 I'm the bureau chief for Al Jazeera Arabic and the host of its weekly show, Min Washington, on what happens in the U.S. and how it impacts the Arab region. Part of this discussion will most likely end up on the show, Min Washington. That's what we do. John has been a guest on that show. It's extremely important for us to show our viewers in that part of the world not just what happens in the U.S., but also the kind of debate that happens in the U.S. And this very important debate on this very important topic, timely, given the events of today, also they add more importance and flavor, the events in Sydney or Australia. So it's very important for us to use the platform of this study, religious radicalism after the Arab uprisings to, as I said, give our viewers a flavor of the kind of discussion that happens here in the United States. I'm extremely grateful and privileged that I've been invited by CSIS to moderate this panel. Thanks primarily to John Ultiman sitting next to me. And many of you already know the panelists, but nonetheless, let me quickly rattle through their bios. John Ultiman is a senior vice president, holds the name that I know, never know how to pronounce things. My name is Difficult. Big New Brzezinski, chair in global security and geostrategy and is director of the Middle East program at CSIS. Prior to joining CSIS, in 2002, he served as a member of the policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State and as a special assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. He is a member of the chief of naval operations executive panel and served as an expert advisor to the Iraq study group. And the bio goes on and on and on and on. His achievements, how many? You can consult that later on. Let me just add that he also teaches Middle Eastern studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Next to John is Haim Malka, who is a senior fellow and deputy director of the Middle East program at CSIS, where he oversees the program's work on the Maghreb. For those of you who are not necessarily familiar with the term, I know many of you are, but the Maghreb is the part of the Arab world, which includes Mauritania, Morocco, where I come from, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, as opposed to the Mashrek, which is the other part of the Arab world. So I'm very happy that we have a Maghreb specialist here with us, Haim Malka. Thomas Sanderson is co-director and senior fellow in the CSIS Transnational Project, where he works on terrorism, transnational crime, global transcentral Asia, and I'm glad that he has that in his portfolio, so we can also possibly touch on the challenges coming from that part of the world and intelligence issues. Some of you may have this if you are looking for more details about the panelists. Without further ado, I just want to say a quick thing about the topic of our panel today and then we'll go to the guests for maybe a conversation of about 15 minutes and then we'll open it up to Q&A from you guys. So once again, welcome to all of you. Semantics to start with. I think all the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, recognize the extreme importance of words and the choice of words. The very first word in the Islamic revelation is, Iqra read, Christianity in the beginning was the word and the list continues. What I found most arresting in this title as far as semantics are concerned is that it doesn't talk about the Arab Spring or the Arab revolutions. It talks about the uprisings. And the study or what I've read of the study actually expands on the reasons why it uses uprisings rather than revolutions. Within the Arab world, as some of you already know, there's a debate going on as to whether what's happened over the last four years are revolutions or uprisings. And technically speaking, an uprising is a particular event in a particular point in time which may succeed or may fail. End of story. A revolution, as you know, there's a continuous debate about the definition of revolution whether in the Arab world or here in the US or elsewhere is like a train. It sputters into action, they stop and start again. So we don't know as far as these debates, there's no categorical settling of the issue of whether what's been happening over the last four years is an uprising or a revolution. What we do know is that many parts of the Arab region are now scenes to the kind of events that we all know and are discussed here as religious radicalism, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and the list goes on. Just a final thought, when revolutions happened elsewhere in the world, let's say part of the world closer to the United States, Latin America, we didn't see the kind of violence that we are now seeing, the kind of radicalism, whether it's religious radicalism, secular radicalism or otherwise, or government radicalism that we are now seeing across North Africa and the Middle East, most of it anyway. So that is one thing that I wanted to start this discussion with and I wanted to start with a quick statement from the three panelists, each one of them is going to speak for what, about five minutes, and then we'll get into some nitty-gritty stuff, which I will start going back to the issue of uprisings and revolutions. I'll start with you, John. Thank you, and thank you very much for coming. Thank you all for coming on a Monday morning. I appreciate your opening this with a problem because we originally saw this as a problem. And people have connected religion and violence and politics in the Middle East for a long time. And suddenly you saw politics clearly moving, unclear what direction they were moving, but politics were clearly changing. You saw religious parties engaging in politics in a new way. You saw groups that had previously espoused violence entering the political system in some way. And it seemed to us that it was worthwhile to investigate what was happening. What did this mean? What direction was this all going? How religious parties in power because some religious parties did come to power, how they retreat violent parties that claim to be religious, how parties that embrace religion would tolerate political challenge. There were any number of questions that stuck out to us, but it's important to remember also when we began this study about 18 months ago, we were in a very different environment. The Muslim Brotherhood was in power in Egypt and Tunisia. Salafis were playing an active political role. Jihadis were growing in both Syria and Libya. It was, I think, one set of questions which have morphed into an interesting and important set of questions. After the fall of the Brotherhood in Egypt, through a retreat of the Nahda Party, the Muslim Brotherhood Align Party in Tunisia, the region seems to be finding itself in a different place, moving in a different direction. I think for us, as we have looked at this question, as we've looked at the groups, we were surprised that if you were to evaluate now, you would say the greatest advantage from efforts of change went to undemocratic forces. And four years ago, if you said there would be a series of uprisings that would challenge governments, and the winners would be not democratic forces but undemocratic forces, that would be a surprising outcome. In part because a lot of these undemocratic forces were never really looking for a majority, and certainly many of the Jihadis groups never had an ambition to win over a majority. They were trying to affect politics in a different way. But I think that one of the things that we've also learned, and one of the things that quite frankly is disturbing, is the extent to which several authoritarian governments seem to have decided that the best way they can deal with their domestic threats is by polarizing their societies. That what these uprisings represented was a way to bring societies together, and you had these very interesting secular, liberal, religious alliances in the middle of societies, and one of the steps that governments seem to have taken is to draw bright lines and say you have to be on the right side of the line to have a place in public life. In some ways that kind of polarization reflects a lot of the Bush administration's strategy of you have to draw a bright line and say you're either with us or you're with the terrorists, and