| 摘要 | Key Points
The US is losing against al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other like-minded groups, which are all part of the Salafi-jihadi movement. US counterterrorism efforts have made Americans safer, but the Salafi-jihadi movement is more than its terrorism threat. That movement now prioritizes developing its relationships with local Sunni communities, from which it draws its strategic strength, to transform the Muslim world.
Winning today means adopting a strategy beyond counterterrorism that will defeat the Salafi-jihadi movement, instead of just countering the terrorism threat. The US must reframe its approach against al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other groups.
With the help of partners, the US must sever the ties of the Salafi-jihadi movement to local Sunni communities. America and its allies must offer these communities a viable alternative to these terror groups.
Executive Summary
The United States has misdefined and misunderstood the nature of the enemy in the fight against terrorism. Washington has consistently fixated on specific groups and individuals that appeared most threatening to American interests: first with al Qaeda “core” in Afghanistan and Pakistan under Osama bin Laden, then al Qaeda in Iraq under Abu Musab al Zarqawi, then al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen and Anwar al Awlaki, and now the Islamic State under Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. American efforts have largely focused on retaking territory from these groups, denying them the sanctuary from which to plot terror attacks, and eliminating leadership and others involved in attack planning. The result has been a series of military victories on the battlefield that have not generated a decisive and lasting effect in reducing the threat of terrorism.
The real enemy is the Salafi-jihadi movement of which al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other such groups are part. This movement includes the collection of individuals, groups, and organizations that adhere to the Salafi-jihadi ideology. They believe that the practice of Islam must return to that of the early days of Islam and that armed force is an individual obligation to achieve this, first within Muslim lands and then globally. The Salafi-jihadi ideology serves as a source of resilience and strength for the movement, enabling groups to reconstitute even after suffering terrible military defeats and unifying the efforts of adherents under a shared purpose. The ideology also defines the set of expansive strategic objectives that extends beyond the terror attacks that threaten US national security.
The Salafi-jihadi ideology itself cannot be destroyed, however. A strategy focused on attacking and discrediting this ideology to weaken the movement assumes it has mass appeal, which history proves false. Muslims have rejected Salafi-jihadism for centuries and relegated the modern Salafi-jihadi movement to the fringes of society until the past decade. It also assumes that the US and its partners could eliminate all or most adherents, which has been impossible even in specific theaters such as Iraq. The ideology instead pulls together a self-defined Salafi-jihadi vanguard—a collection of core believers—that leads the broader movement’s efforts to impose its vision on the world. This vanguard understands that it cannot achieve its goals alone and therefore has sought to build popular support among Sunni Muslims.
The Salafi-jihadi movement has transformed over the past decade, adapting to conditions and cultivating relationships with local Sunni communities to strengthen on the ground. Exogenous factors such as the collapse of governance and the breakdown of security after the 2011 Arab Spring created opportunities for the movement to exploit. Salafi-jihadi groups have rebranded and reorganized to retain local support and obscure their connections to groups targeted by US counterterrorism actions. In doing so, they separated their global jihad effort from their local efforts, making the group more acceptable to communities and protecting the local vanguard from global counterterrorism efforts. Local conflicts in places such as Mali, Somalia, and Syria provided the opportunity for the Salafi-jihadi vanguard to insinuate itself into insurgencies and intermix, generating local support as it fights on behalf of local communities.
Finally, the vanguard has penetrated local governance and institutions in some communities by backfilling gaps. The Salafi-jihadi problem set in northwestern Syria, a confusing assortment of groups that includes al Qaeda members, epitomizes these transformations. In these ways, the Salafi-jihadi vanguard has strengthened ties to local communities and expanded significantly across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
The vanguard has identified its relationships with Sunni Muslim communities as its source of strength.
These relationships and its influence within local communities enable the Salafi-jihadi movement to achieve its strategic objectives of transforming the Muslim world through imposing its governance. The Salafi-jihadi vanguard has built these relationships through delivering basic goods or services, including defending the community.
