All for One and One for AllThe regional Containment of Radical Islam

America lies prostrated between two flawed extremes in its conflict with Radical Islam. The first, viewing the threat as largely organizational, holds the neutralization of individual Islamist groups as the most effective way to check the ideology’s expansion. While advantageous in limiting the scope of attack, this approach ignores the cultural and political circumstances that allow organizations like Al-Qaeda and Hizbollah to effectively operate. These groups’ operational capability and power are sustained, not by their thousands of active members and aligned copycats, but by the passive or overt sympathy they receive from millions across the Islamic world.

Akbar Ahmed, a former US administrator in western Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan War and current Chairman of Islamic Studies at American University, wrote a stellar piece in the Washington Post on western failures to understand Muslim society. His extensive travels across the Middle East and Asia led to him to define three intellectual streams within the Islamic community: mystics, modernists, and literalists. Mystics, the most apolitical and spiritually tolerant, can be found among those practicing Sufi Islam in states like Turkey. Modernists, politically active and western-oriented, seek to balance Islamic faith with secular values and are the ones our political nomenclature terms “moderates.” The literalists, who consider Islam under attack, seek to purge Muslim life of alien western influences. While only a tiny minority actively endorses terrorism, the literalists give militant Islam its spiritual legitimacy.¹

While American and European leaders trumpet the marginalization of the extremists, Ahmed’s observations prove otherwise. “The angry activists are now on the ascendancy, according to our study. The reasons for their rise are complex: the incompetence and corruption of modernist Muslim leaders from Egypt to Pakistan to Southeast Asia; the widening gap between a crooked elite and the rest of the population; the absence of decent schools, economic opportunities and social welfare programs; and the failure of modernist leaders to douse burning regional conflicts such as Chechnya, Kashmir and Palestine.”² No matter how many leaders are killed or captured, the culture that allows Radical Islam to thrive and expand will continue unabated. Failure to acknowledge this makes the organizational approach both dangerous and severely incomplete.

The second strategy incorporates the cultural factor, but proposes a wholly unworkable solution for dealing with it. Proponents aim to neutralize fundamentalism by delivering liberalism to a hapless Islamic society which, so we are told, yearns to be free in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. This harkens back to what Francis Fukuyama wrote in “End of History,” but the triumph of the liberal idea has yet to result in democratic governments throughout much of the Third World.³ The problem lies not with whether or not democratic values are suitable to the Muslim world, but whether the Muslim masses view them as legitimate and high on their list of priorities. Recent attempts to impose democracy in majority Muslim states have only succeeded in providing vehicles for clans and individual sectarian groups to attain power.

Take the example of Iraq and the current Maliki government. Many in the American media and political establishment ponder as to why the Iraqi leadership is neither “standing up” to the Sunni and Shia militants nor trying to encourage unity grounded in western values. I found the answer in a Russian TV press release, where reporters sat down and chatted with senior legislators in the Iraqi parliament. Lo and behold, most of them saw value in a democratic government only in so far as there were Coalition boots on the ground. Already planning for after the American departure, few wanted to commit political suicide by being perceived as too close to Washington. So the correct question to ask is not “Why is Baghdad not standing up?”; rather, it is “Why should they?”

Not only has democratic imposition yielded little, but so too have American efforts to bankroll reformers and strengthen democratic processes across the Muslim world. The US has tried something similar in Russia, by holding large press conferences and sending even larger checks to Gary Kasparov and some leading anti-Putin lights. Unfortunately, this opposition has little to no genuine public backing and is largely confined to liberal intellectual circles. Similarly in the Middle East, US pressure for free elections allowed Hamas to dominate Gaza and Hizbollah to consolidate in southern Lebanon.

The way America and its western allies should deal with Radical Islam is through a coordinated policy of regional containment, mapped out across three continents and joining together such widely divergent states as China and France. Individual Islamic groups will be targeted for their own sake, with little illusion as to the negligible impact this has on the broader culture allowing them to function. Instead, focus will shift to those points on the globe where the Islamic world directly contacts the West or the secular East. The flexibility of states in these areas will be strengthened, their territorial integrity guaranteed, and their nationalist sentiments stoked.

Western Europe is one critical contact point. In 732, Moslem forces of the 2nd Caliphate, then in control of Spain, crossed the Pyrenees and threatened Central Europe. Despite initial success, they were crushed by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours. Today, the threat lies not on the battlefield, but in population demographics. France holds Europe’s largest Muslim minority, numbering over 8% of the population. The degree to which this group is willing to fully assimilate into the broader secular society is questionable, despite a severe lack of education and employment.⁴ Riots in 2005, affecting towns from Marseilles to Paris, were described by onlookers as an urban Intifada.

