by Eric Martin
Fareed Zakaria uses the recent accommodation between the Pakistani government and militants in the Swat Valley in Pakistan as a launching point to discuss the proper posture for the United States to adopt vis-a-vis Islamist movements of various stripes. The short version: it is vital that we differentiate between al-Qaeda type groups and other Islamist groups that do not subscribe to theories of global jihad (and that we learn to live with the latter).
Such realignment doesn't mean that we have to turn a blind eye to crimes against women and other brutal and oppressive policies that certain of the Islamist groups might espouse. But those issues are better addressed through non-violent means. After all, even targeted airstrikes end up killing the women and children that they are, ostensibly, meant to safeguard under such humanitarian justifications.
(Side note: These issues were discussed during this past Sunday's installment of Zakaria's CNN show – GPS – which I have enjoyed immensely. Watching Hitchens get put in his place in the most recent episode is, alone, worth the price of admission):
Pakistan's Swat Valley…became a war zone over the past two years as Taliban fighters waged fierce battles against the Pakistani army. The fighting ceased because the Pakistani government has agreed to some of the militants' key demands, chiefly that Islamic courts be established in the region. Fears abound that this means girls schools will be destroyed, movies will be banned and public beheadings will become a regular occurrence.
The militants are bad people, and this is bad news. But the more difficult question is, what should we — the outside world — do? How exactly should we oppose these forces? In Pakistan and Afghanistan, we have done so in large measure by attacking them — directly with Western troops and Predator strikes, and indirectly in alliance with Pakistani and Afghan forces. Is the answer to pour in more of our troops, train more Afghan soldiers, ask the Pakistani military to deploy more battalions, and expand the Predator program to hit more of the bad guys? Perhaps — in some cases, emphatically yes — but I think it's also worth stepping back and trying to understand the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism. […]
The militants who were battling the [Pakistani] army…have had to go along with the deal. The Pakistani government is hoping that this agreement will isolate the jihadists and win the public back to its side. This may not work, but at least it represents an effort to divide the camps of the Islamists between those who are violent and those who are merely extreme.
Over the past eight years, such distinctions have tended to be regarded as naive. The Bush administration spent its first term engaged in a largely abstract, theoretical conversation about radical Islam as a monolithic global ideology — and conservative intellectuals still spout this kind of unyielding rhetoric. By the second term, though, Bush officials ended up pursuing a most sophisticated policy toward political Islam in the one country where reality was unavoidable — Iraq.
Having invaded Iraq, the Americans searched for local allies, in particular political groups that could become the Iraqi face of the occupation. The administration came to recognize that 30 years of the secular tyrant Saddam Hussein had left only hard-core Islamists as the opposition. It partnered with these groups, most of which were Shiite parties founded on the model of Iran's ultra-religious organizations, and acquiesced as they took over most of southern Iraq, the Shiite heartland. The strict version of Islam that they implemented in this area was quite similar to — in some cases more extreme than — what one would find in Iran today. Liquor was banned; women had to cover themselves from head to toe; Christians were persecuted; religious affiliations became the only way to get a government job, including college professorships. While some of this puritanism is mellowing, southern Iraq remains a dark place. But it is not a hotbed of jihadist activity. The veil is not the same as the suicide belt.
The Bush administration partnered with fundamentalists once more in the Iraq war. When the fighting was at its worst, administration officials began talking to some in the Sunni community who were involved in the insurgency. Many of them were classic Islamic militants, though others were simply former Baathists or tribal chiefs. Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy ramped up this process. "We won the war in Iraq chiefly because we separated the local militants from the global jihadists," says Fawaz Gerges, a scholar at Sarah Lawrence College, who has interviewed hundreds of Muslim militants. "Yet around the world we are still unwilling to make the distinction between these two groups."
Anything that emphasizes the variety of groups, movements and motives within that world strengthens the case that this is not a battle between Islam and the West. In the end, time is on our side. Wherever radical Islam is tried, people weary of its charms quickly. All Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to today's problems. Unlike them, we have a worldview that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. That's the most powerful weapon of all.
This is classic "disaggregation" strategy (a counterinsurgency tool promoted by such well-respected practitioners as David Kilcullen) whereby each group within a given movement is treated as a distinct entity so as to determine how to best respond to each (discussed here and, more recently, here). This analytical device can shed light on which groups can be coaxed to buy-in to a given government structure, and which groups can only be dealt with through the application of force.
Disaggregation offered the only viable means available to us for stabilizing the situation in Iraq (not the surge of troops, as is commonly misinterpreted). We weren't going to be able to keep fighting all militant groups, nor would the Iraqi government be able to persist for long without a broader support in the population at large. By working with various Iraqi Islamist and/or insurgent groups, the US has helped create an imperfect and tenuous momentum in the direction of stability.
Similarly, disaggregation offers a glimmer of hope going forward in Afghanistan. As my friend Steve Hynd points out, the "Taliban" is a multifaceted movement with its constituent parts often working at cross purposes on important issues such as hostility to the Pakistani government and support for global jihadism. We need to do our best to peel away those factions that are not committed to furthering al-Qaeda's cause and provide them with enough incentives to participate in the new Afghan government. Even groups that we might rightly label as "Taliban."