 Good morning everybody. Welcome to the peace game. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the President of the U.S. Institute of Peace and I'm delighted to open this up this morning. For those of you who are here for the first time, the U.S. Institute of Peace is in its 30th year federally funded, independent institute dedicated to a world without violent conflict. And so holding a peace game is squarely in our mission and we're delighted to have the opportunity to have such an incredible collection of policymakers and practitioners who are able to really move us forward on a critical issue that threatens global peace, which is violent extremism. I want to thank our partners in this endeavor for policy and David Rothkoff who is here with us. I'd also like to thank the Embassy of the UAE for sponsoring us today and being an important partner. For those of you who were able to join us last night, we had a wonderful start to this year's peace game with a video of a camp in Jordan, Zaatari Camp, in that marvelous three, I don't even know what you call it, technology that enabled you to really be in Zaatari Camp. And it was a very powerful and very moving film that really gave I think all of us an important choice point to start with this morning in terms of looking at the future of the region, either for a population of displaced Syrians who either can be a part of a positive future or could descend into the kind of hopelessness that would further exacerbate the many problems that we saw that we have in the region. We were joined by Tom Donnellan, the former National Security Advisor for President Obama and he really teed up for us a vision of a world that has higher threats than at any time since World War II in his judgment at a time where great power coordination was less than it had been for a number of decades and poses within that mix with the dissolution of so many states in the Middle East, the importance of addressing the problem of violent extremism and how important it is that today we really grapple with the kind of real recommendations that help us move to real action and a more nuanced, more complex understanding of the task at head. I'd like to also invite everybody to use your Twitters, is that how you say it? You tweet with the hashtag peace game and we look forward to that. We will use the results of this event to help us inform policy, inform recommendations and inform policy as we all move forward together. And with that I'd like to turn it over to David Rothkoff who's the CEO of an editor of foreign policy and is today's MC who will set us up for an important day. Thank you, David. Thank you, Nancy. It's great to be here. This is the fourth peace game. We try to do one of these every six months. We do one in Washington and again with the help of the Embassy of the UAE we do one in Abu Dhabi. So we try to bring different perspectives to this discussion. When this idea was hatched long ago, Kristen Lord over there, Nancy and I were sitting there talking about wouldn't it be great if we could somehow bring the kind of rigorous analysis and tools that are used to plan wars, to planning and exploring peace. Towards coming up with constructive ideas and solutions that can advance the cause of conflict resolution and do so in a way that would impact policy makers by bringing them concrete ideas. The critical component of doing that is a collaborative dialogue among people who really understand the problems. And the reason past peace games have been so successful is that we've been lucky to bring together groups of people like that. And the reason we are so looking forward to today's discussion is that the group of participants we've got here as role players is as good a group as we've ever had is more diverse geographically, is more diverse in terms of their experience and therefore I think is going to bring to bear a more sort of creative force in dealing with these issues. We use a lot of tools in the course of peace game. We use scenarios which we will go through two different kinds of scenario exercises in the course of the day which you'll see. We use wireless polling. Some of you in front of you have these small blue polling devices. We'll get to those in a second so that even those of you who are in the audience can participate. We have panel discussions and guest experts. And very shortly we will kick off the first discussion with Steve Hadley, who is the chairman of the U.S. Institute of Peace and also former national security advisor. And I might add since I've written two books about the NSC and I'm a sort of accidental part time historian of the NSC. Steve Hadley is among the very, very best national security advisors we have and he brings and have had and he really brings an extraordinary perspective and so we're really lucky to start out with him. But before we do, because this is a collaborative dialogue and before we get into the nuts and bolts of it all, I think the most important thing is that everybody knows who else is here. Now, one of the things that makes Peace Game successful is our sort of respect for the time and rules that everybody brings to this. And we start that by asking everybody to introduce themselves in 15 to 20 seconds and sort of teach the discipline of respecting the clock simply by saying who you are and where you're from and who you represent in the Peace Game process so everybody gets to know what you're doing. And we're going to go around this middle table, this U-shaped