Rand Corporation's new recipe to handle the Muslim World

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Al-Jazeerah, April 2, 2007

The semi-official U.S. think tank, Rand Corporation, suggests creation of networks of the so-called moderate Muslims to promote US policy objectives in the Muslim World.

In its latest report, titled “Building Moderate Muslim Networks” the Rand Corp advocates that the building of moderate Muslim networks needs to become an explicit goal of the U.S. government policy, with an international database of partners and a well-designed plan.

Just as it fought the spread of Communism during the Cold War, the United States must do more to develop and support networks of moderate Muslims who are too often silenced by violent radical Islamists, according to the Rand Corporation report issued on March 26, 2007. Lead writer of the report Angel Rabasa says that the United States has a critical role to play in aiding moderate Muslims, and can learn much from the way it addressed the spread of Communism during the Cold War. “The efforts of the United States and its allies to build free and democratic networks and institutions provided an organizational and ideological counter force to Communist groups seeking to come to power through political groups, labor unions, youth and student organizations and other groups.”

The report defines a moderate as a Muslim who supports democracy, gender equality, freedom of worship and opposition to terrorism. This looks an amplification on its two previous reports - “Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies” (March 2004) and “US strategy in the Muslim World after 9/11” (December 2004) - which also suggested supporting moderate Muslims and exploitation of inter-Muslim religious differences. Interestingly, a novelist turned research scholar, Cheryl Benard is the author of “Civil Democratic Islam” and co-author of Dec. 2004 and March 2007 reports.

In the December 2004 study Rabasa had suggested to exploit Sunni, Shiite and Arab, non-Arab divides to promote the US policy objectives in the Muslim world. Echoing this theme, the latest report recommends reaching out to Muslim activists, leaders and intellectuals in non-Arab countries such as Turkey as well as in Southeast Asia and Europe. The report recommends targeting five groups as potential building blocks for networks: liberal and secular Muslim academics and intellectuals; young moderate religious scholars; community activists; women’s groups engaged in gender equality campaigns; and moderate journalists and scholars.

The report warned that moderate groups can lose credibility – and therefore, effectiveness – if U.S. support is too obvious. Effective tactics that worked during the Cold War include having the groups led by credible individuals and having the United States maintain some distance from the organizations it supports. “This was done by not micro-managing the groups, but by giving them enough autonomy,” Rabasa said. “As long as certain guidelines were met, they were free to pursue their own activities.”

To help start this initiative, the report recommends working toward an international conference modeled in the Cold War-era Congress of Cultural Freedom, and then developing a standing organization to combat what it called radical Islamism.

The recent summit of "Secular Islam Conference" in St. Petersburg, Florida, almost coincided with the release of the latest Rand Report. A small group of self-proclaimed secular Muslims from North America and elsewhere gathered in St. Petersburg for what they billed as a new global movement to correct the assumed wrongs of Islam and call for an “Islamic Reformation.”

The St. Petersburg conference, held on the sideline of the Intelligence Summit, was carried live on (Islamophobe) Glenn Beck's CNN show. Some of the organizers and speakers at the convention were well known thanks to the media spotlight: Irshad Manji, author of "The Trouble With Islam," and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch parliamentarian and author of "Infidel," were but a few there claiming to have suffered personally at the hands of "radical" Islam. One participant, Wafa Sultan, declared on Glenn Beck's show that she doesn't "see any difference between radical Islam and regular Islam." Other participants were the now public ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq and self-proclaimed ex-terrorist Tawfiq Hamid.

Surely, the “moderate” Muslim agenda is promoted because these ideas reflect a Western vision for the future of Islam. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, everyone from high-ranking officials in the Bush administration to anti-Islam authors have prescribed a preferred remedy for Islam: Reform the faith.

The Rand Reports about Islam appear to be part of a grand strategy to “change the face of Islam” as revealed by the US News and World Report on April 15, 2005. The report entitled - Hearts, Minds, and Dollars: In an Unseen Front in the War on Terrorism, America is Spending Millions...To Change the Very Face of Islam - reads: “From military psychological-operations teams and CIA covert operatives to openly funded media and think tanks, Washington is plowing tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself.”

