Thoughts on Terrorist Disengagement and CVE
Recently, Will McCants wrote a pair of posts on Jihadica covering the topic of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). Part 1 dealt with developing a good definition of CVE, while Part 2 evaluated what the scope of CVE programs should be. I have to admit, I struggled with McCants' definition before I fully wrapped my mind around what he meant by it.
This is not the first time McCants has commented on the issue of CVE. For example, when Google ran a CVE conference in Ireland last year, McCants wrote a piece for Foreign Policy arguing that Google should put its technological might behind CVE efforts, rather than re-hashing ideas various governments have already gone over.
In his FP piece, McCants noted that CVE isn't as easy as we'd like to make it out to be, stating "I am not ready to give up on the enterprise of countering violent extremism just yet, but I am less sanguine about its chances of success than I was before I started working on the problem." (The byline identifies McCants as a former "senior advisor on countering violent extremism in the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism.")
All of this is to say that McCants is not new to the issue of CVE, and should probably be listened to when he writes about it.
My own research has focused more on deradicalization and disengagement, particularly in Yemen. (More on distinguishing between CVE, deradicalization, and disengagement follows below.) Moreover, as will become obvious, I've found John Horgan's writings on the subject of disengagement to be among the most compelling, which also influences my view.* I've written about Horgan before, both specifically and in passing.
It was with Horgan in mind that I evaluated McCants' proposed definition of CVE:
Reducing the number of terrorist group supporters through non-coercive means.
As context, McCants first provided several reasons why a new definition was necessary:
The United States and its allies devote considerable financial and human resources to countering violent extremism (CVE). Nevertheless the definition of CVE is unclear, ranging from fighting bad guys to creating good guys. This lack of precision makes it hard to design, execute, and evaluate CVE programs and makes it easy to slap the CVE label on all manner of initiatives, including many that seem to have little to do with stopping terrorism and might otherwise be cut by Congress. The lack of precision also inhibits thinking about whether the CVE enterprise is worthwhile and what should constitute it.
Horgan and Kurt Braddock made a similar point in a 2010 article in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, titled "Rehabilitating the Terrorists?: Challenges in Assessing the Effectiveness of De-radicalization Programs." Horgan and Braddock warn of the potential danger of even those released through rehabilitation programs, especially because success rates are determined by governments initiating the deradicalization schemes; recidivism, if tracked, is subject to the host country's definition. "To date, there is no consensus on what constitutes success in reforming a terrorist, let alone what even constitutes reform in this context," they say. Moreover,
it has been practically impossible to ascertain what is implied by or expected from programs that claim to be able to de-radicalize terrorists. No such program has formally identified valid and reliable indicators of successful de-radicalization or even disengagement, whether couched in cultural, psychological, or other terms. (p. 268)
However, CVE isn't quite the same as deradicalization, which isn't the same as disengagement. While definitions vary (much like with the word terrorism itself), Horgan distinguishes between deradicalization (the process of changing belief systems) and disengagement (separating from terrorist movements). CVE, by contrast, is a little harder to pin down. An Australian Department of Defence literature review on CVE notes that:
Given its basis in government policy rather than scholarship, the notion of ‘countering violent extremism’ is rarely defined let alone conceptualised or theorised within the literature. Rather, it stands as a phenomenon that is both self evident and taken for granted. The focus in the literature on countering violent extremism is generally on strategies that aim to respond to, or prevent violence, with recommendations for policy rather than on understanding how ‘countering violent extremism’ is constituted and emerges in particular ways. (p. 16)
Tellingly, checking out the White House's CVE strategy leaves the reader without a clear view of what CVE entails; thus the need for a definition like McCants'. However, McCants himself notes that what he's proposing isn't quite CVE in full, stating "I might also propose a new label and acronym for this activity but 'CVE' is so bland and prevalent that it’s not worth jettisoning." In the comments section, McCants further explains, "If it were just up to me, I’d use Countering Terrorist Recruitment."
To my mind, then, CVE is the overarching (non-military and non-law enforcement) process of responding to terrorist groups; McCants' definition is really one small part of the process at the forefront of terrorist group development, while deradicalization and especially disengagement are facets of the end of the process. While this isn't quite a definition, it suggests the CVE is very broad-based, made up of several components specific to various stages of activity and engagement.
I think the distinction is important, because what I see McCants saying is that US policies for CVE should be very limited in scope, rather than that CVE itself is actually limited to "Reducing the number of terrorist group supporters through non-coercive means." I think this was what bothered me all along in reading McCants' posts, because I don't think CVE is or should be universally focused on dissuading terrorist supporters at the forefront.
