There are three myths about terrorists that must be corrected if we are to battle terrorism effectively, according to Col. Matt Venhaus: that Muslim youth become terrorists for economic reasons; that they become terrorists primarily for religious reasons; and that they are recruited by al-Qaeda.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, terrorists are not motivated by poverty; they do not turn to violence in a fit of religious fervor; and al-Qaeda does not actively recruit them–they go looking for al-Qaeda, according to Venhaus.
“If you understand the phenomenon incorrectly then your solution’s going to be wrong,” Venhaus said at panel Dec. 2 at the Heritage Foundation on the role of psychological operations (PSYOP) in strategic communication in warfare. Venhaus, currently at the Department of Defense, spent a year interviewing more than 2,000 “foreign fighters” to determine the reasons young Muslim men were turning to terrorism in such large numbers. In his words, if putting a bomb in your underwear and getting on a plane is the answer, “then what in the heck is the question?”
Venhaus found that Muslim youth were primarily acting out a need to control their environment–their strict Muslim lifestyles gave them few options to vent the pent-up energy bred by such structured, in many cases suffocating, lives.
Our strategy for psychological operations must, therefore, take this information into account, since we’re fighting two wars in the Muslim world. Kevin McCarty, former global outreach director for the National Security Council, and Juliana Pilon, director of the Center for the Study of Culture and Security at the Institute of World Politics, joined Venhaus on the panel. McCarty said that we also need to understand the decentralized nature of the enemy.
“There is no one person who tells all terrorists to go home and stop or to go out and do something,” he said.
McCarty said that in the past, warfare mainly consisted of “beating the other person to the ground, regardless of what he thinks.” The goal was unconditional surrender. Both of those have changed, especially with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we are attempting to redirect the instinctual behavior of a society in flux. The task is not unlike alcoholics anonymous, he offered.
“We are in effect trying to get an audience–groups of people–to change their attitudes, to change their behaviors,” McCarty said.
All three panelists assailed the U.S. government’s current conduct in the arena of psychological operations, and specifically criticized the compartmentalized nature of the effort and the turf battles between agencies that should be integrating their strategies, not dividing their efforts.
“We have gotten so tangled up in who does what… that we have lost sight that it is what we do, not who gets credit, that matters,” Pilon said. McCarty added that foreign publics certainly don’t care where the policy originates. He explained:
“How are we perceived? We are one to them. We’re not a bunch of different people, a bunch of different organizations. We have to change our way of thinking–we have to change our culture of how we do this in order to deal with these changes.”
We need to do this in three ways, McCarty suggested: Adapt to our current circumstances, better understand the impact of our actions on the local populations, and learn to understand the people we’re trying to influence.
As an example of the second, McCarty said that the U.S. military built a road in an area of Afghanistan where they were trying to help the local population increase their commerce. But at the time, there simply wasn’t much commerce and so the road ended up being used mostly by the military to move equipment around–and that’s all the local population saw.
Venhaus offered an example of the third suggestion–to better understand those we’re attempting to influence. When he went to Afghanistan after 9/11, he was tasked with explaining to Afghans why we were in their country, and what happened on 9/11. But when they showed a video of the towers getting hit by the planes and then collapsing, the Afghans didn’t believe it. Here’s what they did believe, according to Venhaus:
“They believed that things exploded, because in their life they had seen lots of things explode. They believed in airplanes because in their life they had seen airplanes–soviet airplanes, our airplanes, lots of people’s airplanes–flying over and making things explode. What they didn’t believe was that buildings could be built that tall.”
But they had heard of Hollywood, so they assumed the video was a Hollywood film. “So the message to those people is, let’s talk a little bit about engineering as it is practiced in the United States,” he said.
Pilon, noting the counterproductive turf wars and the fact that effective June 21, PSYOP disappeared from the government dictionary, to be replaced with military information support operations (MISO), said, “we have got to stop being so squeamish about something that is so commonsense.” But she said it doesn’t matter what we call it as long as it makes sense, and it shouldn’t matter which government agency (DoD, State Department) does it as long as it’s correct.
McCarty closed with a stern warning for our government to get it right:
“If we as a government do not learn how to play in this world, we are ceding that world to others. And we’re going to have to live with the result of it because we have no ability to play in it–we’re not even on the field. And that’s not a responsible position to be in, watching out for our national security.”
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