According to the well planned leaks to the US News and World Report, this strategy for the first time stated that the United States has a national security interest in influencing what happens within Islam. The report also confirmed that it is, in fact, the US which has been funding an American version of Islam, called “Moderate Islam.”

The Rand reports try to create a fictitious vision of Muslims and of Islam, where it is antihuman, uncreative, authoritarian, and intrinsically against Western societies. It is an ethnocentric view of Islam that dominates current representations of Islam that are reductive, predominantly negative, and encouraging a culture of Islamophobia.

The complexities of the so-called fundamentalism and extremism in the past 100 years or so, whether it be Christian, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim, need to be understood in the context of modernization, the process of secularization, the changing nature of religious institutions, the post-colonial experience in developing countries, globalization, the divide between wealthy and poor, contesting political power, and the impact of totalitarian regimes on civil society.

What is not mentioned in the RAND reports is that the reason for the alienation of Muslims from the West, is the issue of "double standards" the West so brazenly practices when dealing with Muslim nations. America already has a very tarnished image in the Islamic world. It has already alienated a great majority of Muslims throughout the world through its misguided foreign policy. Who in the right mind will believe that this asinine assault on Islam and Muslims will win America friends in the Islamic world?

Now a word about the Washington-based semi-official think tank – the RAND Corporation. Among other government departments, the Rand Corp conducts studies for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Commands, the defense agencies, the Department of the Navy and the U.S. intelligence community. Obviously, writers of the three under discussion reports on Islam may be considered as neo-Orientalists with clear intention to belittle Islam.

When the European nations began their long campaign to colonize and conquer the rest of the world for their own benefit, they brought their academic and missionary resources to help them with their task. Orientalists and missionaries, whose ranks often overlapped, were the servants of an imperialist government who was using their services as a way to subdue or weaken an enemy. The academic study of the Oriental East by the Occidental West was often motivated and often co-operated hand-in-hand with the imperialistic aims of the European colonial powers. The foundations of Orientalism were in the maxim "Know thy enemy". This equally applies to the modern day Orientalists of such semi-official think tanks as the Rand Corporation.

Neocons Want a Mulligan on Iraq

And, it appears, President Bush may give it to them. The LA Times reports:

military officials are taking a close look at a proposal advanced by Frederick W. Kagan, a former West Point Military Academy historian, to combine a surge with a quick buildup of the Marines and the Army. That could allow new units to take the place of the brigades sent to Iraq to augment the current force.

“It is essential for the president to couple any recommendation of a significant surge in Iraq with the announcement that he will increase permanently the size of the Army and the Marines,” Kagan said.

Kagan, who plans to release a preliminary report on his proposal Thursday, said he had discussed his ideas with people in the government. Although the military has had trouble meeting recruiting goals, Kagan said Army officials believed they could recruit at least an extra 20,000 soldiers a year. The Army missed its recruiting targets in 2005 but met this year’s goal.

This strategy faces a few obstacles, though. First:

Only 12% of Americans support a troop increase, whereas 52% prefer a fixed timetable for withdrawal, a Los Angeles Times/ Bloomberg poll has found.

Indeed. This echoes this recent USA Today/Gallup poll which revealed that 57% of Americans want U.S. troops out of Iraq within one year. Also, there are deeper problems with the “more troops” strategy:

Kalev Sepp, an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School, said that the U.S. had demonstrated that many commanders simply did not understand how to mount effective, long-term counterinsurgency strategies.

Increasing the size of the force, Sepp said, will mean that U.S. forces continue to focus on killing insurgents, not training Iraqis. “That kind of approach is still tied to the idea that attrition, of just killing enough of our opponents, is going to get us to success,” Sepp said.

It’s disheartening in the extreme, almost to the point of being maddening, that President Bush continues to look to the folks who brought you the war in the first place for the way forward. There are a few problems with the Kagan approach.

