 Although Tunisia and Libya have taken dramatically different paths in recent years, both countries' security is closely interconnected. We caught up with USIP's Mike Gaffey and AEI's Emily Estelle for their insights on confronting the terrorist threat and addressing governance challenges in the two North African nations. Fogility is the key condition, really, that the root problem that allows groups like ISIS and groups like Al Qaeda to operate is poor governance. It's not necessarily poverty, but when populations are vulnerable to the state or to other populations in some way, it's an opportunity for groups like ISIS to come in and offer protection or to simply overwhelm populations that don't have other recourse. In Libya, the situation there with its weak economy, with its weak and fractured governments has basically set up a situation in which many people feel alienated, which means they are not resilient to push back against the extremists, which basically makes Libya a state in extreme fragility. So if you look at ISIS and Libya taking over the city of Sert, for example, that was Gaddafi's hometown, was totally left out of the equation after the revolution, had no forces to actually defend it, so ISIS came in and was able to do a combination of cutting deals and just taking it over such that the population couldn't resist. A lot of the Tunisian who have left to join ISIS and go to Libya have done so partly out of desperation. They had lost hope with high unemployment, with the lack of political engagement in their home communities, particularly in the middle and in the south. The ideology isn't popular, but it's when people have no other option because the state is so fragile because they're so victimized otherwise that then they become an opening. It's an issue of survival for people. They were looking for opportunities and they were very prone to sermons by radical imams and they became very attractive to going abroad in that case. When people are radicalized in Tunisia, the fight isn't happening in Tunisia, so it's easy for people to cross into Libya and from Libya to go on to Syria. Dynamic has changed somewhat, made it harder for people to go to Syria, so then Libya became the focus. Now that it's harder to get to Libya, the concern is that this radicalized population is going to stay in Tunisia. I think the U.S. could be very helpful at both the bottom up and top down approach to governance in Libya and Tunisia. In Tunisia, I think it's building on the structures that are already there because there are institutions that exist. There has been an effort to build up an internal security structure that can function. At the top level, they basically help build the capacity of the government through reforms that can create more jobs, create inclusiveness. There's been U.S. assistance in helping to build a national security structure, so that's a place to continue building. Also, security sector reforms such that the population begins to see the police as defending them, not prosecuting them, because that is key to actually getting at some of the drivers of radicalization as well as dealing with the counterinsurgency side.