Want
to Fight Terrorism? Think Globally, Act Locally
Khalid Mustafa Medani
Globe and Mail (Toronto, 8/4/08)
Militant Islam is under global scrutiny for clues to conditions that
foster its rise, and to strategies for reversing that growth. But
the key is not in Islamic doctrine, US foreign policy or formal ties
to various nations, as many analysts have asserted. It lies at the
community level, with clan and local leaders.
Contrary to popular misconceptions, jihadists remain a minority in
Muslim countries. Yet armed militants and suicide bombers continue
to wreak havoc worldwide and militant recruitment shows no sign of
abating. The reason is found where most recruitment occurs: ungoverned
areas of failing or repressive states where public resources are stolen,
wasted or otherwise not used for productive social ends.
For centuries, local clan and community leaders -- for better or worse
-- have been the dominant authority in Middle Eastern cultures. Recently,
however, central governments, fearing rival power centers or opposition,
have eliminated many of these local leaders. In such restless neighborhoods,
militant jihadists with international funding quietly fill the vacuum
of authority. They establish informal financial services, welfare
organizations, pharmacies, schools, clinics, unregulated banks and
mosques. They declare religious war on black marketers, street crime,
smugglers and overcharging merchants, offering material incentives
to recruits, and executing rivals and women’s advocates along
the way. Their services attract genuine, popular reformers.
By meeting people’s secular needs and capturing local heroes,
the militants don a mantle of legitimacy. They preach against conspicuous
consumption and establish sharia to resolve disputes. In Sudan, militants
gradually took over the demoralized and low-paid civil service in
the 1990s, dismissed non-Islamists and installed their own people.
Areas under jihadi control became havens for operational planning
and training.
Policymakers should not assume a tottering state automatically breeds
militancy. Terrorists sometimes operate under government patronage,
bullying local elites while central authority protects them from reprisal.
But, in short, the weaker that traditional authorities are in providing
leadership and services and maintaining order, the stronger the likelihood
that militants will find recruits.
An effective strategy against them, therefore, should cooperate with
and strengthen local elites and local economies in alleviating grievances
and delivering social services. Rather than attacking informal banking
networks such as Somalia’s hawwalat as funding sources for terrorism,
US and international financial watchdogs should support them, encouraging
transparency and gradually formalizing them. Policymakers should acknowledge
that poverty does play a role in fostering militancy, even if indirect:
Private financial networks keep scores of families and individuals
from falling into poverty and desperation, undercutting any material
gain that militants can offer recruits. It is not these networks that
largely finance militancy, but wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia
and elsewhere.
An effective approach would also encourage civic and religious diversity,
because militant religious ideology is best neutralized by competing
calls from other religious groups and clan or ethnic authorities.
The fact that some militants are the educated and highly skilled has
to do with screening and material incentives. The more competition
there is for the allegiance of the disaffected, the better.
This strategy of supporting legitimate local leaders is a hard sell
to weak and suspicious governments that view different perspectives
as treason. It’s also difficult for international policymakers,
who are used to dealing with central states or with the most familiar
or noisiest local voices.
Many also seem not to have moved beyond a monolithic view of Islam
and Muslims. In the short term, the most cost-effective approach is
to keep an eye on anarchic areas, getting intelligence from and supporting
legitimate local leaders, if only through diplomatic engagement. Over
the longer term, central governments must be helped, or required,
to restore public service and poverty relief programs with civil society
and local leader participation.
Real research and analysis are required to spot local leaders with
genuine grassroots support and to treat them as allies, but that will
be the key to drying up the sea in which militant Islamist recruiters
now swim. Nothing else has worked, and nothing else will.
---
Khalid Mustafa Medani, a 2007 Carnegie Scholar, teaches political
science and Islamic studies at McGill University.
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