you could argue that that's clarifying. To say you have to choose which side you're on. You could also argue that it's an effort to sustain patterns of authoritarianism and patronage systems that sustain it. For Western countries, that is for countries like the United States and European allies, that creates a series of very hard choices which are nowhere highlighted as clearly as they are in Syria, where you have a government that very clearly tried to drive the conflict in Syria from being a democratic uprising of peaceful protesters into an alloy minority brutally punishing a Sunni Jihadi majority. And that's clearly where they wanted that conflict to be. Where should the US be in that? Do we want to be supporting Bashar? Do we want to be supporting Jihadis? How do you do both at once? And I think we're struggling through that now. There is partly this, the very real fact that the victors of democratization efforts in many ways were radicals, at least in the near term and the US and its allies seek partners to fight radicalism. In polarized societies, we may find as we look forward that this radicalism, the endurance of radicalism may prove to be something of a constant because governments may see the persistence of some small nugget of radicalism as necessary both to sustain majority support for authoritarian rule, but also to sustain the support of the Western governments. And as we look forward, I think that suggests that the radicalism which has seized our attention in the Middle East may be a phenomenon that's with us for a very long time. Thank you. Hi. Wow, that really was five minutes impressive. Ha ha. So one of the things that we had to do in trying to frame this study was to figure out what some of the sources of conflict were in the region. There's a lot of debate about the sources of conflict. Is it marginalization? Is it economic? Is it ideological? And one of the issues that I focused on and I think the work that John and I focused on in particular looked at the struggle over authority and legitimacy as a key driver of conflict in the region. Now, there's always been debates about religious identity. There's always been debates about religious traditions and values, but what we saw emerging is a struggle over the question of who is the authentic voice? Who has the right and the legitimacy to determine ideology? Who has the right and legitimacy to determine strategy, to determine values? And that was a key driver of conflict that I saw emerging in the region. I focused on two specific areas in this study. One looked at the broader jihadi-salafi landscape. And there, we've always seen a debate within the jihadi-salafi landscape. And after 9-11, Al-Qaeda really established a consensus. The consensus was about creating a loose network of jihadi-salafi organizations that respected Al-Qaeda's chain of command, that had an evolutionary and long-term approach to establishing an Islamic state or a caliphate. They tried to avoid alienating populations. They tried to avoid using extreme violence. They tried to avoid alienating and fighting Shia. But the Arab uprisings really not only shook the Arab governments, but it shook the jihadi-salafi landscape as well. And it really created a challenge to the authority and the consensus that Al-Qaeda had developed over about 15 years. And what we saw emerging was not just a debate about tactics, about targets, about timing, but what emerged was really a rebellion against Al-Qaeda's established leadership and a rebellion that was very much in tune with the rebellion against authority that we saw on a political level throughout the Arab uprisings in 2011. So Al-Qaeda had this very evolutionary approach, whereas those calling themselves the Islamic state or ISIS or Daesh were very much more action-oriented. They disregarded the chain of command that Al-Qaeda had established and worked hard to create. They disrespected the Al-Qaeda leadership and saw it as a failure for actually not really achieving anything substantial. It fought the Shia and tried to foment sectarian conflict in Syria and Iraq. And it argued that it was a sin not to establish an Islamic caliphate immediately given the gains that the Islamic state or ISIS had won so far. So this rebellion really showed how out of touch Al-Qaeda was with the prevailing mood in the Arab world after the uprisings. I think there are a lot of implications for this. First, it forces jihadi salafis to choose sides in an increasingly polarized struggle between Daesh and Al-Qaeda. It causes confusion because we see a lot of different movements declaring allegiance one way or the other, either to Daesh or to Al-Qaeda. So it creates a lot of confusion within the ranks. And it further fragments the jihadi salafi landscape and creates competition not only for authority and legitimacy and leadership, but competition and motivation to launch more spectacular attacks, to use more violence to actually achieve something tangible. And we saw this historically when the Salafi group for preaching and combat in Tunisia declared its allegiance for Al-Qaeda and renamed itself Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb. In 2007, it launched a series of high-profile attacks against Western targets, the UN headquarters in Algiers that killed over 30 people in order to establish itself within the Al-Qaeda camp and to demonstrate its loyalty to the Al-Qaeda camp and the Al-Qaeda vision. So I think looking forward, there's going to be pressure on both camps to achieve something tangible. Both camps will be under pressure to continue to use violence and launch what will be successful in their eyes attacks. And this, to me, seems like the struggle that we will see going forward over the next decade or so. There won't be necessarily a clear winner or a clear outcome, but an ongoing struggle between these different visions of jihad, of what it means to fight jihad, what the goals of jihad should be. I'm incredulous that so far you've been able to stick to the five minutes. Amazing. This has not always been the case in other panels that I've moderated. It's a real pleasure to talk. I have another 15 minutes, if you'd like me to. Go on. No, Tom. That puts a lot of pressure on me to remain consistent. If we can go to the slides here, it'd be great to maybe knock down a little bit of the light, if that's hard to see in the back. First, I'd like to start off by thanking Dr. Fakar for moderating in Dr. John Altman and High Malka 4. Their partnership on this and their fantastic team with Kerry and Rebecca and Jason and others and my team with Josh and Zach and David and Jessica and the many others, Mike Barber, who contributed to this. So thank you very much for this. Just a little bit of context just on the first bullet there. This is part of a larger study that we've been conducting for over 2 and 1 half years to look at militancy across the so-called arc of instability stretching from Western Africa into Southeast Asia. We completed phase one on South Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal about 18 months ago. We are now completing phase two with the MENA phase and we hope to go on to phase three, which would cover Africa Sahel region with our Africa team here at CSIS. So just to give you a sense of where that fits in in the larger scope. Our team, Transnational Threats, looked at more of the operational elements of the threat. So in the study, we typically look at group operations, ideology, fundraising, and group structure. And in this one, clearly, as John mentioned, when we started at 18 months ago, things were quite different. And ISIS became the big story about halfway through our effort. So a lot of our focus was on ISIS and on Syria and on the region surrounding. You'll see a list of the sources we interviewed across several countries in the region in a five-week period on two different trips. So I'll just go over some of the findings from that element of the study. And if we can move to the first one. First one is on safe haven. And we've met many, many times with different elements of government here. And one of the things that frustrates folks so much, owing to not just the uprisings, but other factors is you have more ungoverned space in the region now than you did prior to 9-11. And that's obviously tremendously concerning, given