Are We Really Just Beginning to Talk About "Soft Power" Now?
By Douglas Farah
A series of talks I have had recently echoed this Walter Pincus story in the Washington Post about the sudden recognition that "soft power" must be a vital component of any successful strategy to fight terrorism.
"How do we and our allies counter the ideology that supports violent extremism?" asked Michael Leiter, the acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in a speech Wednesday at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The goal, Leiter said, is "to prevent the next generation of terrorists from emerging," and one approach he suggested is "to show that it is al-Qaeda, not the West, that is truly at war with Islam."
My response is, can it really have to taken this long to come to grips with the fact we need to do this? Is it really not being done in any significant way?
For several years, going back to Don Rumsfeld's ruminations on whether more terrorists were being killed than created, there has been some recognition that military power is not going to make a huge or sustainable dent in the pool of people being radicalized by a variety of forces, and becoming convinced that their religion calls them to kill themselves for the cause.
And yet here is John A. Kringen, the CIA's deputy director for intelligence, admitting that despite military success in "disrupting and dismantling terrorist organizations . . . the supply of people wanting to join those organizations continues and in some areas continues to grow." My full blog is here.
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