Extremist organizations are successfully preying on a rising generation of nearly one billion Muslim millennials in order to add to their ranks, according a new book published by Cipher Brief Expert Farah Pandith.
Pandith was appointed as the first female Special Representative to Muslim Communities by the U.S. State Department in a role that was created for her. She’s worked for multiple administrations on Middle East initiatives and believes that the U.S. is losing the fight against extremism and will continue to lose, unless an entrepreneurial team of experts comes together to address the issue in a radically different way.
How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the Extremist Threat focuses on Pandith’s grass roots plan for stopping the flow of extremist fighters by disrupting the recruitment process, something that she says will take the work of all of the above, to make any real progress.
The Cipher Brief talked with Pandith about her experiences talking with community leaders, private sector entrepreneurs and Muslim youth and what she thinks it will take to win the war on extremism.
The Cipher Brief: You’ve studied this problem for more than a decade. What have you learned?
Pandith: I have had the good fortune of being able to serve our nation in a couple of different ways right after 9/11, so I come to the table with insights from the very beginning of the war of ideas and how we have tried to think about how to stop young people from getting recruited.
Serving in both Bush and Obama administrations, I come to this without a political dog in the fight. I come to this as an American who has served and knows how important it is to be able to share what I've seen in almost 100 countries around the world with a demographic that has grown up post 9/11.
So the trends that I've seen, the cultural data that I've seen, paired with what I know has been a very difficult conversation within government, has made me really conscious of the responsibility to share the knowledge that I have, because we can do far more than we are doing right now.
The Cipher Brief: In the book, you say that Muslim millennials are adrift and extremists are praying on a rising generation of nearly one billion of them as a ripe recruiting pool. You’ve spent time sitting down with community leaders and youth themselves. What did Millennials say to you when you asked them why they would ever consider an extremist path?
Pandith: One of the things that's very surprising is that whether you're a Muslim in a Muslim majority country, or you're a Muslim living as a minority, the singular data point that connected all of these young people around the world was a crisis of identity.
Let me be clear, every young person - all of us - grow up trying to navigate our identity, trying to figure out the meaning of life, what you're supposed to do, we ask all kinds of questions of ourselves. But what has made this very different for Muslim millennials is that in post-9/11 contexts, they're seeing the word Islam and Muslim on the front pages of papers online and offline, and it's dramatically changing the nature of that experience growing up and how they think about themselves.
What I know, and what everybody has been dealing with in all of these years since 9/11, is that the bad guys also know that these young people are dealing with this difficult navigation of identity and they're providing answers about identity that are appealing to them. For me, it was very surprising to see a consistent theme around questions of who they are. The question that was asked everywhere is what does it mean to be Muslim in the world today? How do you express it? What is real? What is not real? And they're demanding answers.
I met dozens and dozens of young people, men and women, young girls and boys, in every part of the world who were committed to building a stronger flexibility around identity, so that there was not a monolithic interpretation of what it meant to be Muslim.
The bad guys want you to believe that there's only one way to be Muslim, and the young people I talked with wanted to demonstrate through culture, through arts, through song, through dance, through theology, through the actions on a peer-to-peer level, that there are many expressions and many interpretations of being Muslim.
The Cipher Brief: I think it's really interesting that you see the solution coming from cutting-edge entrepreneurs who are sometimes driven by different motivators than religion, or than people who are serving in government. You talk about political visionaries, you talk about enlightened business leaders, and people who have particular skills when it comes to social media.
These are really interesting groups of people. How likely do you think it is that they will be able to come together and follow some of the prescriptions that you make in your book about how to effectively combat extremism?
Pandith: No matter what segment of society you live in, unless you are an extremist, you are conscious of the rise of hate globally. You are conscious of a change that's happened on our planet and the shared humanity, the feeling of an us versus them series of ideologies that exist, whether it's about race or religion or about gender. And it is very concerning to all of us.
So we're at this very particular moment when we see a rise of hate, we see the outlay of that hate in ways that we wouldn't have imagined, even in our own country. And you're seeing different segments of society asking, "What can I do to defeat that us versus them ideology?" And the answer is all of us. We cannot be lazy on hate, we cannot just be asking another segment of society to be working on this issue and just walk in another direction. Each of us must think about what we can be doing.
And so I think the possibility and the opportunity for different communities to work together is the answer. I think it can happen, you're already seeing changes in the way people think about social responsibility towards each other, how you treat another person, how companies think about social good in terms of what they're doing. And that issue of purely just respect for each other is something that is conscious, it's a conscious change that's happened within America and that need is right here in front of us.
The Cipher Brief: You talk in the book about a concept that you created called Open Power. How do you explain what that means?
Pandith: We have used systems of power in very traditional ways and we're trying to apply old frames of power within government as the only solution. It is important that in the 21st century we understand that some kinds of threats, some kinds of challenges, require us to reconfigure solutions. Open power is a derivative of soft power.
We cannot just have the same people around the table trying to force solutions when we don't have all of the tools available within government. We have to open up the aperture, we have to think differently. Our timelines need to be different in terms of how we solve problems in real time, working on things for both the long term and the short term at once. We need to bring different kinds of experts to the table that allow us to turn things on their head and to be aware of opportunities that work in other sectors that could also work with us now.
This is not to say that we don't have solutions. We know that solutions exist in other places, we need to be able to apply some of the information, some of the creativity and the innovation around problem solving within government that we have not applied before.
The Cipher Brief: What are you hoping will happen in terms of practical, tangible steps that people can take to address the problem differently?
Pandith: Government needs to go all in. We can't keep talking about winning against ISIS when the ideology of a group like ISIS and other groups that are out there, continue to build their armies and are able to recruit. You cannot say as government that we're trying our best to fight the war of ideas.
Every single national strategy talks about the ideological component, yet we haven't put our money where our mouth is, we haven't put the resources where we need to put them, and we haven't configured government in a way that we can actually win this. So the first step of that government piece is that we need to get real about what we're doing, we need to go all in and actually put our best foot forward.
This is a solvable problem. You're not going to eradicate every bad actor in the world, but we can dramatically reduce the appeal of the ideology by effectively dealing with this with all of our assets. The bad guys have the same tools we do, they're applying them, we are not applying them. So that's the first thing.
The second thing is, and I want to be really clear about this, is that when government began to work on the ideological component of this war, we knew that government could not be the most credible actor in how we interface at the community level. It's impossible for government to have that kind of credibility and authenticity. We know that local actors are the ones that do that. The way that's implemented is through non-government organizations. And what I really hope is that people are conscious of the fact that we are putting our best efforts into this fight through NGOs that have to day-to-day think about where they're getting money, how to keep the lights on, how to staff up. They're doing our dirty work, and yet we aren't giving them the kind of support that they need.
And I really hope that we find a way to be able to scale the things that we have learned over almost 20 years since 9/11, that we have seen work. We have examples all over the world, both seeded from the U.S. government and other governments, and things that were designed and have been come up with by local communities themselves that need to be scaled. I hope that happens. That is the only way we're going to be able to win.
Read more from Farah Pandith in The Cipher Brief
