One of the keys to taking down a terrorist/paramilitary organization like ISIS is drying up its pool of recruits by combating “radicalization.” ISIS is very, very good at getting its message out to potential recruits in ways that capture their attention, and the United States government, is…very, very bad at countering it:
They say even just the name of the State Department’s anti-terrorism campaign — “Think Again, Turn Away” — is pretty lame.
“I have a lot of friends in the State Department and I respect their efforts, and their intentions are good, but seriously — ‘think again, turn away?'” said Nadia Oweidat, noting that it’s a hard name to remember and also that those who are sympathetic to ISIS won’t take directives from the U.S. government.
Oweidat, a senior fellow in the international security program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, has some advice for the State Department: Reconsider the whole effort, because it’s just not working well.
“It’s ineffectual. It’s simply ineffectual,” she said.
“It’s not reaching the right population. It’s not reaching the potential jihadists,” added Daniel Cohen, coordinator of the military and strategic affairs program and the cyberwarfare program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
So this is an ongoing issue. The US is trying to improve in this area but so far it’s failing, or flailing, or both. At Brookings’ “Markaz” blog, Will McCants and Clint Watts are wondering why the US government doesn’t try producing a magazine to counter ISIS’s very effective Dabiq publication:
Can you name a single U.S. government publication or online platform devoted to the anti-ISIS fight that is as informative or as widely-read as Dabiq? Is there anything that tells us what all these air sorties are for? Who’s fighting this fight on the ground? What advances the coalition has made and why we should we care? We couldn’t come up with one either.
That got us to thinking: why can’t the U.S. government publish something like Dabiq online? Lack of imagination isn’t the reason. A news magazine isn’t a very creative idea—Americans perfected the form, which ISIS copied. And if anything, folks inside the government have too many overly-imaginative ideas, most of them involving whiz-bang technology. If you’ve thought it, they’ve thought it. A social media campaign for youth to come up with ways to counter violent extremism? Check. Sock-puppetry? Check.
The only real obstacle impeding the U.S. government is itself.
They go on to explain, probably presciently, what would happen if Washington decided to produce a Dabiq of its own: bureaucrats would beat all the most interesting parts out of it until what was left was both uninformative and uninteresting. What they’re left wondering is: how can the US counter ISIS’s more sophisticated digital propaganda if we can’t even counter its in-house magazine?
But I think this kind of misses the point. Even if you could somehow overcome the problem of bureaucratic ineptitude or whatever, who are we expecting would actually read this hypothetical magazine? Would anybody who’s already been radicalized enough to seek out and read Dabiq (it’s not like you can pick a copy up at the local 7/11) actually be interested in reading anything from the US government? Are there really any young Muslims out there thinking, “hm, ‘Death to America’ or ‘USA A-OK’? I just can’t decide. Guess I’ll go with whoever has the nicest magazine”? By the time these people have gotten to the point where they’re reading (or are even interested in reading) Dabiq, they’re already too far gone for even the slickest USG-produced #content, sorry.
For what it’s worth, I feel kind of the same way every time someone in the government starts talking about how ISIS is perverting Islam and you kids at home should be aware of this. I mean, they are, and I certainly understand Washington’s desire (its need, really) to isolate ISIS from mainstream Islam in its rhetoric, but is this what alienated Muslim young people want? Lectures about their own religion from the United States government? Is that really going to win hearts and minds?
So the real problem here is that maybe there is no propaganda that the USG can successfully use to deprogram somebody who’s already become an ISIS follower/sympathizer. No matter how cool you think you’ve made your message, or what a great job you think you’ve done extolling America’s virtues, they’re probably not listening anyway. The message needs to come from leaders within the Muslim community and from personal interventions by parents, friends, etc. And even that isn’t sufficient, as any number of lone-wolf shooters who never got any family intervention have demonstrated over the years. The real ways to stop radicalization have little or nothing to do with directly communicating with potential radicals, because radicalization’s causes–alienation, disempowerment, frustration–have to be killed at the root.
You want to prevent radicalization? Stop making it harder for immigrant families to integrate. Stop demonizing immigrants and refugees. Stop talking about creating lists of Muslims. Stop burning mosques. Stop running the country like the rest of us are little more than human ATMs for the rentier class. You get the idea. But fixing those problems is hard, and uncomfortable, and we’re looking for something easy, some magic 2 minute YouTube video or online magazine that will make angry Muslim kids stop being angry, without actually addressing the causes of their anger. We will never succeed that way.
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