“Having intentionally purged the DOD’s training of any ability to define the enemy, America’s top warriors admit they have lost any ability to identify, and then defeat, the enemy.” Yes.
In February 2015, President Obama hosted a three-day summit on “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) that featured a roll-out of three local programs in Boston, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. This culminated CVE efforts by the Obama administration going back to 2011.
These programs are also a practical failure in preventing violent extremism. Earlier this month, the Associated Press
reported on one Somali youth leader in Minneapolis associated with government-funded CVE programs who later
attempted to join the Islamic State.
Remarkably, as the Obama CVE programs are in complete meltdown, Republican leaders
such as Rep. Mike McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and conservative organizations
such as the Heritage Foundation are openly embracing Obama’s CVE agenda — and even calling for its expansion.
Kicking off their CVE programs in December 2011, the
administration issued the “White House Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism,” which articulated its goals:
To support our overarching goal of preventing violent extremists and their supporters from inspiring, radicalizing, financing, or recruiting individuals or groups in the United States to commit acts of violence, the Federal Government is focused on three core areas of activity: (1) enhancing engagement with and support to local communities that may be targeted by violent extremists; (2) building government and law enforcement expertise for preventing violent extremism; and (3) countering violent extremist propaganda while promoting our ideals. (pp. 1-2)
So Obama’s own stated goals fall into three areas: 1) engagement; 2) training; and 3) counter-Propaganda. In each of these areas, Obama’s CVE programs have been a complete failure.
1. Engagement
Obama’s CVE policies were developed in 2011 specifically
at the demand of U.S. Muslim groups. Now, the very
same Islamic groups that demanded CVE are some of its loudest opponents. They claim that the administration is promoting “Islamophobia” through their programs.
Just a few months after the February 2015 White House Summit, Islamic groups in Boston — one of the cities selected for funding local CVE programs — were
openly attacking those policies:
Islamic and civil rights groups in Boston and two other cities spoke out Thursday against a federal government initiative to counter violent extremism, saying it unfairly targets the nation’s Muslim communities.
“There’s no evidence programs like this are effective,” said Liza Behrendt, organizing consultant for Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-discrimination group. “It’s a federal program that singles out Muslim communities and reinforces false notions of the link between Islam and terrorism.”
Nadeem A. Mazen, a Cambridge city councilor, called the program “authoritarian.” He urged an alternative approach that would increase community engagement and community policing, rather than using “violent practices like surveillance and racial profiling.”
Shannon Erwin, cofounder of the Muslim Justice League, said the program could rely on false indicators to identify potential at-risk youths, targeting people who grow beards, express interest in foreign policy, and adhere to strict religious beliefs.
A diverse group of leaders representing civil rights and religious organizations Tuesday called on Minnesotans to stand against Islamophobia and oppose a federal anti-terror program.
The leaders, who met at the State Office Building for an event organized by the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said they are concerned about recent anti-Muslim comments from presidential candidates and the “negative impact” that the federal government’s Countering Violence Extremism program might have on the Muslim community.
These engagement efforts targeting communities vulnerable to terrorist recruitment have been such a failure that National Public Radio
had to recently report that even if the CVE programs aren’t effective, they somehow mystically still benefit these communities.
2. Training
One of the first federal agencies to openly embrace the White House CVE initiative was the Defense Department.
Nearly two months before the White House Strategic Implementation Plan was issued, the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued an
October 14, 2011 memorandum directing all elements of the DOD to screen CVE trainers and speakers. This was specifically tasked to the service academies and other academic centers, including the Joint Special Operations University and the National Intelligence Defense University. Particular emphasis for this new undefined and secretive CVE screening process targeting “Military Information Support Operations, Information Operations, and Military Intelligence curriculum.”
But at the time, some warned that the
administration’s “purge” targeting both counter-terrorism training and instructors was based on
highly partisan reporting, and that the DOD’s efforts would
lead to a blindingof the foremost elements of the U.S. government conducting the War on Terror. Unable to define the enemy, the U.S. would wander aimlessly, fighting an unending war against an ever-shifting opponent.
Those predictions of the Pentagon’s intentional blinding of its war-fighting units has proved catastrophically true.
In late 2014, the
New York Times reported that Major Gen. Michael Nagata, then-head of Special Operations Command Central, had held a series of conference calls attempting to understand why the Islamic State had grown so dangerous:
Trying to decipher this complex enemy — a hybrid terrorist organization and a conventional army — is such a conundrum that General Nagata assembled an unofficial brain trust outside the traditional realms of expertise within the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies, in search of fresh ideas and inspiration. Business professors, for example, are examining the Islamic State’s marketing and branding strategies.
In the midst of these discussions, Gen. Nagata issued this damning indictment on how the Obama administration’s CVE policies had blinded the very tip of the American war-fighting spear:
“We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it,” he said, according to the confidential minutes of a conference call he held with the experts. “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”
Having intentionally purged the DOD’s training of any ability to define the enemy, America’s top warriors admit they have lost any ability to identify, and then defeat, the enemy.
3. Counter-Propaganda
But not even five years after the fact, the program has suffered chronic leadership changes and a string of public embarrassments in the face of the growing international terrorist threat from the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.
As a consequence, the State Department has closed the CSCC in the face of widespread failure, and now the U.S. government must delegate these vital tasks to foreign organizations.
Another CSCC effort was their “Think Again, Turn Away” program that pushed out counter-messaging via social media targeting potential ISIS recruits. The program’s Twitter account
would regularly “troll” ISIS adherents on Twitter.
Another difficulty was that the actual penetration of their social media efforts barely touched the potential terror recruits they were trying to influence. For example, when one well-known pro-ISIS Twitter user, Shami Witness, was arrested, the Soufan Group compared the Twitter followers of Shami Witness and the Think Again Turn Away account — nearly 40,000 followers between the two accounts — and found thatthey only shared FIVE followers:
In the comments to that tweet, some users revealed that they were among the five followers that overlapped — and they weren’t even recruiting targets, but terrorism researchers or academics.
Rashad Hussein was promptly moved to the Justice Department and the CSCC shut down.
In January 2016, a new effort, the Center for Global Engagement,
was launched, but with little prospect that rebranding their efforts will be more effective.
So the Obama administration’s counter-propaganda efforts were not only unsuccessful, but found to be so harmful and counter-productive that they had to be shut down and replaced.