what ungoverned space fosters. Planning, operations, fundraising, movement of weapons and people over borders, antiquities, passport, trafficking, you name it, all of these elements that fuel the environment that causes so much trouble for us today. And controlling that territory, and the territory specifically that ISIS has, not only allows them to run these operations and to raise money locally, but impede the same operations of their adversaries and what the Declaration of the Caliphate established as a land that's governed in an Islamic fashion, therefore lending credibility to their ideology and drawing folks from overseas in an effort to, among many things, defend this territory. Next slide, please, to terror finance. We've also benefited from having Juan Zarate on our study team here as a senior advisor. And he has provided great expertise on the terror finance side. When we went to the Arab Gulf to look at the funding element in our second visit this past March, we looked at many things. And we attended a fundraiser in Kuwait. We went to the UAE. We went to Bahrain. We went to Qatar to look at these issues. And one of the things early on we saw with the conversations we had with people like Elizabeth Dickinson and others who've done excellent work on the funding side was the uncoordinated nature of some of the funding that came in from the Gulf that helped fracture the movements as they were at the time. There's clearly much more polarization at this point now. The portfolio of ISIS funding is one of the things we constantly focus on. When you think about the need to stay in the battle for the long haul, you don't want your funding sources in your lines of communication to be stretched out across the world. They're even into the Gulf where they can be pulled and tightened in times of stress. So ISIS, with its local portfolio, has been able to very effectively maintain robust revenue generation as they conduct their fight. However, there's a very high burn rate on that cash as they seek to fund the Sharia courts, as they fund those alliances that they have with Sunni groups in Iraq for the weapons and other needs that they have in conducting operations, subsidizing food, puts a lot of stress on that. So hitting, in particularly the oil facilities, the refiners has been very, very critical in trying to attenuate some of that funding. And I think there's a small difference that's been made at this point, and we need to do an awful lot more work. Vicks, please. On the foreign fighter side, this number 15,000 is already itself out of date just after a week. And that is, we're looking at numbers of up to 20,000 now from 80 countries. And this is primarily on the Sunni side. This is an incredible network that ISIS has at its hands for a potential blowback to those countries or for onward movement to other countries, essentially a networked force of primarily young men who are skilled, who are going from zero to hero from their formally marginalized existence to a place where they gain credibility and legitimacy, network, brotherhood, and going back to places where they are given a sense of empowerment where they had none before. And that's very concerning to partners of ours in Southeast Asia, in South Asia, across North Africa. In many countries, we have 80 plus represented at this point, and that has been one of the top concerns as we look at this. Visa waiver is one of those critical issues. There are 38 visa waiver countries with the United States and 30 of those in Europe. And you have over 3,000 fighters coming from Europe into the battle zone. You do the math, it's pretty simple there. You return, get on a plane to Dulles Airport in Newark, and it's up to that officer at the airport to determine whether you present a danger or not. My colleague, Zach, and I interviewed a passport trafficker at the Baba Salam crossing at Syria on the Turkish border, and he had a Belgian passport available for $8,000. There are local fixer, engaged him in the conversation, and we had heard prior that this individual was the one who, at that particular gate, was offering passports from suicide bombers who would enter the country knowing that they were on a one-way ticket, sell their passport, someone would come in the opposite direction, have their picture taken, they had sophisticated equipment available to repurpose that passport. So that was something that we found to be of particular concern. And just to give you a sense of some of the sources in both the initial trip to the Levant and then to the Gulf, a number of folks from refugees to smugglers, to foreign service officers, to journalists, to government officials, to scholars and academics across the region. We've got a very rich source of perspectives, and we're able to bring that into the research mix. And you see there the set of countries that we were able to engage in the course of this, as well as dozens of subject matter experts that we engaged here at CSIs in over Skype and through other means. So I'll turn them back to Dr. O'Carr. That's great. That's great. Thanks, Tom. So we're going to engage in a 15 minute conversation if the onus is a little bit on you to keep your answers as concise as possible so we can go to the audience with as much ground covered as possible to give them things to think about. I wanted to go back to the issue of Semandik's with you, John. You call it uprisings. Now, just to follow your logic, if you had called it something else, if you had called it revolutions, for example, would we still be sitting here today, four years, also after the fact, talking about the spread of religious radicalism, as you call it in this study? I mean, revolutions can go in lots of directions. And what I sense is implicit in your question is an expectation that a revolution would have produced an inclusive democratic result, which would have brought political parties of all stripes in, which would have tempered the radicalism of a number of groups that the spirit of Taher, if you will, that sort of sense of inclusivity that we saw in late February and early March of 2011 would have worked. Partly that assumes that the sort of naivete of some of the young revolutionary groups that we're all going to meet with the Supreme Council, the armed forces, and we're gonna post the notes of our meeting on Facebook, and that's gonna be the way that everybody's gonna vote, and that you can make politics work that way. I think one of the things we learn from these efforts is it's really hard to make politics work that way, that you can have post-modern politics in the street, but it's hard to govern in a post-modern way, and a lot of these efforts didn't work. We have seen in other revolutions, the Iranian revolution started off as a more inclusive revolution. Revolutions often become less inclusive, so one of the questions to ask is there a reason why these revolutions didn't stick as inclusive, and part of the reason probably has to do with security services? Part of the reason I was just talking to a former Yugoslav activist who is now a former Croatian activist because Yugoslavia didn't work, but Yugoslavia, as he was telling me, had a lot of people with a Western education, there was certainly an elite which shared a whole series of values that there was something else to draw on, which was not necessarily present in the Arab world. Were we naive to think there were revolutions to start with, or were we naive to think there was a chance that it's ever working? No, I think there are chances for it to work, but the question I think now is what is the best way forward? Are there ways to have more inclusive politics? As you know, the strategy of the government of Morocco has been to try to include part of the Islamist community, but not include all of the Islamist community and to try to split that so it doesn't become so larger group that it threatens the government to have a game where people feel they have at least a possibility and a utility in participating, and that has, up to this point, kept Morocco relatively more stable than most of its neighbors. Is that adaptable to other places? Can you adapt it to non-monarchical systems? I mean, these are the hard questions. The question I find disturbing is the utility of radicalism for authoritarian regimes. Well, let me stop you