Winning friends and influencing people in the Islamic world

A strategy for dealing with Islamists (via David Frum):

...Rather than expend effort on winning Muslim friendship for America, our engagement with Muslim publics -- what we call "public diplomacy" -- should focus on identifying, nurturing and supporting anti-Islamist Muslims, from secular liberals to pious believers, who fear the encroachment of radical Islamists and are willing to make a stand.

This strategy would involve overt and covert ways to assist anti-Islamist political parties, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, media outlets, women's groups, educational institutions and youth movements as they compete with the radicals. It calls for marshaling government resources -- our embassies, aid bureaucracies, international broadcasting units and intelligence agencies, as well as our commercial, educational and civic relationships -- to give anti-Islamists the moral, political, financial, technological and material support they need. A key feature of this includes empowering local Muslims with information about the salafist or Wahhabi connections of their radical Islamist adversaries.

Our goal is to help anti-Islamists prevent extremists from controlling public space, public speech and public behavior. If our allies win, their societies have a chance to join the globalizing world and America benefits; if anti-Islamists fail, they lose, we lose and no bump in America's poll numbers will ever offset the gravity of the defeat...

The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, seems to be thinking along rather similar lines:

Gordon Brown's plan to tackle Islamist extremism by winning the battle for Muslim hearts and minds is hugely ambitious. But it is also essential. We cannot hope to defeat terrorism without the willing cooperation of the communities in which it flourishes. Ambivalence works asymmetrically to our disadvantage. It is enough for people to look the other way for terrorists to find a safe haven. Those aiming to defeat them need the support and goodwill of people willing to isolate the extremists and challenge their ideas at a grassroots level. The challenge is how to build that support after five years in which repeated policy blunders have widened the divide between mainstream Muslims and the west.

It is said that Brown has been strongly influenced by the example of the cultural and intellectual campaigns fought by the west during the cold war, and in particular the account of them given by Frances Stonor Saunders in her book Who Paid the Piper [the UK title]; hopefully Brown's approach will prove to be more nuanced than that because the book is actually a warning about the perils of trying to advance democratic ideals through state-sponsored programmes, especially ones that deploy covert means.

In the first two decades of the cold war, the CIA and MI6 set up numerous publications and front organisations, such as Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, as instruments of political warfare. These attracted heavyweight intellectual backing before their intelligence links were exposed in the late 60s, and many of those involved were left feeling compromised and cynical...

If you want to go beyond simply trying to influence opinion and get into very serious "nation building" read this.

Meanwhile, maybe we in the West should be watching more Al-Jazeera.

Mark C.

Update: What the UK government plans to do abroad:

Addressing the House of Commons following the regular Prime Minister’s Questions session, Brown said...“Building on initial road shows of mainstream Islamic scholarship around the country, which have attracted over 70,000 young people, and an internet site which has reached far more, we will sponsor at home and abroad, including for the first time in Pakistan, a series of national and local events to counter extremist propaganda.”

[...]

“The scale of our international effort is such that around 400 million pounds over the next three years will be invested through the Foreign Office, DfID and the British Council to tackle radicalisation and promote understanding overseas."..

Details on what it plans to do at home, and some Muslim reaction, are here.

Posted by markc at November 15, 2007 07:48 AM