As part of the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) during the Obama administration, Michael Ortiz helped develop and launch a new CVE strategy and also worked to build the case internationally for those efforts. The Cipher Brief’s Mackenzie Weinger spoke with Ortiz, the first U.S. diplomat focused on countering violent extremism policy at State, to learn more about the department’s CVE programs, how the government works with the private sector, and what challenges lie ahead.
The Cipher Brief: What are some of the ways in which the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism has worked to prevent the spread of violent extremism?
Michael Ortiz: We have a multifaceted approach. We realized early on, and this was even before I arrived at State Department, that we needed a global architecture to support CVE efforts. And what I mean by global architecture is ensuring that there are organizations and resources out there to provide support to CVE efforts around the world. During her tenure, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set up the Global Counterterrorism Forum, which is an organization of a number of countries that shares best practices on counterterrorism issues. CVE became a big part of that.
During my tenure, we launched the Life Cycle of Radicalization to Violence initiative, which is like a toolkit for government, civil society, and others to use to prevent violent extremism. We helped set up the Strong Cities Network [a group for mayors and local level policy makers to help communities address CVE issues] as well as The Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, a private-public partnership fund, to support CVE programs around the world. We’ve also supported the Hedayah Center in Abu Dhabi, which is a think tank focused on CVE issues. And we also launched the new East Africa CVE Center with Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), which is East Africa’s development organization, and this will support East African countries in their fight against violent extremism.
Secondly, we also have a multilateral approach. We engaged with the UN, helped them renew the global counterterrorism policy that they’ve developed. And we were able to attach to that the preventing violent extremism plan of action, which was a priority for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. We really engaged in the forum and certainly in other organizations around the world.
And our third way is, we certainly enhanced our bilateral cooperation around the world. I traveled frequently and met with other governments to raise awareness on these issues. And then we of course had bilateral programing support. So those were the three main ways we enhanced our policy.
TCB: Which programs have been the most effective? Which ones could use improvement?
MO: There are a few types of overall programs. We had programmatic support to the global institutions, which I mentioned, so obviously those have been helpful in a number of ways. First, in convening countries, local actors, and civil society and focusing on local issues; and second, on our bilateral programs, there are a few examples of what I think have been most effective. Figuring out they can be most effective when we know what the drivers of violent extremism are or have a better understanding of it. For instance, in a number of countries, including in Africa, if we were able to determine that law enforcement played a role in the development of violent extremism, then we would be able to provide support for community police training, which we have found to be enormously valuable in Africa, Asia, and Europe. That is something I think has worked, and we should certainly do more of.
But what we need to do is be as specific as possible in all of our programming. That means we need to prioritize focus countries, and that’s something we did during my tenure. What are the top countries where we see violent extremism emanating from and how are we going to mitigate that? We can’t just do programs in random countries throughout the world. We have to be very focused.
To your second question on how we can improve, we need to make sure our messaging efforts, our counter-propaganda efforts, all those are tied together with the people-to-people efforts that I just discussed. It needs to be a coherent strategy and focused on a certain group of countries. Only then will we be able to be successful.
TCB: How do you see these programs changing in the future? Are there any new program suggestions that you would want to offer?
MO: I would say two things. One, in terms of programming, the State Department is doing programming, DoD is doing programming, the Intelligence Community is doing some programming, USAID certainly does programming, and DHS does domestic programming. We need to find a way to bring all of this together.
At State, we would hold weekly coordination meetings and we would have assistant secretary level meetings, but in my view, coming from the National Security Council, there needs to be some sort of coordination from the NSC. When you have this many agencies involved, you don’t want your efforts to be duplicative, and I worry that could be the case. What we need to do is have a better understanding of what’s happening in each agency. You certainly don’t need to dictate what other agencies are doing, but you want to know what the gaps are so you can fill those gaps. That’s the first thing we need to do.
Second, so much of our attention has been on our online activities, namely ISIS propaganda and our efforts to do counter-propaganda, and now we’re building third party messengers. We need to focus also on what tools we are providing to communities and families to push back on this. We can spend all day developing messaging campaigns, pushing back online — it’s very, very difficult, as we all know. If we can empower parents, teachers, and religious leaders to be able to identify online radicalization, figure out how to prevent it, and then intervene when it’s happening, including providing them with the resources to seek out when they do think their child or loved one is being radicalized online, that’s critical. We need to do more programming in that regard.
