, with one Syrian Salafist commander admitting that ”Nusra is going down the wrong path,” the strike on a headquarters of Syrian group Ahrar al-Sham late on November 5-confirmed to me by multiple Syrian and international sources-consolidated this impression that U.S. interests have diverged from those of Syria's revolution.14 Even if Western voters could be convinced to support a full-scale invasion to remove a.s.sad, what would happen in the ensuing vacuum? The cautionary tales of Iraq and Libya loom large. In the words of Lieutenant General Daniel P. Bolger (ret.), who served as a senior commander in Iraq: The surge in Iraq did not ”win” anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans' unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today's stalemate. Like a handful of aspirin gobbled by a fevered patient, the surge cooled the symptoms. But the underlying disease didn't go away. The remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni insurgents we battled for more than eight years simply re-emerged this year as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. . . .

We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn't understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We're made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam. As a general, I got it wrong. . . .

Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren't enough, we're told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we're there.15 General Bolger argues that we would have needed to occupy Iraq for three decades to create a viable state, echoing similar arguments made at the time by both Jim Webb and then Secretary of State Powell.16 The problem is that if we're not prepared for a thirty-year occupation, we cannot create a viable state in Syria, and even that level of commitment comes with no guarantee of success. And if there is anything we ought to have learned from our mistakes in both Iraq and Libya, a failed state is the worst of all possible outcomes.

On August 14, 2014, Haider al Abadi took over from Nouri al Maliki as prime minister of Iraq. He faces a daunting task in stemming the chaos and healing a society profoundly riven by ethnic and religious strife, a fire that rekindled under Maliki and has been stoked continually since by ISIS.

We wish him well, but we do not-and should not-necessarily expect that the postWorld War II boundaries of the Middle East will remain intact. The devolution of powers to the regions, with a limited central government, may be, as Leslie Gelb has long argued, the only policy glue that will prevent the outright breakup of Iraq.17 Gelb has proposed that Sunni, Kurdish, and s.h.i.+'ite regions each be responsible for their own domestic laws and internal security. To some extent, this is a fait accompli for the Kurds.

”The Middle East is clearly in one of those pivotal moments,” said General David Petraeus in July. ”We're in a period of history where the organizing principles, the lines on the map drawn by British and French diplomats early last century, are being erased.”18 How can we stop this carnage, without inadvertently a.s.sisting ISIS, a.s.sad, or both? If a military operation only serves to create more insurgents than it takes out, it is not a useful operation. If we cannot practically impose a political and military solution on the region, we can at least learn from our past mistakes.

Instead of smas.h.i.+ng ISIS in the same way we approached al Qaeda, Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Inst.i.tute proposes, we should consider ”letting them rot,” in some ways the modern equivalent of a medieval siege.19 The rot may already be setting in. Reports in December indicated that ISIS's capitals in Iraq and Syria, Mosul and Raqqa respectively, are suffering under dramatically deteriorated living conditions.20 Rather than trying to displace ISIS with an external force, we should consider efforts to cut off its ability to move fighters, propaganda, and money in and out of the regions it controls, weakening its ability to use brute force and extreme violence to keep the local population in check. It would also force ISIS to fail based on its own actions instead of being displaced by outsiders, which would do much over the long run to discredit future efforts at jihadist nation building. Such a strategy would have to be probed for its own pitfalls and weighed against the moral conundrums it presents, especially as it pertains to the human costs that ISIS could impose on the population in the areas it controls. Targeted military action may be able to inhibit ISIS's ability to carry out genocide with impunity, but it will not entirely remove that ability. Our military approach will unavoidably need to evolve along with the situation on the ground.

THE EXTREMIST MIND.

Fundamentalists see religious texts as inerrant guides to life. But even for those who see scripture as the literal word of G.o.d, the people who read it and interpret it are human and fallible, a concept fundamentalists are often unable to conceptualize as it applies to themselves, although they happily apply it to others.

This is not particular to ISIS or to jihadists; it applies to many violent fundamentalists across a range of ideologies, whom we have spoken with and studied. Readers bring their prejudices and pain to religious texts.

Salafism, like all fundamentalisms, is a response to the pain of modernity. Karen Armstrong, a former nun, has studied fundamentalism across different religions. She observes: Fundamentalist movements in all faiths . . . reveal a deep disappointment and disenchantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. They also express real fear. Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied is convinced that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out.21 What seems to be most appealing about violent fundamentalist groups-whatever combination of reasons an individual may cite for joining-is the simplification of life and thought. Good and evil are brought out in stark relief. Life is transformed through action. Martyrdom-the supreme act of heroism and wors.h.i.+p-provides the ultimate relief from life's dilemmas, especially for individuals who feel deeply alienated and confused, humiliated, or desperate.

Although ISIS, like many fundamentalist groups, claims to be practicing the religion in its purest, most original form, this represents a longing, not a reality.

Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist and researcher, has studied the role of complexity in conflict, including how it plays into extremist narratives. His work and that of others supports our own observation that violent extremist messaging and narratives are less complex than similar messages from nonviolent movements, stripping narratives down to their bare essentials with little qualification or elaboration. (His research compared al Qaeda and AQAP messaging to that of nonviolent Islamists.)22 Integrative complexity, defined by Suedfeld as being able to examine problems from different perspectives and make cognitive connections drawing on those different perspectives, is not the same thing as intelligence. Extremists are sometimes exceptionally intelligent. Rather, it applies to flexibility of thought and the ability to see things from someone else's point of view. Studies have found that integrative complexity and empathy are closely correlated, with empathy being the emotional equivalent of the cognitive process.23 Research by Jose Liht and Sara Savage of the University of Cambridge suggests that it is possible to promote integrative complexity among people vulnerable to extremist radicalization.24 This suggests two possible avenues for countering the appeal of ISIS and groups like it. First, we can attempt to continually reinforce messages that flesh out the nuance and complexity of the situations and conditions that extremists use to recruit, undermining the incorrect thesis that the problems faced by communities vulnerable to radicalization are easily reduced to absolutes.

In practice, this means refusing to characterize our conflict with ISIS in stark, ideological terms, an uphill battle in the current media and political climate, which tends to incentivize simple explanations. It is further complicated when ISIS theatricalizes dreaded risks such as beheadings to evoke a stripped-down primal response. In many ways, The Management of Savagery outlines a specific psychological campaign designed to provoke enemies into the same simplistic thinking that dominates jihadist thought-al Naji refers to the process as ”polarization,” and that is why those who argue that ISIS's public displays of brutality will backfire are wrong (up to a point). The object of ISIS's extreme displays of violence is to polarize viewers into sharply divided camps of good and evil, not to rally the general public around its actions.

The second prescription follows from the first. Our policies must not lend credence and support to ISIS's simplistic and apocalyptic worldview. When ISIS began beheading Westerners on video in September 2014, it did so with the intention of prodding the United States into an ever-deeper engagement in Iraq, consistent with the blueprint in The Management of Savagery. ISIS

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