The radicalization of Muslims in Britain resulted in three major terrorist incidents over the last three years, with two narrowly thwarted. Some, satirizing the government’s inability to adequately confront the problem, have gone to calling the capital Londonistan. Although Holland’s Muslims number only 5% of the national population, concentrations in cities like Rotterdam are in the double-digits. The 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh sparked a wave of religious reprisals and strong gains for the country’s anti-immigrant forces. Islamist ideologues have exploited Europe’s internal divisions to their advantage in an attempt to radicalize the Muslim youth, with the Saudi Royal Family and Salafi clerics providing billions of riyals to the effort. Consequently, every effort must be made to support Europe’s nationalist parties, to oppose blanket tolerance initiatives, and to strengthen cultural unity on both sides of the Atlantic.

We turn now to the Balkans. In 1456, the failure of the Siege of Belgrade stopped Ottoman Emperor Mehmed II from pushing into Eastern Europe. Here, in one of Europe’s most important and vulnerable spots in confronting Radical Islam, foolish western governments and human rights activists seek to provide the Islamists an open door. Independence for Serbian Kosovo, a seeming obsession on the part of the US and EU, is particularly worrisome. NATO intervened in Kosovo in the spring of 1999, following Serbia’s attempted crackdown on Albanian Muslim separatists led by the Kosovo Liberation Army. The western media and political elites painted the conflict as Serb barbarians annihilating a peaceful indigenous population, conveniently ignoring Serbia’s seven centuries of control over Kosovo (including those centuries prior to Muslim arrival) and its status as the country’s spiritual center. The KLA, conveniently removed from the State Department Terror List, was given diplomatic backing and military support. Also providing support were our trusted allies, Saudi Arabia’s Salafi clerics, and Al-Qaeda, which gave KLA members training in Bosnia and Afghanistan. NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign, forced the Serbs to withdraw, and placed Kosovo under UN control.

Recently, President Bush flew to Albania and renewed promises to grant Kosovo independence. The province’s Muslim majority, which only developed during the middle of the last century, is the first rationale given for stripping Serbia of one-third of its territory. Whether Washington would support handing parts of the Mexican Cession to our southern neighbor if ever they developed Hispanic majorities is unclear, but a province of a sovereign and Christian European state is apparently fair game. An independent Kosovo will be controlled by the KLA leadership and be a springboard for the expansion of Islamist networks into Europe’s heartland. Relations with Russia, a state whose value in checking Radical Islam cannot be overstated, will be greatly soured. It is difficult to see how any of this is in the interest of America and its allies.

Finally there is the North Caucasus and Central Asia. Russia is determined to protect its Caucasian territories, fighting two conflicts over Chechnya and launching extensive operations in the province of Dagestan. Retaining these areas serves a distinct political purpose for Moscow’s ruling elite and has become a cause for national unity. The war itself has been savage, with 100,000 Chechens killed and the capital of Grozny destroyed in a sustained land and air campaign. Shamil Basayev and most of the Chechen Islamist leadership have been eliminated and a pro-Kremlin strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, was recently installed as president. Although intimately involved in Chechnya, Moscow is well aware of its severe demographic problems and the stagnation of its conventional forces. Consequently, it has opted for double-diplomacy with numerous Muslim powers, particularly Syria and Iran. This should not be interpreted as Russia’s ignoring the need to contain Islamism, but as a tactic to buy time and manage the problem more reliably. In Central Asia, the activities of Hizb al-Tahrir, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and other Islamist groups have partly driven a Russo-Chinese convergence. Working independently and through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, both states have prioritized Central Asian stability and thwarting Islamist expansion into the Far East. Washington’s false belief that its power is the principal reason for the Russo-Chinese Partnership serves largely to prevent America from exploiting the situation to its advantage.

America’s conflict with Radical Islam has thus far been driven by two flawed strategies. The organizational approach, by giving little weight to the cultural divisions within Muslim society, cannot function as a global strategy in an ideological conflict. The second option, to change Muslim society through the imposition of western democracy, has succeeded only in rocketing sectarian factions and rival clans to positions of power. A coordinated strategy of regional containment offers the best chance to deal with the threat, by acknowledging the strength of its cultural foundations and its avenues for continued expansion. Nationalism in Western Europe should be encouraged, not feared. Independence for Kosovo should be totally opposed and Serbia’s integrity protected. The US should detach itself from Russia’s operations in the North Caucasus and reexamine its position in Central Asia as well as the underlying reasons for Russo-Chinese unity. Only then will the groundwork for containment be set and America’s national security safeguarded.

1. Akbar Ahmed, “Bush Still Doesn’t Get It,” Washington Post on the Web, 22 July 2007 [↩]
2. Ahmed, 22 July 2007 [↩]
3. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, 1989 [↩]
4. BBC, “Muslims in Europe: Country Guide,” BBC News/Europe, 23 December 2005 [↩]