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RAND Report: US Strategy Counterproductive

RAND Report: US Policy in Muslim World Counterproductive
By Riaz Haq
http://riazhaq.blogspot.com

The RAND Corporation, a highly respected non-profit policy research
institute in the United States, says in its latest report on the
ongoing War on Terror: "Large-scale U.S. military intervention and
occupation in the Muslim world is at best inadequate, at worst
counter-productive, and, on the whole, infeasible."

"Violent extremism in the Muslim world is the gravest national
security threat the United States faces," said David C. Gompert, the
report's lead author and a senior fellow at RAND, a nonprofit research
organization. "Because this threat is likely to persist and could
grow, it is important to understand the United States is currently not
capable of adequately addressing the challenge."

The study finds that when infected by religious extremism, local
insurgencies become more violent, resistant to settlement, difficult
to defeat and likely to spread. The jihadist appeal to local
insurgents is the message that their faith and homelands are under
attack by the West and they should join the larger cause of defending
Islam. This makes U.S. military intervention not only costly, but
risky.

While the recent military surge has improved security in much of Iraq,
"it would be a profound mistake to conclude from it that all the
United States needs is more military force to defeat Islamist
insurgencies," Gompert said. "One need only contemplate the precarious
condition of Pakistan to realize the limitations of U.S. military
power and the peril of relying upon it."

The report recommends that the United States should shift its
priorities and funding to improve civil governance, build local
security forces, and exploit information — capabilities that have been
lacking in Iraq and Afghanistan."

It is good to see that the US policy think tanks and researchers are
finally beginning to recognize the follies of US policies. Let us hope
that the current and incoming US administrations pay heed to what
these researchers are finding and make dramatic policy changes before
it is too late. I am hopeful that the world leaders can still pull us
back from the brink and avoid catastrophic consequences of the
Bush-Cheney policies of the last seven years.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 21, 2017 at 7:00pm: Global Center for Combating Extremism in #Riyadh uses new ways. #moderation #terrorism #Trump http://ara.tv/2rhre via @AlArabiya_Eng

- The center is established as a result of the international cooperation in facing the extreme ideology leading to terrorism, the world’s first common enemy.

- It was founded by a number of countries who chose Riyadh as its headquarters in confronting extreme ideologies by monitoring and analyzing it, to confront and prevent it, cooperate with the governments and organizations to prevail and promote a culture of moderation.

- The center was established on three basic pillars: confronting extremism by the latest intellectual, media and numerical methods and means

- The center has developed innovative techniques that can monitor, process and analyze extremists’ speeches with high accuracy, all phases of data processing and analysis are done in no more than six seconds once the data or comments are posted on the Internet, allowing unprecedented levels of facing extremist activities in the digital world.

- The Center works to refute the hate and extremist speech and promote concepts of moderation, accepting the other, and the production of media content that confront the content of the radical thoughts in order to defy it, and reveal its promotional propaganda.

- The center includes a number of international experts specialized and prominent in confronting extremist speech on all the traditional media means and electronic world.

- The center operates in the extremists’ most widely used languages and dialects. Advanced analytical models are being developed to locate digital media platforms, highlight extremist focal point, and secret sources of polarization and acquiring activities.

- The importance of establishing the center lies in that it is the first time that the world countries seriously come together to face the threat of extremism, which poses a threat to the communities and endanger them, therefore it is the center’s duty to fight together to win and to be able to protect people from its danger.

- The selection of the (12) representatives of the Board of Directors from states and organizations; reflects the independence of the center's work, which is characterized by a governance system that applies international management best practices of major international organizations, which allows neutrality, flexibility, efficiency and transparency to fulfill the Center's functions and achieve its objectives.

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