TCB: What is the level of cooperation and coordination between the Bureau and the private sector, with companies such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as with local civil society groups?
MO: On civil society, I find those groups to be absolutely critical in this fight. Those are the folks who are on the ground, they know their communities much better than any of us at the national level will. What we try to do is really lift them up and support them. Part of the UN plan of action called for developing CVE national action plans, and a component of those plans means engaging civil society and having a way to communicate with them. In all of my diplomatic outreach, that is something I prioritized, and that’s something I hope will continue.
In terms of the private sector, we have a good, positive relationship. A number of these companies have taken action to carry out the obligations they have under the terms of service agreements, which is a positive development. But we’ve also partnered with them in creative ways. For example, State Department partnered with Facebook to do the Peer to Peer program, which empowers university students to develop messaging campaigns to push back against violent extremism. This involves thousands of young people, they get grants. We did an event with them at UNGA [UN General Assembly]. This is something that Rick Stengel promoted under his tenure as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. It’s a positive program, it gets kids involved, and Facebook has been quite generous in supporting that effort.
We’ve also partnered with Stanford University on the Hacking for Diplomacy course. There were a number of courses in the program, but one of them was CVE. My colleagues and I were able to engage with students who typically wouldn’t be engaged in issues related to diplomacy or politics. These were engineering, computer science students. It was fascinating because we could identify a problem and they would help develop an idea and it was part of their course.
Those are the types of things we need to do and be creative about. On the tech side, those are some of the most innovative thinkers we have today. They can help us with those creative solutions.
TCB: How does the Bureau work with local governments to build their capacities to counter extremism? What kinds of experiences did you have on this on the ground during your tenure?
MO: Whenever I traveled, particularly in Africa, I would meet with civil society and local government officials. Those are the people who know exactly what’s happening, who know in many cases why it’s happening. But the challenge is there is a real disconnect between national governments and local governments around the world. The federal government here, I would say, has a better relationship with local governments than most countries around the world. So it’s figuring out how to connect the national governments with the local governments to provide funding or other resources that will really push this over the finish line.
It’s also about establishing lines of communication, which haven’t existed. In some countries like Germany and France, local governments are quite powerful, and they don’t interact with the federal government or national government as much as they do here in the U.S. We really have to figure out how to make that connection.
TCB: Do you have any examples of a success story, or something that did not go well but that you took some lessons from about CVE efforts?
MO: There were times when there has not necessarily been agreement about the purpose of a program. For example, if you develop a program and you say, we’re doing this because there’s violent extremism in this region, you do that with a messaging program, with booklets, or online messaging. But the reality is, if you’re not specific, you’re not going to be effective.
More importantly, where we’ve had problems is when there aren’t solid metrics. Particularly with messaging. You can put it out there as much as you want, but if folks aren’t responding to it or you don’t know action is being taken, then it’s hard to figure out if you’re making progress. This has certainly been an issue with Congress, too, because as they should, they want to see progress in metrics. That’s something we’ve gotten much better at — identifying what we’re trying to do and then showing how we’re doing it.
TCB: Looking ahead, what are some of the biggest challenges you see facing CVE?
MO: One of the things we struggled with in the previous administration, and this administration is struggling with it now, is figuring out how much emphasis you want to put on CVE. It’s critically important to prevent terrorism, but there needs to be a true focus on this. That means you’ve got to put a lot of money towards it, and you have to put your best minds on it and really prioritize it within the building, whether it’s the White House, State Department, USAID, or wherever. But this has to be a priority.
We spend billions of dollars on technology that’s able to take terrorists off the battlefield. I’d rather spend billions of dollars trying to prevent people from getting to the battlefield in the first place and using that technology as a last course of action. Senior Cabinet officials have to make the case to Congress on why this is absolutely important.
There’s been a lot of focus on what we call this effort. President Trump has called it radical Islamic terrorism — in my view, the name doesn’t matter, because what we’re trying to do is prevent radicalization and recruitment to violence. That needs to be our focus. We’ve spent a lot of time on what we’re calling it, but we just need to double down, actually get to work and start doing. Like many others, I certainly have concerns with that phrase, but my priority is getting the job done.
