Richard Barrett
Senior Vice President
The Soufan Group
The attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi last week showed once again how effective terrorism can be in gaining world attention and spreading fear. Whatever the local objectives of the perpetrators, the attack was evidence that 12 years after 9/11 and an enormous amount of international effort, al-Qaida still attracts people to its cause. It begs the question: what more should or could the international community do?
On 27 September, Secretary of State John Kerry and his Turkish opposite number announced a new Global Fund for Community Engagement and Resilience. The Fund, which hopes to raise some $200 million over 10 years, is designed to promote local initiatives to counter the appeal of terrorism. It will have financial support from a range of countries and aims to attract private donations as well. The initiative is overdue, but it has the potential to make a real difference.
As Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida, pointed out in two statements released on 12 and 13 September, al-Qaida’s resilience is not organizational, it is the resilience of an idea. In fact in his September 13 message, al-Zawahiri instructed his followers to focus on spreading the message so as to establish safe havens and strengthen the foundations of its support, rather than launch attacks on new fronts. Al Zawahiri said that al-Qaida will not be defeated so long as the focus of its enemies is on its structure; it will only die when Muslims no longer see it as a way to protest policies they regard as humiliating.
Although the number of Muslims who support al-Qaida is infinitesimally small compared to the 1.6 billion who share the faith, it is a sorry state of affairs that anybody still sees al-Qaida as a way to restore their dignity. Al-Qaida-inspired attacks have led to the deaths of thousands of Muslims; many more than of non-Muslims. In fact al-Qaida is in danger of becoming mired in a sectarian fight that only targets Muslims. Ayman al Zawahiri is aware of this and is attempting to spin the message as well as change the facts. He may succeed with the first – if we let him, even if there is little he can do about the second.
The resilience of the al-Qaida idea is a criticism of us all. The international community has been unable in over ten years of trying to undermine its appeal. The reasons are twofold: first, as al Zawahiri points out, counter-terrorism resources have focused on fighting the organization, which is much weaker as a result, rather than the idea, and second, that whatever efforts have been made to counter the al-Qaida narrative, they have tended to be sporadic, disjointed and poorly implemented. They have reflected government policies at a macro level rather than focus on where al-Qaida operates, which is at the local, or even the individual level.
In the area of counter-narrative, international and regional organizations are most effective when they empower governments, whether by providing ideas, advice or resources, and governments are most effective when they empower communities, accepting that grass-root civil society organizations have a far better idea of what is going on in their locality, and better tools to influence it, than national, official bodies.
The future success of counter-terrorism lies in well-directed government support for local initiatives that steer people away from the use of violence. Although much harder to organize than the kinetic, operational activity that has dominated the agenda until now, this approach would certainly be far cheaper. A focus on the narrative at the local level in communities that are vulnerable to the terrorist message will also have the benefit of putting the terrorist threat in better perspective by ensuring that the resources devoted to it are proportionate to its true size. As action and reaction moves to the sphere of ideas, al-Zawahiri will find that not only is al-Qaida vulnerable organizationally, but also ideologically.
There has been a general lack of funding for community-based initiatives to counter the appeal of violent extremism, of whatever complexion. Some countries have made efforts to provide such support, but the results have not been as positive as expected or hoped for. There are various reasons for this, all of which the new Global Fund could address.
Big donors will always find it hard to deal with small initiatives, just as small initiatives will always find it hard to deal with big donors. The big donor problem revolves around the difficulties that distant donors have in evaluating local initiatives, vetting their leaders, auditing their expenditure and evaluating their impact. To do all that properly costs more money and time than the donors generally think worthwhile. It is obviously cheaper and more efficient to fund and monitor one large project than to fund and monitor a multiplicity of smaller ones.
The small initiative problem exists because local communities often don’t know how to apply for grants, how to design and execute their programs to make them transparent and accountable, and because they often lack confidence that government authorities will support them, or they fear that government support will destroy their value by association.
A Global Fund can overcome these problems by drawing on local expertise in target areas and by forging relationships with civil society groups so as to mentor, monitor and support their activities in the most appropriate way to help them succeed; the Fund should invite, encourage and inspire applications for help at the local community level.
With the prestige of major State and private donors behind it, the Fund would have a fair chance of reaching into areas where the violent extremist message thrives: places where governance is weak and the relationship between local communities and State institutions may be characterized by mistrust on both sides.
The Fund could also act as an aggregator, managing to coordinate different initiatives into a larger whole without forcing them into an uncomfortable union. The Fund could spread best practice as well as financial and other resources, and enable community organizations to test relatively small initiatives without fear of failing. Equally, the Fund could work with local organizations to scale up those initiatives that prove successful.
A series of country teams could offer advice and guidance both to the Fund and to the potential recipients of grants, then including representatives of the grant recipients as a way to ensure the proper flow of information and complementarity between projects. The country team would also have links to the relevant Government departments to ensure that projects were appropriate and their execution uninterrupted.
In addition to funding local initiatives to counter the narratives of violent extremism, the Fund could also help improve our understanding of why these narratives find fertile ground. It is not enough just to argue that violence is not the answer, there have to be alternative answers, ways to allow people to express their frustration and direct their energy towards alternative solutions to the ills they see around them. This is a way to turn potential forces for evil into potential forces for good.
To do this, the Fund and its country teams will be able to collect from their grass-roots partners, evidence of the drivers of extremist violence at the local level: the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism. With this knowledge in hand, the international community will also be able to help regional and national authorities to examine ways to address any deficiencies in delivery of the three principal requirements of the vast majority of mankind: security, equal justice for all, and economic opportunity.
The creation of the Fund is an important initiative that will help take counter terrorism to a new and different level – not up, but down. To the communities that are at most risk and are most able to do something effective about it, giving them ownership of the problem and recognizing their role as part of the solution.
There may be many questions about how the Fund would operate, but there can be no question about the validity of its objectives.