Al Qaeda fixed sewers and delivered water and fuel in Yemen. Its courts in Somalia and Mali offer the fair resolution of local disputes. Its operatives dispatched to Syria to organize against the Assad regime. The Salafi-jihadi vanguard then uses its local ties to communities to start shaping them in its image and to strengthen itself by securing resources and sanctuary and building a position from which to eventually overthrow Muslim governments. The vanguard does not require that the community share its ideological conviction but seeks to expand its adherents over time.
The point of attack for a successful strategy against the Salafi-jihadi movement is its relationships with local communities. The Salafi-jihadi movement is vulnerable to the community’s own decision to accept it. Conditions have weakened communities and made them vulnerable to the Salafi-jihadi vanguard’s predatory efforts. The requirement is not to resolve all local conflicts or strengthen governance globally but to target the approach where the Salafi-jihadi vanguard is operating. Competing with the Salafi-jihadi movement by offering communities a viable alternative to the vanguard empowers the community to reject them. The US should attack the means by which the vanguard has built its relationships with communities, which will weaken the movement and relegate it again to the fringes of society.
Summary of Approach. The Trump administration’s strategic rebalancing toward great-power competition presents an opportunity for the US to also reframe its approach against the Salafi-jihadi movement. Countering Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea will draw on many of the same intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets that support the current counterterrorism strategy and raises the question of that strategy’s viability with reduced resources even outside its effectiveness. US reorientation against state actors provides an opportunity for the US to counter particularly those Russian and Iranian efforts that have facilitated the expansion of the Salafi-jihadi movement and to reframe its approach against the Salafi-jihadi movement to draw on different resources. The US must develop and execute a strategy to defeat the Salafi-jihadi movement that extends beyond pure counterterrorism.
The new approach must (1) destroy the global Salafi-jihadi movement by isolating it from the population, (2) support and legitimize governance that is representative and responsive, and (3) support establishing security conditions such that local forces will prevent the return of the Salafi-jihadi vanguard. These strategic objectives will be achieved by accomplishing several key tasks: (1) severing the relationships between communities and the Salafi-jihadi vanguard through supporting the resolution of local conflicts and redress of grievances, strengthening acceptable local and national governance, and providing communities with an alternative to the Salafi-jihadi vanguard’s goods or services; (2) blocking the vanguard’s efforts to penetrate communities and build new relationships; (3) supporting or enabling acceptable forms of governance; and (4) enabling the development of security structures that can operate with limited external support and do not alienate the population or drive further conflict.
The overall concept is to attack Salafi-jihadi influence within Sunni communities by restoring the communities’ ability to reject the Salafi-jihadi vanguard’s efforts to penetrate them. Deteriorating local conditions made communities vulnerable to Salafi-jihadi influence, which had been limited to the margins of society previously. The intent is to isolate the Salafi-jihadi vanguard and eliminate its influence in communities, reducing its threat to terrorism. The approach’s main effort is non-kinetic and intended to exploit the vanguard’s vulnerabilities, primarily its ability to gain initial entry into communities and the absence of other viable alternatives for the community. The approach is global but limited to the specific communities where Salafi-jihadi vanguard members are present. It will be iterative, adaptive, sustainable, and multigenerational.
The civilian-led approach must be coordinated under a State Department lead to achieve alignment of purpose across US foreign engagements. The State Department must identify and socialize the minimum essential political conditions within the areas of interest that satisfy US national security interests. These conditions must inform the sequencing and prioritization of efforts and shape US foreign and security assistance programming. US ambassadors as chiefs of mission must be stakeholders in the success of this approach. They must ensure that US partners and host nations accept and support the overall approach and that their country teams support the implementation of it.
