Cold War-style information program is right against terrorism

This Nov. 10, 1989 file photo shows East German border policemen, right, refusing to shake hands with a Berliner who stretches out his hand over the border fence at the eastern site nearby Checkpoint Charlie border crossing point after the borders were opened. Monday, Nov. 9, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. (AP Photo/Lutz Schmidt, File)

The existence of a problem does not guarantee the existence of a solution. Recently a swag of minor critics has condemned the federal government for committing billions of dollars to national security and only some $40 million or so to counter-radicalisation programs for those attracted to violent extremism.

In fact, the government has got its priorities right. It is worth giving counter-radicalisation a shot, because you’ve got to do everything possible to try to prevent terrorism, but there is not the slightest evidence that it has any real effect.

Perversely perhaps, it is more likely to win back people who have already been radicalised than to prevent people being radicalised at all, though of course prevention is the holy grail of this business.

The reason cure works better than prevention is because with cure you are at least actually targeting your efforts at the right place. With prevention you have to target the whole society, which means it is everything and it is nothing.

Much attention has rightly been paid to a recent report, Gen Y jihadists, Preventing radicalisation in Australia, which has been produced by the splendid Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

This is a very fine piece of work. But the subtlety, complexity and nuance of its diagnosis shows up the paltry and almost completely meaningless nature of its policy recommendations. And in a rueful if unstated acknowledgement of this, the authors do not recommend any great increase in resources for counter-radicalisation programs.

Of course, if such a program prevents even one single person from going down the terrorist road then it is in some sense a success, but the idea that such programs make a serious difference, a difference say that is statistically measurable, is pretty much baloney.

ASPI recommends that the government explain the reasons for Australia’s involvement in the Middle East more persuasively, urgently expand counterterrorism co-operation with key international partners, set a new basis for collaboration with Australian Muslims, engage schools in a practical discussion about terrorism and counter-radicalisation, start a discussion with the media on reporting terrorism, develop individual case-management strat-egies for at-risk people, combat online propaganda, revise the public terrorism advisory system, and explain how government agencies use counterterrorism powers.

All these recommendations have some merit but in truth they are all either marginal, already being done, impossible to do well and some are potentially counter-productive.

In the counter-productive category is the call for schools to teach explicitly about Middle East history and Australia’s interventions there.

Really?

That’s going to stop radicalisation?

Apart from anything else, most history in our schools is already taught with a deep anti-Western bias. To take one of a million examples, mostly school courses on human rights generally start with the UN declaration of human rights and focus on Western perfidy ranging from colonialism to alleged snooping by intelligence agencies.

Almost none commences with William Wilberforce’s historic campaign against slavery, beginning in the 18th century.

More generally, has social engineering through inserting approved ideological modules into school education ever worked at all?

And as for the idea of newspapers being more sensitive in the use of words in headlines, well, for goodness sake. The vast majority of young jihadists are recruited online and one of the problems is they never read newspapers at all.

And Muslim societies which are always observant of sensitivity in headline writing about Muslim issues produce as many or more jihadists as other societies. Although this is a good report, the recommendations are flim flam and show that as yet we, like the rest of the world, have no effective program for counter-radicalisation.

In powerful and well written sections, the ASPI report demonstrates the great variety of paths to radicalisation.

Thus any general counter-radicalisation program has to cover a thousand different possibilities, or risk missing out on big avenues of radicalisation. And furthermore the paths of radicalisation are protean. Just when you’ve figured out how to counter one, several dozen others take shape.

Is this a counsel of despair?

Not at all. The real counter-radicalisation program is the nature of Australian society itself. Probably the two single most effective counter-radicalisation programs are football and cricket. They excite, ventilate and spend the passionate energy and idealism of young men, they enforce team work, they lead to cross confessional and cross ethnic friendships and they occupy the participant’s mind.

Of course, they’re not for everyone.

Anything which is called counter-radicalisation and is not dealing with people who are already radicalised will be dealing with such a broad cohort of potentially radical young people as to become meaningless. At most it will be a tiny supplement to the inclusive nature of society itself.

The ASPI report sensibly comments that there is no stereotype for who becomes a jihadist, but argues that three characteristics are common: a sense of injustice or humiliation, a need for identity and a need to belong.

Perfectly sound analysis. But these characteristics are common to every teenager in Australia, perhaps every teenager in the world. The great Yugoslav philosopher, Milovan Djilas, once remarked that the beginning of everything is moral outrage, a sense of an injustice to right.

The question with potential jihadists is to try to root the sense of injustice in reality and to try to keep the response non-violent.

All of which leads us to an old debate in intelligence and analysis about jihadis in Western societies. Are we dealing with a hearts and minds question, or a question of pathology?

The answer of course is both, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both together.

So what can we do about the hearts and minds question? The ASPI report wants a more vigorous effort to combat online jihadist propaganda. This is a very sound general idea though I am not convinced by the specific measures ASPI proposes.

The Cold War is a most imperfect analogue to the struggle against terrorism, but it offers some lessons, especially in the hearts and minds field. All through the Cold War the US produced excellent, highly effective government funded information. Radio Free Europe was a vital source of information for democrats in eastern Europe. And Problems of Communism was an extremely useful journal all through the Cold War.

These were not government- owned independent broadcasters like the BBC or the ABC. They were government-funded, and broadcast or printed approved government information of relevance to the Cold War. The producers and broadcasters were independent within clear guidelines. They were not partisan in terms of Western politics but dedicatedly and intelligently anti-communist and they had excellent, well presented information.

At the height of the Cold War, enterprises like these were handsomely funded. This effort needs to be updated and re-embraced. The US State Department has a social media presence now, which is mostly fatuous, and a few direct counter-extremist web sites and the like, and there are still some TV broadcasts of that kind. But in their modern incarnation they are poorly funded with poor production values. It doesn’t matter that potential jihadists are likely to find anything originating from a Western government to be lacking in credibility. The more important point would be just to have a big social media presence aimed at providing the truth.

This is very difficult stuff for Western governments. But another lesson from the Cold War is that you can’t win a long war with short strategies, or without doing difficult things.

The bigger crisis is the crisis of meaning in post-religious Western societies, now being attacked by all sorts of belief systems which are much more vigorous than the empty hedonism and postmodern, extreme, almost absurdist, liberalism of the contemporary zeitgeist in the West.

The normative beliefs of our society are attacked by more vigorous and brutal systems of belief.

In some ways it was always thus. At the height of the Cold War, when Stalin and Mao had already killed tens of millions each, nearly 25,000 Australian citizens belonged to a communist party.

The big difference is that we are feebler today than we were then.