there, and before I go to Tom for the next one, I'll ask you a follow-up question. Now, the fact that you used the word uprising instead of revolution, the kind of religious radicalism that you're talking about, is it an inseparable adjunct of an uprising given that an uprising can be declared failed, can be crushed and produced intended or unintended consequences? I think there are radicals who don't aspire to winning over a majority, who are not interested in a political, in a democratic political process except to capture it. So I don't think that, I don't think that the exclusion of some people creates the radicalism. I think the problem is, how do you treat the radicalism if what you were trying to do is bring everybody in, and every society decides there are some people who you don't want to have in the system, and maybe you want to isolate them, and maybe you have to arrest them. I mean, we have guys who we leave isolated on mountaintops in parts of the United States, and we're not truly trying to bring them into the system. The fact is, there aren't a lot of those people in the cities, although we had some in the 1960s and 70s, and that created our own domestic conflict. Okay, Tom, in the same strain before I move on to other stuff with Heim, now, if you're sitting in the material as well as intellectual comfort of the United States, it's very easy to say this was this or this was that. If you are a Syrian, for example, who has seen 10 million Syrians driven into displacement or refugee camps in neighboring countries, you have seen about 200,000 people killed describing it as an uprising may create the kind of backlash that you'll be warned against here in your study. Yeah, I think they would describe it as a, it depends, of course, who you're talking to, but an uprising to them, I think would understate what is going on to them. It's a full blown revolution, and they seek to topple the government there, and I'm glad you did bring up the refugee element because we visited Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan as John did earlier in the year, and as we look at those 10 million Syrians who are displaced, about six and a half million internally and three and a half million externally as refugees, we see them as a potential factor in the future. These young men and women, very young, who will spend many, many years growing up amidst this uprising, and not having a chance to return to their lives, to continue their lives, and having that resentment build. We see that as something to look out on the horizon. We didn't see it as a problem at this point, but we did get many, many opinions from the Syrians. We met in Qatar, the ones we met in Kuwait, and these were pharmacists, these were lawyers, real estate agents, these were journalists, adults who looked at this as a very black and white issue, of course, and wanted us to engage in a much more comprehensive manner to turn the page as they saw it, just sitting there and not being moved at all after four years, three and a half years of tremendous effort to move this forward. Haim, you talk about religious radicalism. There are all sorts of other types of radicalism. There's secular radicalism, and as I'm sure you're well aware, there are people who argue whether you agree with them or not, that what has produced the kind of religious radicalism that you're talking about, at least in some parts of the Muslim world, is secular, the kind of secular radicalism, and the kind of reaction that secular radicalism had to the Arab uprisings or revolutions or whatever you wanna call it. What do you think? I think there's something to that. I mean, and I think it's important to understand that and the role that repression of religion in some countries has produced religious radicalism. I mean, if we look at the biographies of many of the leading ideologues in the Jihadi Salafi movement, many of them went through a process of alienation, prison in many cases, some of the Egyptian leaders that became al-Qaeda, and that process of repression radicalized them in the process. One of the other cases that I looked at in this study was Tunisia, and I spent some time in Tunisia over the last year and a half, and that's a country where state secularism was imposed and restricted the religious space across the entire religious spectrum. So you had a very narrow window of religious space to operate in, and that also produced religious radicalism of different kinds, and when the Ben Ali regime fell in Tunisia, we saw all of those different religious radical movements emerge, different models of Jihadi Salafism emerge, and going back to your point, I think it's important, as governments, as new governments in some case, try to deal with the problem of religiously inspired radicalism and violence, they have to, the challenge, I would say for them, is not to fall back into the old trap of repressing across the board. As John mentioned, there has to be some space for religious actors to operate in, otherwise we're gonna fall back into the trap of repression, human rights abuses that actually fuel radicalism and extremism, and then we're back in the same place. You know, I think a lot of this is really just, it comes down to a question of legitimacy, right? You can get legitimacy through religious means, you can get legitimacy through a political process, you can get legitimacy because people feel there's a utility in somebody maintaining some sort of order. There are lots of places you can come to, and then people attack the legitimacy of others as a way to further their own political standing because politics is ultimately about power and power is about distributing resources. I think what we are seeing is there has been this incredible competition for legitimacy coming from lots of places, and what we are seeing, I think, is religious groups that are fundamentally political, political groups that put on the cloak of religion in order to further their goals, that this doesn't divide as easily as people had anticipated, and what I think is disturbing is there was a sense that this radicalism is something that was going to be treated by more open politics, as your question suggested, and instead it feels to me like this radicalism is something that a whole range of actors see utility in preserving. And for- And including governments, you mean? Some governments see utility in it as well. And that's not conspiracy theory. I don't think it's a conspiracy theory, I think it's a reality. Just Jackie. Because of a sense that if you let these guys in, they will radicalize the whole, so you have to keep them out and maintain your system over here. And what they said, what that means for a US audience, for a European audience, for a South and Southeast Asian audience that sort of sees this as coming out of the Middle East. It feels like to us, having looked at this, that these problems that people triumphantly said in the spring of 2011 are going away because you demonstrated, people demonstrated in Cairo and Tunis and elsewhere, that the political process could deliver the results that people wanted and you didn't have to try to overturn the apple cart. Instead, we're seeing an endurance of the kinds of dynamics that make radicalism process. And I'm assuming that when you use the apple cart, you're not necessarily alluding to Boisezi in Tunisia. I'm from upstate New York, it's apple country. Okay, let me, before you add to that, let me just ask you. I mean, in the study, you make the point which John has just reiterated now, that at one time, in places such as Egypt, Tahrir Square, a window of opportunity for the youth opened up with a new narrative, which some of these religious radical groups, as you say in the study, found hard to compete with. Now you say that right across the region, these groups are now back into competition. What would have taken to keep that window of opportunity that you talk about in the study open to keep these religious groups, as you say, running into irrelevance? Well, you don't actually use those words, but I'm a journalist, I like to editorialize sometimes. There were a lot of factors that played into this. I mean, for one, the security services in these countries were weakened after the air bob risings. There was a lot of tension between the security services and new