Current US authorities and capabilities exist to support the implementation of this approach. The primary change is the reorientation of US foreign and security assistance programming into a strategic framework aimed at reducing the Salafi-jihadi movement’s influence. The US has already conducted versions of this approach, though on a more limited scale. Expertise and experience therefore already exist within the US civilian agencies and military on how to plan and implement programs that will bolster local governance and security structures and reduce the space for Salafi-jihadi groups to operate. A strategic messaging campaign should also reinforce the approach, though counter-messaging of the Salafi-jihadi ideology should be only a supporting part of the messaging campaign.
Success for this approach will require that the US work with local, regional, and global partners. The US must set the global framework within which its partners act and ensure that partners are bought in to the premises behind the approach—namely, that continued counterterrorism activities are insufficient in reducing the threat from the Salafi-jihadi vanguard and that shifting the effort to a civilian-led strategy will yield more durable long-term results. Yet working with partners does not mean that the US subcontracts to partners; it must instead support, enable, and leverage partners to do what they must and to backfill where partners are unable to execute. The US must also ensure that its partners cohere around a single definition of the enemy that is not as limited as it is today—in which Salafi-jihadi vanguard members operate in the counterterrorism gray space—and that is not so expansive that it creates new supporters for the vanguard.
Key Recommendations. The US needs to reframe its approach to the Salafi-jihadi movement from counterterrorism, which addresses only the terrorism threat from the movement, to one that will weaken and eventually enable the defeat of the movement entirely. The new approach must orient around breaking the relationships that members of the Salafi-jihadi vanguard have built within local Sunni communities through a civilian-led strategy. Impediments to this approach are in the mindset of decision makers, the muscle memory of US departments and agencies, and the absence of a unified effort to develop and implement the approach.
The following initial steps should be taken to implement this new approach.
US administration officials, Congress, and other policymakers must advocate for developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy to counter the Salafi-jihadi movement. The US government must break from the counterterrorism mindset that has colored its prioritization of resources, efforts, and engagements with foreign partners. It must also adopt a long-term planning cycle. Congress should appropriate multiyear and predictable funding to facilitate planning. Foreign and security assistance programming must also shift away from countering the Salafi-jihadi vanguard to shaping conditions on the ground and eliminating the vanguard’s means of support.
The State Department’s strategic planning and coordination role must be strengthened to ensure that the activities of US functional bureaus and agencies abroad are aligned in support of this effort. The State Department should own the coordination responsibilities for the development and implementation of this new approach. Additionally, the State Department should seek to develop and cultivate more strategic thinkers within its diplomatic corps.
The US government must increase its tolerance for select calculated risks. Congress must support funding new programming concepts on a small scale and accept the failure of a percentage of these programs. The State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID) should be willing to repurpose funds from steady, but not strategic, programs to new initiatives. They must also take more risk by working in the competitive space where the Salafi-jihadi vanguard is, which means risk to personnel and possible diversion of marginal funding. The Defense Department must push back on political pressure to reduce calculated risks to its personnel and allow US soldiers to do their jobs in the field.
The US and its partners must actively compete with the Salafi-jihadi vanguard within local Sunni communities to prevent the vanguard from gaining influence. The US therefore needs to unite its partners around a sufficient minimal common definition of the enemy to bring international pressure against the Salafi-jihadi vanguard. The US, among other partners, also needs to operate in the contested space where the Salafi-jihadi vanguard is and not in secure spaces. The US will need to continue to invest in expeditionary civilian capacities, which would better enable the US to counter Salafi-jihadi efforts.
Finally, US policymakers and decision makers must lead the effort to transform the approach against the Salafi-jihadi movement on the global stage. They should seize the opportunities presented by this period of rebalancing toward competition with Russia and China to also redefine US priorities, including for its partners, to counter the Salafi-jihadi movement. The harmful convergence of great-power and Salafi-jihadi interests in attacking the international system necessitates a new approach. US leadership should reframe the global approach to ensure American interests are secured.
Any analogy between the Salafi-jihadi threat and the Cold War has its limits, but the US devoted substantial resources to countering the spread of Soviet allies and Soviet influence during that period of competition between the US and the Soviet Union. The US invested resources in vulnerable communities in Latin American and southern Africa to contest Soviet influence. It not only supported armed opponents of Soviet proxies but also developed those communities and pursued soft-power investments in shaping the international order in support of American interests.