table, and then once we've done that we'll get right into the panel discussion. But let me start with you. I'm Neda Bakos. I'm a former Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorism analyst and today I will be representing Al Qaeda. Hi, I'm Leanne Erdberg from the State Department. I'm a counterterrorism advisor and I will also be representing Al Qaeda. Tony first standing Chair of the Middle East Program at the Aspen Institute and I will be representing Business Interest. David Garten-Steinrass Foundation for Defensive Democracies. And I represent the Caliphate and our Caliph Ibrahim the first. Shlomo Borom, a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress, representing Egypt. I'm Michael Wahid Hanna. I'm a Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation and I'm also representing Egypt. Dr. Catherine Brown, King's College London, and I'm representing the European Union. Edith Laffer, Women Without Borders, Vienna, and I'm representing the European Union. Peyton Ahimi, I'm from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and I'm representing the Intelligence Community. Good morning. This is Ahmad Qiyani from the American Iranian Council. I'll be representing the Iranian administration, possibly Javad Zarif or Rohani. I'm Barbara Slavin. I'm a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. I'm also representing Iran. I'm thinking I'll be Kazim Soleimani today. Doug Ollivant, I'm a partner of Mented International and a senior fellow at New America and representing Iraq. Tom Stahl, I'm assistant administrator at USAID for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, and I'm also representing Iraq today. I'm Georgia Homer. I direct the rule of law program here at USIP and I'll be playing law enforcement today. My name is Joergine Illum. I'm a police commissioner of the Second largest police district in Denmark. We've been running since 2007 different programs addressing radicalization problems, and especially over the last couple years, the specific Syrian problem. And I'll be, together with Georgia, representing the law enforcement. I'm Nick Harris. I'm research associate at the Center for New American Security. Today I'll be representing local insurgent groups and I'm your partner for peace on the ground. I'm Philip Smythe. I'm at the University of Maryland and I'm representing the local Shia, the Baikia Zayna. I'm Tom Apire, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and I'm representing local Sunni communities. Masut Farivar from Voice of America. I'll be one of two representatives of the fourth estate. Viola Ganger. I'm a writer and editor here at the US Institute of Peace and career journalist and trying to soak chaos. I'm Sarnada Reynolds. I'm a senior advisor and human rights at Refugees International and I'm representing NGOs today. I'm Robbie Torbey. I'm with the International Medical Corps and representing NGOs. I'm Mary Casey Baker. I work for the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. I'll be representing Saudi Arabia. I'm Manel Omar. I'm acting vice president for the Middle East and Africa Center at the US Institute of Peace and I will be representing the Syria regime. Hi, I'm Tafiq Rahim, director of the Global Site in Dubai and non-resident fellow at New America. I am Bashar al-Assad. How are you, Qassim? You're doing well. I'm Sasha Meinrath. I direct XLAB. I'm a technologist and policy hacker and I'm here representing all tech and telecom. So what could possibly go wrong? I'm Jonathan Morgan. I'm the CEO of a data science startup called Pappali and co-author of the ISIS Twitter Census for the Brookings Institute and I'm also representing half of the tech and telecom industry. Good morning. I'm Gordon Gray. I'm the deputy commandant at the National War College and along with Laura, I'm representing Tunisia. Good morning. Laura Talverdean, associate director for research focusing on North Africa at the Atlantic Council, representing Tunisia. Good morning. Dan Brumberg, special advisor at USIP and I want to thank my colleagues for giving me the easy case of Turkey. Hi, Jim Jeffery, Washington Institute. I'm trying to represent the US government despite the uncoordinated elements to my left. Tough to beat that. Susan Reichle, I'm the counselor at USAID and we are whole of government. I'm Tamika Tilliman. I'm the director of the Bretton Woods II Initiative at New America. I will be representing both the Democratic and Republican voices of the US Congress. Hi, I'm Muath Alwari, formerly with the UAE National Security Council and with Ahmed here, I'll be representing the United Arab Emirates. Good morning. My name is Ahmed Alhamdi, coming from Abu Dhabi Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I will be representing United Arab Emirates. Good morning. My name is Tom Parker. I'm a counterterrorism strategist with the UN Counterterrorism Implementation Task Force and somewhat conveniently, I will be one half of the team representing the United Nations today. Good morning, Lorenzo Vidino. I'm the director of the newly established program on extremism at George Washington University, the other side of the UN for today. Good morning, I'm Jocelyn Cezari, Georgetown University and Harvard University and I will represent Muslims in Europe. Good morning, my name is Farah Pandith. I'm the former special representative to Muslim communities at the Department of State. I had the honor of working at the NSC under Mr. Hadley where we pioneered CVE programs in