governments that took over, which allowed some of these radical movements to emerge. In some cases, the new governments were political Islamists that had to navigate this new religious landscape for the first time and delineate for themselves who was radical, who was acceptable. And again, going back to the question of Tunisia, where we had a Nahda in power, a Nahda very much tried to absorb all these different religious movements, including religious radicals for a number of reasons. For one, this was a religious movement that had been repressed for decades. It had a hard time conceiving of repressing other religious movements. They saw them as wayward youth in many cases. There was a political component. They wanted to absorb potential votes from jihadi salafis or jihadi salafi sympathizers. And so there were lots of reasons why these movements were allowed to continue to operate. At a certain point, however, it became a political liability for a Nahda in Tunisia. At a certain point, the violence that was allowed to accelerate both in Egypt and Tunisia reframed the issues of the air bob risings and it was no longer this rainbow coalition of secular, liberals, Islamists coming together, but this choice between radicalism on the one hand and stability on the other. And I think that's what doomed the spirit of Tahirir. Okay, I'd like to get you guys to elaborate a little bit more on the part of it which you are directly concerned with, which is the maghreb. But let me start to Tom and I'll circle back to you on that. I mean, to the extent that this study is actually four Americans and four American national security challenges and so on. Traditionally, the US has been from the Second World War concerned more with the Gulf and the Middle East. Now we see the spread that Haim is talking about of these Salafi movements into what had been traditionally a European concern, North Africa, basically West Africa and so on. Has the prison, as you describe it in the study, for the United States changed now on this part of the Arab world? Well, and I'll defer to Haim on the North Africa side but I'll give my thoughts on it. And that is, there's no doubt that the prison has changed because we're seeing the links between North Africa and what's happening in Syria where our focus is intense because of the number of foreign fighters coming in from North Africa. Yes, Tunisia is a success story among those countries that have experienced the uprising. Yet you have the highest number of foreign fighters from all of those 80 countries are coming from Tunisia. 3,000 in addition to 8,000 that they said they blocked from going. So you can't help but have the prism or the scope wide into include North Africa, which as you know is typically a European focus because our concern is with Iraq and Syria and so many of the fighters that we're concerned about and the weapons in particular from Libya are coming from that region. And on your previous question, if I could just add something, it clearly economics was a huge element of providing the space for Milton Actors to come in with the tremendously unmet expectations for all those youth across the region that saw the uprising, saw potential for political, economic and social engagement and it was not met. There was disarray and so new actors or old actors in fact, presented options in the midst of this chaos. I'm on the issue of the prism based on this study. Is there anything that you think now makes it, makes the prism different looking through your study? If you're American or European, looking at North Africa specifically. North Africa is where so many of these trends have actually started. I mean, if we look at the Jihadi Salafi movement back in history, we can go back to the Algerian, the war against the Algerian state by the GIA. Again, the uprisings in Tunisia would spark, I think there's a greater understanding that what happens in the Mughrab actually matters for the rest of the Arab world and what happens in the rest of the Arab world and the Mushrek has an impact on the Mughrab as well. The split between Al Qaeda and ISIS or the Islamic state that I spoke about is having an impact on the Mughrab as well. And so I think these two sub regions are much more interconnected than they ever have been before and I think we're starting to realize that in Washington. Can I just make a point going back to your question about the governments however though? A lot of the discussion that we have here in Washington focuses on the security element, focus on the Connecticut element of how to battle the Islamic state and religious radicalism. We also need to understand the ideological battle that's going on and that's the other part of my study is looking at how governments in the region are trying to fight, not only the counter-terrorism fight but the ideological struggle and that is much more difficult than counter-terrorism for all the challenges that it pose. And what we're seeing is governments in the region in the Mughrab in particular, I think it's where we can see it most clearly, is that governments are trying to re-establish their control of religious space. They're trying to recreate national religious identity in order to fight radicalism, in order to fight Salafism, Jihadi Salafism. And we see this very clearly in Morocco. We see this clearly in Tunisia. Algeria has also started to do this. And there are two components of this. One is controlling physical space. It's about controlling, registering the mosques. It's about monitoring what imams are saying. It's about educating imams to be more relevant to youth. But then there's the ideological component. And the ideological component, again, is very difficult. What are the messages that can compete with the radical messages? What are the values that can compete with the religious, with the extremists and radical values? And that, to me, is one of the biggest challenges and struggles that will go on for the next generation in the Arab world. On that shoulder. If I could just ask you this, and you can do both, two for the price of it. I don't have to remember my idea. This idea that Chaim has just talked about now, I mean, if you're sitting in the United States, and I get it, because I am obviously sitting in the United States. But if you're sitting in the United States and hearing these discussions, the impression you get if you didn't know that the Arab world well, is that the entire population of entire countries is now turning to religious radicalism. For a better informed perspective, how should this be angled for the American policymaker or for American public opinion at large? Look, I don't think whole countries are turning to radicalism. And one of the things that we've seen is that a small number of radicals can persist because the radicals aren't looking for majorities. That's still the fact that the radicals exist, creates consequences for Western governments, for government's allied to Western governments. But I think one of the things we have seen in fact is that these populations are not radicalizing as a whole. That Ankada and its adherents have not succeeded in radicalizing majorities. They've succeeded in radicalizing enough people to be a persistent factor in international relations. What I wanted to pick up on that Chaim was mentioning, which feeds into this as well, is the extent to which you've always had sort of two things going on in the Arab world. There's a sense of nationalism or certainly for the last 100 years. You've had a sense of nationalism of particularism and we're seeing an effort to resurrect a sort of Tunisian state Islam. And there are certainly efforts in the Gulf and elsewhere to try to have clearer boundaries on what state sanctioned Islam looks like. And then you have the spread of Pan-Arab ideas or Pan-Islamic ideas. El Jazeera plays a role in creating a national dialogue. The fact that you can have Moroccan hosts on El Jazeera. Talking to audiences, talking about regional issues means that there are people from everywhere absorbing ideas from everywhere. So on the one hand you have this much more regional discussion about legitimacy and religion and state and politics and all those things. And you have a resurgence of state efforts to articulate the boundaries of a state approach. That is a much more complex political