One of the most painful moments of this week’s White House summit on countering violent extremism was when Ori Brafman – who was identified only as a “best-selling author” – asked the assembled policymakers, community leaders, law enforcement officers and foreign officials to each jot on a notecard one idea for countering extremism, and told us to vote for the ideas we thought could be implemented.
One of the big winners? “Empower youth… social media to amplify.” Another? “Get moms talking.”
The suggestions were absurdly amateur and incoherent, and the whole exercise was emblematic of the White House’s bigger problem: the United States is poised to deploy its global influence and hundreds of millions of dollars to “counter extremism” with few workable ideas and fewer plans for their potential consequences, including the impacts on freedom of expression and privacy.
During the summit, President Obama set out what he called a “generational challenge”: to counter violent extremism. In the United States, the government and private partners are supposed to “raise awareness so more communities understand how to protect their loved ones from becoming radicalized.” Family, neighbors and faith leaders will be encouraged to intervene at signs of potential radicalization, to “save their loved ones and friends, and prevent them from taking a wrong turn.” The focus is not just on Muslim communities, but any communities where “twisted ideologies” can “incite people to violence.”
Around the world, the US will promote economic development and human rights, because where “corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns … the risk of instability and extremism grow.”
The underlying trouble is that it is all too easy for “Countering Violent Extremism” to transform a society that aspires to be free into one in which political expression and debate put one at risk of being treated as a security threat based on vague criteria or no criteria at all.
While seemingly benign, the call for neighbors to “save” each other from radicalization implies a snooping society, in which community members don’t just welcome a police presence, they become an extension of it. The insidious side of the “see something, say something” mantra – first popularized on New York subway cars – has always been that “something” could encompass, well, anything.
Imagine being at the mercy of your neighbors’ judgments over what is suspicious – which could include what your community views as deviant or offensive. Imagine your neighbors’ judgment leading to a referral to a psychologist; if you refuse, you could incur greater law enforcement scrutiny and potentially life-long surveillance. Imagine the public stigma of being identified as a potential terrorist, and how that might deter you from speaking your mind in the first place.
These are just the predictable risks of a nebulous program like Countering Violent Extremism, so it is remarkable that, in the years that have passed since 2011 (when the Obama administration first announced its strategy for “empowering local partners to prevent violent extremism”), US officials have failed to establish any safeguards within its mandate to protect privacy and civil liberties.
Likewise, it’s remarkable that the United States is now encouraging governments around the world to adopt their own Countering Violent Extremism programs and create other measures to stem the recruitment of foreign fighters, without describing how to ensure protection for freedom of expression or prevent the misuse of the programs by security forces or intelligence agencies.
But too many of the US government’s partners in CVE – including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, all represented at this week’s summit – have unmistakable records of using counterterrorism as a pretext to target and punish dissent. Some of these governments have smeared human rights activists and anti-corruption reformists as “Islamist”, used vague terrorism charges to detain them and subjected them to torture and other ill-treatment.
President Obama didn’t mention these records of abuse on Thursday, when he spoke at length at the State Department about expanding human rights to combat terrorism. But if the president is serious about human rights, he must start by putting them at heart of any new programs at home or abroad right from the get-go. He must offer more than words: there must be legally binding rules at home and, at the international level, clear US positions on necessary safeguards.
After Wednesday’s disastrous notecard exercise, I looked up Ori Brafman. The subtitle of his most famous book is “the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations.” The summit organizers perhaps wanted to harness that kind of energy and optimism, which is so inimical to the bureaucracy and caution of ordinary DC politics. But the danger of unstoppable power is its ineluctable abuse.