Western Europe. Today, I will be representing a Western Muslim woman who is on her way to Syria and I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for hosting us. Thank you very much. That was a great start. It showed great appreciation for the guidelines, which was great. It also showed that some of you were getting into the roles early. Also great. It I think should be revealing to us even at this early stage that you are here representing the countries of the world and some of the most chaotic places on earth and yet it's clear the greatest chaos is in the United States government already. So we have a very similitude going for us. Anyway, what we are going to do now is to just give you a taste of what the polling feels like and then we're going to turn to Steve and then we're going to open up the discussion and frame the discussion. I'm going to get up just because I do that periodically during the day so I can walk over here. These are the polling devices. The way the polling devices work is the periodically questions will come up on these screens and there will be a series of answers. Next to the answers will be a number. You can hit the number and that will input your vote. You'll have eight seconds. At the end of eight seconds we'll know where everybody is. Everybody in the audience can participate as well. That gives us a sense of a bigger group and where the group is. These first three questions are kind of simple sample questions but they have to do with our opening set of discussions. This morning we are going to be talking about one of the critical elements in combating violent extremism and that is countering the success many of the groups that are operating today including notably the Islamic State have had recruiting foreign fighters and others into their ranks and so the question is if we are trying to achieve more peaceful outcomes one of the ways we may want to do that is via countering these recruitment blunting the recruitment efforts because that at the end of the day of course will reduce the number of people who are producing some of the bad outcomes that we're seeing in countries across the region. But how do we get there? I want to say this now and I'm going to say it again and Nancy will say it again throughout the day. Our objective is to come up not with 35,000 feet analyses not with the kind of things that you see in op-eds or in some of the papers that you may have seen that are abstract. We want to come up with concrete ideas and so that's up to you and as you go through the day what you want to be looking for whether it's in discussions or whether it's in scenarios when we take breaks during the scenario so you can collaborate with one another is what kind of ideas can realistically work. Now that realistically is an absolutely critical point. We live in a in a world full of constraints there are political constraints economic constraints there's circumstantial issues that have to be taken into consideration. We want to find the best possible path towards peace so emphasis on the possible and and that's what we're all here working together on. Let's start the collaboration and just to you know put our toe in the water with this polling to give you a little bit of a sense of that. We'll do this a couple of times through the day but if we have the first question you'll see you know how effective have efforts to stem the recruitment of foreign fighters bin to date. You can see it on all four of these screens there's a little clock at the bottom pick one very effective two effective three you're on the fence for ineffective five very ineffective soon as I finish reading them off the clock starts counting down I hope and you have now just a few seconds to put in your answer you change your mind just hit a second button whatever the last button you hit is what will count and then there's a moment and we tabulate it and you can see that 66 percent of you say efforts have been ineffective 11 percent very ineffective so 77 percent of you are on the ineffective side of the scale that gives you a sense of the challenge that lies ahead of us let's go to two more questions which I hope you get acclimated with this what recruitment counter strategies have been most effective now we've said these have been ineffective but has outreach to vulnerable communities been effective law enforcement surveillance and prosecution tracking and disabling of social media accounts or something else that would be other and so again we go to the countdown clock and we shall see that you say 40 percent say outreach to vulnerable communities 29 percent say law enforcement 12 percent say tracking and disabling of social media accounts and 18 percent of you have fallen into our trap of saying other because when you say other when we're polling then I'm going to ask who said other so you explain what you said okay so who said other why did you say other when you talk hit the button outreach to vulnerable communities doesn't uh it doesn't explain that you have to look beyond just particular places you need to go global and you need to build movements at the local level excellent point building on that similarly that you need an integrated approach just throwing money at vulnerable communities without understanding the drivers that are happening at the local level will not prove effective somebody else say other okay well i said other because none of the first three choices have in my view have been particularly effective and there must