and religious environment than we've had. And again, I think what we're likely to see is rather than a consolidation, a convergence, which is what we thought we were seeing in the early spring of 2011. I think we're likely to see a sustained differentiation both in terms of the approaches that states take, but also consistent entrepreneurship by this myriad group of non-state actors to find a chink in the armor against the state that they're working against. Because ultimately, if you wanna make a difference, you have to make a difference against a specific state. The idea that you're gonna be able to sweep across the entire region, I think is not in people's minds, but people are learning from individual efforts in individual places and transferring that knowledge. And I think that dynamic is a quite robust one. Okay, just a final one before I open it up to Q&A, and I'll go to you, Tom. When you're writing the history of anything, you obviously have to choose a starting point. Now, when you talk about religious radicalism, whether in the Muslim world, in the Christian world, in the Judaic world, whatever world you're talking about, you have to choose a starting point. There's a guy, he's a former president of Egypt, his name is Mohammed Huzni Mubarak. He did tell another guy who is a former U.S. president prior to 2003, if you invade Iraq, you will open the gates of hell. Now, why is your religious radicalism study joined up to the Arab uprisings and not to anything else before the Arab uprisings, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example? For example? We certainly address some of the underlying structural instability that took place, I think, certainly in our briefings we've done in as far as the foreign fighter phenomenon played a key role in ours. Foreign fighters had already been moving into the region into Iraq, Syria, of course, had played host to many of those fighters, ironically, and now they are the subject of that. So I think that plays strongly into what we looked at as far as the instability in Syria and Iraq looking back to the 2003 invasion. So I think that has been a strong component of it. Okay. And then let me also make a comment on John's final comments about establishing control of the state. It's clear that they are not challenging in looking for control of certain states in the region, but we do have, in fact, a movement, ISIS, that has swept into large areas of two states, states that cannot establish control over their own borders, have extremely weak militaries, and are fighting other battles. So we do, in fact, have a group that has established some control over a large space with six million people under some nominal degree of control, and that, I think, is one of the greatest concerns we're looking at today. Okay. Thank you. Can I open it up for a question and answer now? If you could, please wait until you get the microphone. Identify yourself. Ask a brief question. If it's too long, I'll cut you off. Arab Spring or no Arab Spring? Please, you at the back. My name is Ali Sada. I work for the AI. I have a question for you, John. You just touched on the media element of the appraisings and the creation of ISIS. What's the media role, especially the regional media? We know that it's guided, and it even reached personal levels. For example, now one of the cameraman of one of the regional media stations is the head of education in ISIS in Iraq and Syria. How did that happen? How the media became so involved with ISIS and the creation of ISIS? Thank you. Do you want to take that now? Shall we take a string of questions? Can we take a string of questions? Yeah, okay. Yes, please. My question is, my name is, sorry. My name is Fuad Aarif. I'm the director, North America director for the Moroccan news agency here in Washington. My question is directed to Haim, who brought up the idea of the ideological struggle going on right now in the Minna region. The idea of ideological struggle does pose the crucial, another crucial idea, which is of producing the right content to fight this ideological struggle. I know that you're familiar with several Arab countries. I would like you to give me your take on those Arab countries who are right now, according to you, producing that right ideological content that, according to you, might be effective in fighting the ISIS ideology. Thank you. Okay, we'll take one more. You, sir. Yes, please. My name is Raymond Wong from the Singapore Embassy. I'd like to add on to the question that's just been asked regarding the ideological struggle that Haim mentioned. I would like to ask whether, you know, there is any kind of role that the non-Islamic world could play, a positive, constructive role that the rest of us who are non-Muslims, whether we can play such a role, if there's any kind of secular element in that particular struggle. Thank you. Okay, John. Media. To me, what is striking about ISIS is not its use of mainstream media, but its use of new media. I think it, in many ways, while people describe the Arab revolutions as the Twitter revolutions, it seems to me that the Arab revolutions had everything to do with television. It had everything to do with the ability to assemble a narrative, to broadcast a narrative, to unify people around a narrative that these were revolutions taking place. And one of my favorite fun facts is El Jazeera did not call what was happening in Tunisia a revolution until three days before Ben Ali fell, but it called what was happening in Egypt a revolution three days into the protests. That's a big change. And I think it played a significant role. What we have seen with ISIS instead is a spectacular use of social media, narrow casting, high production values, not by broadcasters, but by individuals, small groups of individuals seeking audiences and finding audiences on the web, using Twitter, engaging people in multiple languages. It seems to me that what is dramatic about this is not so much the use of the traditional broadcast outlets to create a unified narrative of what's going on, but instead insurgent's ability to use technology in innovative ways to reach audiences, to not broadcast but narrow cast in ways that people find persuasive and to constantly adapt to the audience. And that's quite a profound shift over four years. Clearly, they say different objectives, clearly they are not looking to bring a majority of a population on board, but if you're looking to activate a minority, we are seeing these groups use technology in spectacularly innovative ways to pursue their objectives. Hi. Thanks for the questions on ideology. I think the countries that are taking this the most seriously, as I see it in the area that I'm focusing on in the Maghreb is Tunisia, which was trying to revive this idea of Zetuna and Zetuni Islam, the Zetuna Mosque, but also Morocco. Morocco has the advantage of working on this issue for over a decade, and so it has a head start on many of the other countries in the region that are working on it, like Algeria, which has also started to talk about reviving Maliki Islam or local traditional Islam as a counter way to radical ideology. But I think Morocco has made the most progress on this front. It's already has a system for regulating the mosques. It's already gone through a curriculum restructuring and reform for training imams and the kinds of values that imams within the state religious establishment are promoting. But again, I think there are lots of lessons that we can learn from Morocco's examples, but we also have to understand that Morocco is a unique case given the role that the king plays as the commander of the faithful, as the highest religious authority, and the king has this built in legitimacy to some degree to operate in the religious space which other secular or Republican governments don't necessarily have. To the question that Mr. Wong posed about what can non-Muslim countries, governments do, I think that's probably one of the hardest questions because we're dealing with religion and people don't necessarily like outsiders coming in and meddling in their religion telling them what religious values they should promote, which religious values make sense and are valuable because that automatically will undermine and delegitimize religious values and perspectives that these governments or