The challenge for the modern era is not in finding armed proxies—or counterterrorism partners— but in identifying those areas at risk of Salafi-jihadi exploitation and tailoring soft-power interventions to head these groups off at a pass. Doing so requires a transformed mindset within the US government about the national security imperative. Only then will the US begin to attack the roots and sustenance of the Salafi-jihadi movement that spawns the terrorist threat to the homeland. This is the only long-term strategy that will work.
Introduction
The divergence between American counterterrorism strategy and reality is growing rapidly wider and will soon reach a critical point. The Islamic State is reconstituting a vibrant insurgency in Iraq and Syria, its threat is rising across Africa, and it is increasingly active in South Asia, including its most deadly branch in Afghanistan.1 Returning Islamic State fighters to their home countries in Europe, North Africa, and elsewhere poses a growing threat as they surge battlefield expertise and connections into the Islamic State’s transnational networks. Al Qaeda, meanwhile, has insinuated itself into local and regional groups globally, strengthening particularly in the Sahel as its presence in Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere remains strong.2 Both the Islamic State and al Qaeda share the same vision, and both benefit from shared resources and capabilities as they pursue their global goals. The threat of terrorism to the US remains active even as more local groups proliferate.
The current counterterrorism strategy is effective at what it sets out to do: prevent massive terror attacks against Americans and US interests. The strategic objectives listed in US policy documents do not include the defeat of terrorist groups, and the end states identified focus on the terrorism threat and the security of the US and its people.3 Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other like-minded groups use terrorism as a tactic in support of a larger strategy. Current US counterterrorism strategy can disrupt their efforts to harm American interests using this tactic as long as certain conditions continue to hold. But the strategy does not purport to attempt to defeat either group and will not do so. It is, therefore, the archetype of a forever war; it does not envisage any actual end state.
Most concerningly, the strategy relies on the assumption that perpetually targeting the attack cells and not the local base that supports these cells will permanently disrupt the threat to the homeland. That assumption has largely held thus far, but it will not likely continue to hold indefinitely. As al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other such groups continue to expand locally, so too do their capabilities to prepare and conduct more frequent and damaging attacks on the US than the US approach can disrupt or defend against.
The absence of a comprehensive strategy against al Qaeda and the Islamic State has created the endless cycle of war about which both the Trump and Obama administrations have complained. The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 as part of the war on terror to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban and invaded Iraq in 2003, sparking an insurgency that al Qaeda would come to dominate. The US missed when al Qaeda transformed from a loose network of cells into the transnational organization that it has become today.
Counterterrorism efforts globally pressured al Qaeda, specifically the cells plotting attacks against the US and Europe, but defeating al Qaeda was left to the efforts of local partners with US and European support. The Islamic State’s meteoric rise in Iraq and Syria, which prompted the redeployment of US military forces to prevent the collapse of the Iraqi government, did not spur the development of a global strategy. Rather, the US and coalition sought to defeat the physical caliphate in Iraq and Syria while retaining pressure on the global branches using the same means they had been using since 2001. Neither transnational network withered away when the “core” was decimated. Both organizations instead adapted and became more resilient, strengthening globally.
The US is now rebalancing its efforts toward countering Russian and Chinese global influence even as the threat from al Qaeda and the Islamic State grows. This rebalancing shifts resources away from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia—from the counterterrorism effort, in other words—toward the Pacific and European theaters. It guarantees adopting an even more limited version of the current counterterrorism approach in these theaters to focus pressure—drone strikes primarily—on active terrorist cells. The availability of intelligence assets to support even a limited counterterrorism effort in this context is unclear, however, as such resources must also shift to support the focus on state competition. Downsizing counterterrorism to an economy-of-force effort to shift resources to compete with Russia and China opens the door for al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others to expand their influence on the ground even more than they have already done.
Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others will strengthen within the local contexts and pose greater threats to the US if they face only counterterrorism pressure. Many local counterterrorism partners, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, do not have the means or the ability to sustain long-term pressure on al Qaeda, the Islamic State, or Taliban militants.4 These groups and their local branches may gain sufficient strength to collapse or seriously weaken African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian states, the consequences of which would ripple through the US national security architecture that relies so heavily on partners abroad.
The US intelligence community has warned of the increasingly improvised terrorism threat from the Islamic State in particular, and from others, as they experiment with and learn to weaponize cheap, commercially available drone technology.5 Their cyberattack capabilities remain below those of state-based actors, but groups may also acquire sufficient expertise to conduct large-scale and damaging cyberattacks on Western infrastructure.
The US must not sacrifice protecting its interests from one adversary to combat another. The security the US has achieved through its counterterrorism effort will erode without the resources to support even a minimized version of it. Moreover, the gains that the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and other like-minded groups have made globally are already chipping away at the ability of the US and its partners to defend themselves against terror attacks.
Instead, the US must finally develop an approach that will counter the Salafi-jihadi movement—the movement of which al Qaeda and the Islamic State are part—to eventually defeat this enemy and win the war. Changing the approach may require a higher investment upfront, especially in terms of strategic planning resources, but it will end the resource drain from counterterrorism. As the US reorients toward competing with Russia and China, it should reorient in such a way as to also focus on countering their actions, and those of Iran, that strengthen al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
A strategy to counter the Salafi-jihadi movement requires the US and its partners to shift the focus of their attacks from the leaders and cells that threaten terror attacks to the strength of this movement, which is its relationship with Sunni communities. This report seeks to present a definition and understanding of the Salafi-jihadi enemy that the US faces and how this enemy has strengthened. It then follows a modified implementation of the military decision-making process to develop a conceptual approach to countering the Salafi-jihadi movement, recommending a civilian-led effort to isolate Salafi-jihadis from communities and reduce their influence. The report identifies significant challenges to implementing the approach, especially an engrained counterterrorism mindset and an aversion to certain types of risk. The initial recommendations put forward seek to better posture the US government to implement a strategy to counter the Salafi-jihadi movement.
Read the full report.
Notes
1. Recent assessments on the Islamic State’s strength derived from the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General’s August 2019 report on Operation Inherent Resolve and remarks by the Counterterrorism Coordinator Ambassador Nathan A. Sales. See Office of the Inspector General, “Operation Inherent Resolve: Lead Inspector General Report to the United States Congress,” US Department of Defense, August 2, 2019, https://www.dodig.mil/Reports/Lead-Inspector-General-Reports/Article/1926689/lead-inspector-general-for-operation-inherent-resolve-quarterly-report-to-the-u/; and US State Department, “Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Ambassador James F. Jeffrey and Counterterrorism Coordinator Ambassador Nathan A. Sales,” press briefing, August 1, 2019, https://www.state.gov/special-envoy-for-the-global-coalition-to-defeat-isis-ambassador-james-f-jeffrey-and-counterterrorism-coordinator-ambassador-nathan-a-sales/.
2. US State Department, “Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Ambassador James F. Jeffrey and Counterterrorism Coordinator Ambassador Nathan A. Sales”; and Daniel R. Coats, “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,” statement for the record for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, January 29, 2019, https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/ documents/2019-ATA-SFR—SSCI.pdf.
3. White House, National Strategy for Counterterrorism, October 4, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ NSCT.pdf.
4. The Defense Department Office of the Inspector General assessed that the resurgence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is in part because the Iraqi Security Forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces “remain unable to sustain long-term operations against ISIS militants.” Office of the Inspector General, “Operation Inherent Resolve.”
5. Michael K. Nagata, “Taking Stock of U.S. Counterterrorism Efforts Since 9/11” (lecture, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, DC, July 10, 2018), https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/policy-forum-july-10-2018. |