be other methods that have worked locally and in different countries that we would have to look into okay well hopefully we will do that here and anybody else surely somebody did because the numbers don't add up but okay in the you are warned if you say other we are going to come back to and we have ways of finding you um by your twittering all right one more to a tweet agree or disagree counter strategies targeting women recruits should be different than those targeting men strongly agree to strongly disagree this gives you a sense of a kind of arranged question uh and uh i in my head i'm predicting the answer let's see how good i am at this um so 83 percent of you are on the agree side of the spectrum that was kind of the obvious answer here uh strongly disagree who said strongly disagree okay people gonna play that game where they're gonna go and vote not own up to their vote okay we will come after you so okay Steve we've set the stage for this Nancy will kick it off with the first question for you great thank you um and uh i'm delighted to have with us here today Steve Hadley who is the chair of usip and a wonderful leader and partner for us um Steve you know we've already talked this morning about the dissolution of a number of states in the middle east as having been a part of the equation one of the one of the very exceptions uh important exceptions to that is Tunisia we just hosted president asepsie here on a recent visit um you were just in Tunisia Tunisia stands as one of the few states that seems to be succeeding after the events of 2011 and at the same time as one of the largest contributors of foreign fighters to the region talk a little bit about what you saw when you were there as to how those dynamics uh are in in counterplay well one it's a pleasure for me to be here with you this morning and i'm sorry i'm not going to be able to stay for the day i think this is a very important subject i think we're going to learn a lot and i want to compliment Nancy you and david for putting this together again and christin for being part of the original idea for it i think you're also sounds like can have a lot of fun today and i think i'm i'm sorry i'm not going to be a part of that as much as uh in the same amount is not being able to hear to learn learn what you're what you're going to learn tunisia is interesting um the origin of the arab spring a country that is opposed to its neighbors has done almost everything right teetered on the brink of kind of a muslim brotherhood takeover stepped back established a consensus process got a constitution has now a unity government that has 80 percent of the seats in the parliament and is committed to a reform agenda political economic and social doing all the things right why really three factors one was this vehicle of a national dialogue supported and really driven by civil society second a decision that the country made in the 1950s to give women full equality with men and invest in the education of their people as their most important resource and finally interestingly enough and the anata party which is a muslim brotherhood type party that is opposed to their counterparts in egypt thought power was a vehicle to establish democracy rather than a democracy is a vehicle to establish power and so this is a country is doing everything right and yet as nancy said three thousand of their citizens are with islamic state in syria so why is that and i talked to the advisor to the president and his comment was tunisia has run the course of the national narrative and vision for the country that was established in the 1950s and we need to come up with a new national narrative a vision for our country what is uniquely tunisia and what is the role tunisia is going to play in the region that give our people a reason to invest in the future of their country and i think he's on to something because if you look at the countries in chaos iraq syria yemen libya their countries i think that have also outrun their national narratives or really never had a strong national narrative in the first place so one of the things i would hope you would do today is you'll have a focus on the technology why is it the islamic state uses american-made technology to beat us in the marketplace of our ideas ideas every day why is that why how do you counter their visual images how do you counter the grievance narrative how do you deal with the real deprivation in their societies that is a recruiting tool but i think you also need to spend some time thinking about countering the vision of the islamic state and part of that is undermining their vision which is tied to the caliphate that is what gives them a riveting narrative for the region restoring the greatness of the people of islam lost for over a millennium now coming back that is a powerful image and phrases that we use like inclusive governments representing all society elements of society accountable and responsive governance justice and security those concepts important as they are the right concepts pale in comparison to the lure of the caliphate so i think we need to think about given that how do we roll it back and one of the things is we have to take that territory back so the caliphate essentially comes to an end but we have to at the same time talk about what is the affirmative vision the narrative for these states that will give their people a motivation to support together to support their states and to fight against isis i think that's really what we're missing