outside actors are actually trying to help. I think this is more relevant for Europe, for example, where they have much larger Muslim populations that are much more connected to not only physically within the region, but some of the dynamics that are going on in the Middle East. So I think there's room to work with local imams, local Muslim centers, both in the United States and Europe to understand what they're doing, but to promote, to fund, I think it's a slippery slope. Can I just add something? There is something about the experience of pluralism and diversity, which I think is foreign and increasingly foreign to many countries in the Arab world and I think there's a career. Sorry, is essentially foreign or historically foreign? Are you, I mean? No, it's becoming increasingly foreign. It's becoming increasingly, not essentially, increasingly foreign, that there's a sense that as these countries move toward revolutionary republics, that all of these foreign minorities were sort of holdovers from a colonial age and they're somehow not truly national and that there's a purity that authoritarian government should strive for and it seems to me that there is an increasing crisis of tolerance in much of the Arab world to the extent that governments, in many cases, have Arab minority, Muslim minorities. Treating those Muslim minorities in such a way that they become sensitive to issues of tolerance and acceptance and pluralism and can feed some of those ideas back. I think that is a constructive thing that can be done. I think if there is a single thing that concerns me most about the Arab world, it is this growing crisis in my mind of intolerance and it has been growing for more than a half century and it is growing as we speak. Yes, Tom. Let me add to what Haim said to Raymond Wong and that is I absolutely agree that outside states, especially non-Muslim states in many ways, not welcome to comment on what's going on. There are a couple of things that can be done. Any economic trade efforts to help stabilize those countries so that they can provide the kind of structure that young people who looked at the Arab uprisings as turning a new page for them actually provide opportunity. A second issue and even more difficult than that is helping to control the flow of foreign fighters. It's exceptionally difficult to do it, but some people do indicate that they haven't desired to go and fight and so among those 80 countries trying to stop the fighters. But even on the other issue of political development and advice, when we interviewed one of our individuals who was superb, he told us, and this is a Muslim country close by Turkey that was the subject of his argument was, he said, stop telling us that Turkey is our model. We have no experience choosing leaders and we have no experience leading, but we won't go back to our cages. So it was, don't offer these models that are not replicable to our specific circumstances. He was a Syrian and this was a nearby country and this was a Muslim country and with some significant degree of success in bringing pluralism and maintaining democracy. A lot of people question that now, but nonetheless he was saying, don't even use that as a model, which is to some degree similar, but there is no model, has to be everything from the bottom up. Now let me just inject a quick question there. Now we are sitting in a country which is about 300 years old. It's got its act together. It's got a constitution that at least tries to protect the majority from the tyranny of the minority and tries to protect the minorities from the tyranny of the majority. This country is now talking to a country like Syria, which is 7,000 years old. Now that's a lot of layers of diversity and tolerance. Where did a country like Syria go wrong based on your prism here? Is it secular radicalism that got it to where it is now or is it religious radicalism that got it to where it is now? Where do you see it? Well, the tyranny of the regime is one certain element of that. And then the tyranny of the Milton groups that came in from the outside in particular ISIS. I think those are two of the factors that brought us there today. I'll defer to those who know the region better than I do, but it was two ends. It was a secular regime under Assad and then the extremists from ISIS or the Islamic State coming in from Iraq that combined and collided. Okay, we'll take a string of yes, please. This is Ghassan Roubaiz. I'm an Arab writer, a former official of the World Council of Churches for the Middle East. I haven't seen the role of humiliation, political humiliation every Arab now with the media today. It feels like he's part of the whole region. And there are occupations, invasions. There is also the role of industrialization, unemployment and all of that. And then there is a role of the big elephant, the army as an oppression system and nobody is talking about the militarism. And then there is the role of religious institutions becoming corrupt, whether it's Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. There is radicalization in the three religions in the Middle East. There are three gods. There's the Jewish God, the Muslim God and the Christian God. Question, okay. Where are the roles of political humiliation in this business? All right, anybody else? Yes, please. Hi, my name's Katie Paul. I'm with the Antiquities Coalition and with regard to fighting the ideological issues, there's been a lot of destruction of cultural heritage that started before the rise of ISIS. It started with the Brotherhood under Morsi and the destruction of churches. Do you think that the unchecked destruction of cultural heritage across the region is emboldening these groups to further their ideology? Because it's essentially erasing the cultures and religions that came before them. And should there be a greater role for Western nations and protecting this kind of cultural heritage that can be used as a unifier, as we saw in the Egyptian uprising in January 2011 with the holding of hands to protect the museum. Do you think that there's a role for Western countries to play in combating this aspect of ideological terror? Do you want to start, Joe? Yeah, if I could sort of link these at a higher level. It is very easy to see what is happening, whether in Western Iraq, Eastern Syria, in the deserts of Libya elsewhere, as an effort to take the region back to the seventh century. I mean, these are seen as sort of retrograde, pre-modern movements. And it's very important to understand these are very modern political movements with very modern political goals, with very modern use of technology. They exist wholly in the present with a desire to draw on historical legacies, to reshape the way people see history as a way to give themselves more legitimacy in the current battle for political control. Does humiliation play a role? People try to humiliate their opponents, and they use all sorts of tools. They try to delegitimize their opponents by saying religion doesn't have that role to play, by saying these people are religiously illegitimate, they're part of the jahadiyah. I mean, any number of strategies. But it seems to me that when we see this as they're trying to go back into the seventh century and we're trying to go forward into the 21st, that's a mistake. To touch a little bit on this question of Syria and where this all started, there is something about the experience of Arab states in the 20th century where a lot of the revolutionary republics which were really army authoritarian regimes, not very revolutionary, certainly not republics, strove for a kind of purity. A purity which said this is where the line is, these people are outside. The ideal was the closer you looked, the more it would be pure, and that took away a place in public life for a whole series of minorities, which used to play a very vital role, both stitching countries together and then connecting countries to their surroundings. That was modern too, right? And I think that it's very important as we look at all these things to not think that this is all about debating the seventh century. This is all about debating the way forward into the 21st and the more we understand the modernity of it, the more we understand the uses of history, forward-looking purposes, the more accurately we're gonna understand