This surge of roughly 25,000 additional troops, at this stage in the conflict, is unlikely to even suppress the violence significantly in Baghdad. Kaganites like to point to U.S. operations in Tal Afar as an analog. In that instance, a population of (a guesstimated) 150,000 Iraqis was pacified by 3,800 U.S. soldiers, with Iraqi forces in tow. Kagan protests, in response to those who say the forces don’t exist to replicate this strategy in the rest of Iraq or even Baghdad, that their opposition “rests on vague extrapolations of force ratios in Tal Afar to the entire population of Iraq or of Baghdad.”

But our extrapolations aren’t vague at all–they’re based on all the counterinsurgency literature out there. Kagan’s plan doesn’t use the normal metrics for stability ops–he changes them completely. He uses studies that are based on total population, but then decides, without much explanation, that only using the Sunni population for calculation is appropriate in this instance, since “it would be unnecessary and unwise to send coalition forces into Kurdistan or most of the Shiite lands.”

But force requirements in the literature aren’t based on hostile population or some sub-segment of the population, they’re based on total population. Rarely can counterinsurgencies adequately quantify the number of hostile population. So we use overall population for a metric.

Take this quintessential Parameters article by James Quinlivan of RAND. Quinlivan points out that “From the start, practitioners of counterinsurgency have been clear in stating that the number of soldiers required to counter guerrillas has had very little to do with the number of guerrillas.” You can’t slice the population the way Kagan does and then use the counterinsurgency literature for benchmarks. It’s goalpost shifting. Apples and oranges.

Discussing the more useful historical ratio, Quinlivan concludes that “Force ratios larger than ten members of the security forces for every thousand of population are not uncommon in current operations. . . . Sustaining a stabilizing force at such a force ratio for a city as large as one million . . . could require a deployment of about a quarter of all regular infantry battalions in the U.S. Army.” The very study Kagan cites (.pdf) echoes this finding:

International troop levels should be at least 1,000 soldiers per 100,000 inhabitants and international police levels should be at least 150 police officers per 100,000 inhabitants, especially when there is the potential for severe instability.

And just to amplify that, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board released a study (.pdf) in 2004 concluding that “The United States will sometimes have ambitious goals for transforming a society in a conflicted environment. Those goals may well demand 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants . . . working for five to eight years.”

Sure enough, if you look at the U.S. troop to Iraqi population in Kagan’s example of Tal Afar, you come up with more than 20 U.S. troops per 1,000 inhabitants. To get a 20 U.S. troops per 1,000 inhabitants ratio in Baghdad alone (population 6,000,000), you come up with 120,000 troops. And as Kagan admits in his article, the approach to Tal Afar, which involved building a large sand berm around the city to isolate it, “may not be appropriate for a large city like Baghdad.” Probably right.

Kagan also skirts the issue of force protection, the primary focus on which has kept U.S. casualties “low” at 3,000. Kagan admits, without openly pointing to the resulting skyrocket in dead Americans, that “close interaction with the population and even with the enemy is essential.”

This all leaves on the table the problem of whether or not a lot of the troublemakers in Baghdad wouldn’t head for the hinterland when they saw such a force coming. Senator John McCain, for all his faults, has this right when he worries about playing “Whack-a-Mole” across Iraq.

So then, what about cranking it up to 20/1,000 for all of Iraq? You’d need 500,000 troops.

In short, Kagan’s plan appears in any light to be a recipe for compounding the disaster of the neocons’ policies in Iraq thus far. But despite the history of the last four years, neoconservatives still have a tremendous amount of sway with the White House. Sharing the same a priori commitment to an illusory “victory” in Iraq seems to be a precondition of getting the president’s ear. It would be good if someone, at some point, would attempt to disabuse him of this idea, and confront him with the cold facts on the ground. It’s been almost four years.

The upshot, it seems, is that the neocons are going to get a “do over” in Iraq. And, unfortunately, it looks like the U.S. military is going to pay the price for their Mulligan.