thank you are there are there other i mean besides developing a narrative in the context of tunisia are there i mean they must be concerned about the 3000 people as well because not only do the 3000 people originate there but when they go off and they fight these wars they're learning skills that if they bring them back to tunisia they can be extremely dangerous in the context of tunisia we're there in in your conversations there programs that they're working on to nip this in the bud that are particularly effective have they not gotten to that point yet beyond simply describing a narrative i think they have not gotten to that point yet is my sense they're focusing on what can we do to get the kind of effective security forces so we can catch these people at the border and not let them back into society i think when they think about the broader problem i think one of the great strengths they are going to have and going to use is that this sort of emerging social cohesion that is built heavily on civil society which i think was was prompted heavily by the role they gave to women here five decades ago that that gives them a platform with which to deal with this problem that i think other societies really don't have and i think what they're going to end up doing is figuring out how to lever that kind of civil society and it is active civil society that system the president basically said the constitution of tunisia today was handed to us by civil society and we adopted it so i think their approach is going to be then reaching out to civil society and and energizing the society as a whole to try to come up with a plan to try to reintegrate these people but at this point they're very early in that process you know one of the issues that president sebsi seem to be wrestling with in his comments was that balance between human rights and the security approaches that might in many people's minds be necessary to stem the flow or to deal with the return how did you see that balance playing out in tunisia you know throughout this conversation is the discussion of how to include security forces on a in an approach that is part of a productive partnership and doesn't end up further alienating uh communities in the process one of the problems they have is um and it has echoes in a on the problem in iraq where a lot of people said you know you shouldn't have allowed the iraqi security forces to disestablish themselves which really what happened and you should have called them back and restored them tunisia is very interesting because we've spent some time with the minister of interior they took an approach that they fired all the heads of the ministry of interior but they kept all the soldiers uh all the people in the ministry and they thought they could retrain and reeducate um and it is a very divisive issue at this point that they are only now beginning to address through a truth and reconciliation uh device and it has vignettes like the following young gentleman i talked to he said you know i was incarcerated by the regime and i walked into the ministry of interior and i saw a man who was my jailer and who raped my wife in my presence as part of the torture that he imposed upon me and i said to myself why is this person still part of the ministry of interior so there is a huge issue in these transition societies if you fire all the existing structures you invite the risk of chaos but if you try to preserve them you don't address the underlying grievances that the population have against those people and i think it'll be very interesting to see how tunisia now handles that problem they are early in the process with their truth and reconciliation commission and i think this in a way can be a case study of how you deal with a very challenging problem you know there's a clear echo in what you're talking about of iraq and and and in some respects kind of the mirror image of what we ended up doing with the bath party right and and there's a lot of prescriptions you know sort of monday morning quarterbacking about how we handled that that said well if we'd only done it the other way everything would be fine and and clearly you're saying maybe not it may not be it may not be the case but let's turn for a second to iraq because clearly you had a lot of experience with that and clearly the genesis of of the islamic state is within iraq as you look back what do you think were the factors that fed into the to the growth of the islamic state so that we can sort of use those as guideposts and in the in the in the efforts to resist such developments in the future i'm uh probably not a i'm not a disinterested witness on the issue of iraq so you know you should take that into account in these comments uh look i the where we were through the efforts of two administrations in 2009 and 2010 was that al-qaeda in iraq had been defeated not destroyed but it had been defeated it had been so beaten down that while it could maintain a low level of violence it did not threaten the state and the state building process so that problem was done um then what happened well people will say the u.s went home in 2011 did not leave a residual force and we can discuss how significant that was two other things the sins of the maliki regime i think began to come into fruition and it was it basically subverted what was a unity government in favor of a more sectarian agenda and the response to that was very predictable among the sunnis and the Kurds i think the big thing was syria and when