what's going on. There's actually an echo chamber situation here. When you watch the gentleman there mentioned the Christian churches, when you watch some of the Christian churches here in the United States, the kind of narrative that they put forth, looking at the present and the future through what happened three, four, six thousand years ago, explaining the conflict with Iran, for example, as something that exists in religious scripture. How is that different here? How is the system dealing with that here as opposed to how it's being dealt with over there? What are the lessons? Partly we have lots of systems here, right? I mean, we're a country with spectacular diversity and spectacular tolerance of diversity. There are people who will tell you that six thousand years ago that's when the world was created and everything else is an illusion and there are people who say, that's nuts and we're all in the same discussion. Certainly there are people who will tell you that everything is about a historic battle of civilizations and we're headed toward Armageddon and then Jesus Christ will return to the earth and there are people who believe that too. Do they have analogs in the era world without question? Is there apocalyptic thought in the era world without question? Does it have its mate in apocalyptic thought in the United States and parts of the evangelical Christian community without a question? But I think what is different is the way we deal with those kinds of ideas, the way we tolerate difference and the way we seek to advance ideas and I think that's what is different about the process but there's certainly for virtually every radical group in the era world, I can find an analog in the west and for virtually every radical group in the west I can find an analog in the era world. The question is where they're situated in the societies, what their aspirations are and how the societies and states deal with those ideas. Let me reply to Katie Paul's question and it's very similar in a way to Raymond Wong's question is as far as whether the outside countries can come in and call out the cultural heritage destruction. I think at the very outset there's a base level of suspicion and conspiracy that those countries that have contributed to the conditions that are there now are not the ones to be coming in and even highlighting something that's terrible is cultural destruction. Yet at the same time, we heard time and again from folks on the ground in country across the region, why isn't the United States, where is Europe, why aren't they coming in and showing leadership? So at the same time, there's an expectation of leadership to defend minorities. You also have this base level suspicion that Europe and the United States are the ones that drew the maps here and that led to what we see today. So it's a very, very difficult position to be in and I think at the end of the day there's a minimized role for outside countries to play a role. One thing that you focus on Katie, which is superb and important is the theft of antiquities. Cultural heritage destruction is one thing but also the theft and antiquities. That's one thing where the United States can help out because we are the number one market for those stolen antiquities and that's a small part but nonetheless a part of the wider funding portfolio for ISIS. And so that's one area where we can make a difference but on the larger side I think where we're still looked at is you guys not only don't have the history to talk to us with our 7,000 year history but you created many of the problems that we're had. Going back to your question of prior to the uprisings our effort in Iraq and what that led to as far as problems, putting Maliki in power, et cetera, et cetera. Anything to add? Just very quickly, this is not a new problem of destruction of antiquities. I think there's a general discomfort in much of the Muslim world with what came before Islam and before the Prophet Muhammad and so the Taliban destroyed shrines that were un-Islamic. We see sort of an effort to sweep under the rug any kind of pre-Islamic antiquities in parts of the Gulf. What's interesting is those countries that feel more secure are more willing to embrace their pre-Islamic heritage. In particular Morocco, for example, which in its new constitution of 2011 has recognized its Amazigh, Berber heritage, its Jewish heritage and tradition as well. So there are some countries that are trying to embrace this while other countries are still very much uncomfortable with anything that came before Islam. All right, any more questions before we conclude with a question of my own? Anybody else? You've already done one. Okay, okay, I'm just gonna end this with your part of the radar, so to speak, Asia. There was the question about what can the Western world do? What can countries other than the United States do? Central Asia is basically a playground has traditionally been a playground for the Russians. And the Russians, they have their own issues with the issue that you deal with here in this study. What have the Russians been doing that's helpful and what have the Russians been doing that's detrimental to what you consider a sane approach to this problem that you deal with? The Russians do have a considerable problem on their own territory in the Caucasus, of course, but the Caucasus have also sent over 750 young men to fight the overall military commander Shoshani as a Chechen, speaks no Arabic. You saw the attack in Chechnya last week, not directly involving returning fighters, but nonetheless a concern. Russia's presence in Central Asia is still very strong, as you point out. The 201st Motorized Rifle Division is still in Tajikistan. They have a number of facilities in the region that is beset by tremendous instability as it is and with what is likely to come in Afghanistan, and that is, I think, dissolution at least on the margins of the country, if not right in the core, is going to further destabilize a region that has produced the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan in the Islamic Jihad Union, fighters of which have moved west into the Middle East. Therefore, there is an opportunity for cooperation with the Russians on impeding the movement of some of these fighters, but you can't do that in the current atmosphere unless you have leaders who can compartmentalize and say, we have a terrible relationship and 90% of what we do together. Yet let's focus on the Caucasus fighters, fighters coming in from Central Asia, where the Russians do have pre-existing, excellent relationships in the security services. John, just to conclude briefly, bring this discussion back to the United States. What you've heard now, what does it mean for the Americans in terms of dealing with this issue? In a broad sense, we have to not only figure out what kind of relationship we're going to have with Russia, but we have to understand that there are a wide number of areas where our interests overlap, a wide number of areas where they differ, and we have to, I think, be thoughtful and strategic about both how we're going to differ with Russia, how we're going to try to minimize the areas of difference and how to gain leverage so for things that are really important, we can find a way to align. One of the problems with the US government works is we're not very good at prioritization. We're good at inclusion. We're good at adding things to lists. But the reality is, sometimes you really have to choose what you care about, and you can't do everything equally, and you can't have 17 priorities or 26 priorities that really matter. And I think that one of the things that we're seeing with the Ukraine, with Syria, with the Iran nuclear issue and proliferation is we have to figure out what do we really care about, and what are we willing to let go a little bit, and that's hard to do. But it's necessary, and it may mean that we're going to have to accept less satisfactory outcomes in some places, but we have to have a theory about what's really important. Okay, and with that, we come full circle to the end of this panel. By the way, what I have seen of the study is interesting whether you agree with it or not. If you have the time to go through it, there's a lot of food for thought there. Round of applause to John, thank you for having me.