RAND Report Says Cold War Offers Lessons on Engaging With Muslim
World
Mon Mar 26 15:00:01 2007 Pacific Time
SANTA MONICA, Calif., March 26 (AScribe Newswire) -- Just as it
fought the spread of Communism during the Cold War, the United States
must do more to develop and support networks of moderate Muslims who are
too often silenced by violent radical Islamists, according to a RAND
Corporation report issued today.
"The struggle in much of the Muslim world today is a war of
ideas," said Angel Rabasa, a RAND senior policy analyst and the lead
author of the report. "This is not a war of civilizations; it's not
Islam versus the West. It's a struggle within Islam to define the
character of Islam."
"We cannot come in as outsiders, as a non-Muslim country, and
discredit the radicals' ideology," Rabasa said. "Muslims have to do that
themselves. What we can do is level the playing field by empowering the
moderates."
Rather than an afterthought, the building of moderate Muslim
networks needs to become an explicit goal of U.S. government policy,
with an international database of partners, a well-designed plan and
"feedback loops" to keep it on track, according to the study.
The report by RAND, a nonprofit research organization, is
intended to serve as a "road map" to build these networks and to serve
as a practical guide for policymakers to implement.
Rabasa said the United States has a critical role to play in
aiding moderate Muslims, and can learn much from the way it addressed
the spread of Communism during the Cold War. The efforts of the United
States and its allies to build free and democratic networks and
institutions provided an organizational and ideological counter force to
Communist groups seeking to come to power through political groups,
labor unions, youth and student organizations and other groups.
Broad parallels stand out between the Cold War environment and
the situation in the Muslim world today.
"At the beginning of the Cold War, the threat was a global
Communist movement led by a nuclear-armed Soviet Union; today it is a
global jihadist movement striking against the West with acts of
mass-casualty terrorism," the report notes. In both cases, policymakers
recognized that the United States and its allies were engaged in an
ideological conflict that had to be contested across diplomatic,
economic, military and psychological dimensions.
But unlike the Cold War, this battle involves shadowy groups
rather than a single entity. These radical Islamic groups control no
territory, reject the norms of the international system and are not
subject to normal means of deterrence. Many of these groups have been
organizing for decades and have access to vast amounts of money, Rabasa
said.
The radical groups are fighting to create religious states based
on Shari'a, or Islamic law. They typically reject liberal Western values
such as democracy, gender equality and the right of religious minorities
to publicly practice their faith.
Many Muslim countries are ruled by authoritarian political
structures and the mosque is one of the few places people can protest
harsh political, economic and social conditions, the study says. Radical
Islamists have seized the opportunity to promote their interpretation of
Islam as a solution to those problems, aggressively spreading their
views in the mass media and via the Internet.
"Moderates by definition are not aggressive," Rabasa said. "These
radicals are much more willing to go the extra mile and use violent
means to enforce their views. Moderates are in the majority, but the
radicals tend to intimidate the moderates by accusing them of being
agents of the West or not true Muslims. Radicals have also threatened
physical violence and have forced many people into silence, hiding or
fleeing their countries."
One of the challenges for the United States will be identifying
genuine moderates from those who may appear to be moderate, but in fact
advocate ideas that are inconsistent with democratic values, the report
states.
Characterisics of moderate Muslims include: support for
democracy, internationally recognized human rights including gender
equality and freedom of worship; acceptance of nonsectarian sources of
law; and opposition to terrorism.
Instead of focusing on the Middle East, where most of the radical
Islamic thought originates and is firmly entrenched, the report
recommends reaching out to activists, leaders and intellectuals in
Turkey, Southeast Asia, Europe and other open societies. The goal of
this outreach would be to reverse the flow of ideas and have more
democratic ideas flow back to the less fertile ground for moderate
network-building of the Middle East.
Partners in this network-building effort should be those who
share key dimensions of democratic culture, the study says. The report
recommends targeting five groups as potential building blocks for
networks: liberal and secular Muslim academics and intellectuals; young
moderate religious scholars; community activists; womens' groups engaged
in gender equality campaigns; and moderate journalists and scholars.
As America learned during the Cold War, moderate groups can lose
credibility - and therefore, effectiveness - if U.S. support is too
obvious. Effective tactics that worked during the Cold War include
having the groups led by credible individuals and having the United
States maintain some distance from the organizations it supports.
"This was done by not micro-managing the groups, but by giving
them enough autonomy," Rabasa said. "As long as certain guidelines were
met, they were free to pursue their own activities."
To help start this initiative, the report recommends working
toward an international conference modeled in the Cold War-era Congress
of Cultural Freedom, and then developing a standing organization to
combat radical Islamism.
Besides Rabasa, the authors of the report include Cheryl Benard
and Lowell H. Schwartz, both of RAND, and Peter Sickle, a Ph.D.
candidate at George Washington University, who served as a summer
associate at RAND. The report, titled "Building Moderate Muslim
Networks," is available on the RAND Web site at www.rand.org
<http://www.rand.org/> .
The report was funded by a grant from the Smith Richardson
Foundation and was conducted within the Center for Middle East Public
Policy within International Programs at the RAND National Security
Research Division.
The RAND National Security Research Division conducts research
and analysis for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint
Staff, the Unified Commands, the defense agencies, the Department of the
Navy, the U.S. intelligence community, allied foreign governments and
foundations.
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