that uh civil war got started in 2011 a number of republicans and democrats were saying if this is not addressed four things will happen more people will die it will become more sectarian it will destabilize the neighborhood either because of refugee flows into places like lebanon jordan and turkey or because of terrorist flows into places like iraq and finally it'll open the door for a resurgence of al-qaeda and that's exactly what happened so one of the challenges we have to learn there are sins of commission mistakes people make a lot of people think going into rock in 2003 was a mistake there are also sins of omission a failure to act and sometimes the consequences of those can be even worse go ahead go ahead so on the on the topic of of whether to act or not when we talk about the the critical importance of creating a narrative into the future a new tunisia narrative alibia a yemen narrative should they get to that place what is the role of the united states how how are we helpful or not helpful as those narratives are born and created the narratives obviously have to come from the people and and it is the i think a principal burden of the leaders in a country like tunisia and iraq and elsewhere to while all the day-to-day pressures they have which are enormous if you're leading one of those countries have some time to step back and and think strategically about what is a narrative that is right given our history and culture and they can inspire and motivate our people they have to find it themselves but i think one of the things america can do through organizations like us ip and also through our diplomats is to be in dialogue with those national leaders and help them to understand that that is a critical part of their leadership challenge if they are going to lay the foundation for a stable prosperous society going forward and to engage that dialogue with them and share their own our own experiences because we have a national narrative reflected actually in the declaration of independence in our constitution about freedom and democracy that is held up for over 200 years and still compels and motivates not only our people but attracts people to our shows so we know sure so we know something about the power of narratives and i think we can be in dialogue with these national leaders to help them appreciate that this is an important part of their leadership challenge and then to be in dialogue them help them try to to define it okay so what we want to do at this point is open up this this conversation a little bit turn to some of you out there uh either for comments or if you have questions for steve or or just to throw it out and remember the the the title for this session is the search for an effective counter strategy steve has talked about some of the parameters and some of the challenges you know it's a very common for people to say well we need a counter narrative but in the case of tunisia there's a strong counter narrative and it doesn't reach everybody within the society so the question is what kind of counter narrative for whom a counter narrative about what is an economic counter narrative a social counter narrative a political counter narrative and ideological counter narrative a theological counter narrative uh you know how backed up does that have to be by results where does that fit in this continuum of things that we do and and and we're not going to come up with a precise prescription here for among other reasons the situation in tunisia as we've just discovered is very different from the situation in iraq and the situation iraq is very different from syria or yemen or libya or some of the other places where this is manifesting themselves what we want to zero in on is what have we seen that's actually effective or what might we consider that based on what we know might be effective and and and look in those directions now we've talked to catherine brown and jonathan morgan beforehand to think about this a little bit so they could offer you know in three or four minutes some thoughts to help trigger this conversation and then we may go back to steve after they talk and then we'll open it up a little bit to you in the remaining 30 minutes we've got in this session can i turn to you catherine first of course uh firstly it is of course a pleasure to be here as an academic to be surrounded by so many practitioners as well we usually stand on the sidelines looking in and sniping so it's a real pleasure to do something that might actually be productive well here the practitioners stand on the sideline and snipe too so you'll have something in common i'm okay so in terms of what do we know in about effectiveness or otherwise of counter narrative strategies the first thing i think that was picked up on this morning in terms of islamic state and others and we mentioned the idea that they have an effective narrative themselves but i would say that's only part of the issue if we deconstruct what islamic state saying there are three effective elements to what they're doing the first is they offer a critique of global politics and i think in order for a counter narrative to be effective we have to look at that critique that they offer as well and recognize that there are some elements of truth within that and challenge how we might respond to that the second bit is what was picked up on their vision their solution to that critique and that solution appears inspiring and it appears authentic and therefore what we might want to consider