If we are focusing on the CVE component of reducing the number of terrorist group supporters, then we can apply all of McCants' arguments for it -- limited to terrorists rather than skinheads or gangs, empirically measurable, etc. -- while also acknowledging that CVE for another country might look different, and might include additional components.
It is precisely this look at the scope of US policies that constitutes McCants' second post. With the caveat that what we are talking about is which domestic US policies on CVE we should be implementing right now (as opposed to what CVE should be in general, or even what CVE policies we should implement or support abroad), McCants is right on: it should be measurable work aimed at identifiable audiences of both law-abiding and incarcerated terrorist supporters. It should not be about monitoring large portions of the population, attempts to control thought crimes or to implement social engineering, or otherwise exaggerating the threat or violating civil liberties.
In short, domestic CVE policies should be based on realistic goals of what we can and should do, and they should be held to a pre-determined rubric of success, with frequent re-evaluation of both goals and accomplishments. Succinctly, do what you can do, and do it well; don't try to do what you can't and shouldn't do. (Or, as they put it over at Selected Wisdom, "broad, top-down federal strategies to deal with local issues routinely fail" because "The individuals, ideologies and threats of extremism arising from local communities vary wildly from place to place.")
If there's anything we can learn from the Yemeni model (which was, admittedly, quite different than what McCants suggests for the US), it's that clear goals are absolutely essential. Under Hamoud al-Hitar from 2002-2005, Yemen essentially tried to argue with al-Qaeda detainees and other jihadist prisoners that the Yemeni government was based on an Islamic and thus violent jihad should not be carried out in Yemen, resulting in the release of over 350 prisoners who signed paperwork saying they had turned from their ways. It ended partially because some of these same released prisoners' remains were found in the aftermath of suicide attacks in Iraq.
For all the structural criticisms of Yemen’s de-radicalization program (and there are many, including corruption and a revolving-door policy for prisoners), the clearest critique and most necessary change is the need for an unambiguous statement of goals for jihadist rehabilitation. By Horgan’s theory, the Yemenis stated a goal of disengagement while trying to accomplish it through deradicalization. However, most of the deradicalization process focused on altering perceptions of state legitimacy to appear properly Islamic, rather than on intense Quranic re-education. The several well-founded criticisms of Yemen's program essentially stem from the lack of needed goals and guidelines. Without measurable aims, effectiveness is impossible to gauge. Without documented, successful practices, Yemen could expect little outside help for its deradicalization efforts and even less from its own troubled government.
Why should we hold the American government to any different standard? I'm not suggesting that we try the same approach that Yemen did; we couldn't, even if we wanted to, and Yemen showed the danger of too heavily associating Western governments with attempts to change Muslims' thinking. I do think we should be able to learn from their mistakes, though.
CVE has to be dynamic, able to change with the threat (a challenge Yemen had a hard time overcoming as al-Qaeda in Yemen became more hardened and ideological), and it must be tailored to the specific culture and context. Moreover, it must be carried out by the appropriate party. Legitimacy is a key issue of deradicalization, which explains the lengthy debate over the propriety of the Yemeni state in al-Hitar’s dialogue in Yemen. There as in the US, if a non-state organization ran CVE programming, it might be able to skirt some of the legitimacy issues, but it could face other obstacles, including finding the right leadership and sufficient resources. (I'm very interested to see what McCants has to say about this in his third post of the series.)
Until we get a good idea of what we're trying to accomplish, we have no chance of success. McCants' definition gives us a good start on what the US should try to do in the here-and-now. Hopefully, it will help start a broader discussion about what CVE means in general, and how governments can maximize their investments and achieve their goals related to CVE, rather than throwing money after well-intentioned but obviously muddled programs.
(For the record, J.M. Berger's re-imagined charts are far superior to the one accompanying McCants' posts, and he's got some good points on CVE of his own.)
[Update: McCants and I had brief back-and-forth on Twitter that helped clear up some miscommunication arising from this post being not clear enough. You can see it here.]
* Other interesting works include Michael Jacobson's "Terrorist Dropouts: Learning from Those Who Have Left," Jaret Brachman's Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice, and the other writers in Horgan and Tore Bjørgo's Leaving Terrorism Behind: Individual and Collective Disengagement. Of course, this is just a small sample. The Australian literature review mentioned above has more, of course, and then there's this.