is how then do we inspire ourselves that narrative from our young people and i have to admit a little bit of anxiety around this notion that individuals like ourselves need to be coming up with the counter narrative rather than empowering the next generation to find their own narratives regardless of who they're meant to be countering and that therefore means empowering them to ask difficult questions of ourselves as well as of islamic state and others and then thirdly one of the issues i think is important is the question of what it means to be living in this world as ordinary citizens rather than as elites and in terms of that islamic state attempt to provide a way of life that perhaps we have yet to really figure out how do we give young people motive to carry on living and what does that mean how do you find meaningful life and that might be where the theological solutions might be found as well as the social economic and political ones which leads us then to think in terms of counter narratives how might we break this down to look at evaluating them so firstly we might need to consider at what point do we seek to intervene at what point do narratives need to be engineered are we talking about individuals who are seen to be at risk or are we looking at vulnerable communities and how broad do we target that secondly where does that intervention occur is it within communities or within schools or is it on the battlefields themselves second thirdly the question is who who should be doing this is it a matter for government or for civil society if governments are actively involved does that undermine the legitimacy of the programs and the good efforts that civil society might be putting in but if they're not involved does that not reinforce the idea that governments of the west in particular the illusion that they think muslim lives don't matter and i think that's something that islamic state have been quite good at presenting this idea that somehow for western governments muslim lives don't matter and i don't think that's true but that's an image that's being put forward that needs to be counted and then thirdly of course of course there is the question of well what do we do should there be a militarized response which was discussed last night at the talk how important is the use of force in countering the idea that islamic state are successful militarily or will that merely fuel the idea again that western states are more than willing to use the middle east as a battlefield for their own ideological games and i think that's really important in thinking through some of the ideas around islamic state because as well this question of a global versus a local agenda is really important and i think that's where this new form of islamic state is really interesting about countering violent extremism dealing with the global and the local is something that we really need to tackle especially today okay so that's very useful right it's a very useful structure because essentially katharine's provided us with the five w's here which narrative is it is it political, social, economic is it the military narrative where they're not gaining is it a theological narrative when at what point in the timeline do we intervene and where will it be most effective where who does the intervening and what specifically do we do and i think the what has a double meaning because it's not just what do you do to establish the narrative it's also what do you do to prove the narrative what you know words alone won't do it you know you have to actually demonstrate that you can deliver a result or deliver whatever is promised within the context of the narrative i just want to um i i thought that was very helpful and i wanted to ask a question about what i didn't hear you see say of a potential fourth criteria and that is um you know this this very powerful call to give your life and you know the the fact that if you join ISIS you are committing to potentially die or to die in in a way that we see with you know samurai cults and other places around the world how do you factor that in to the power of the vision and the find a way to live because it's actually a bit counter to that it is i think what's been really interesting is a shift in islamic states dialogue and their narratives to begin with it was very much about generating a fighting force that this was a warrior type initiative that you could be a hero and fight the jihad in their language and therefore your sacrifice would be worthwhile because you'll be fighting for a higher cause however possibly since the declaration of the caliphate you also see a change in the narrative which is saying we are more than a fighting force and so we talked about yesterday we are a territorial state and they're not just asking for people to sacrifice their life as fighters but to provide a life that can create this new state and i think that combination is what makes them incredibly powerful because it's not just about providing fighters in some militarized society although it is actually quite militarized and death is a way of life but their narrative very much focused now on creating the institutions of statehood okay jonathan thank you also of course it's a pleasure to be here it's actually nice on the opposite side being a practitioner and always being focused on doing things all the time to actually take a step back and talk about perhaps why so i think what we see a lot in the technology industry is that these narratives that we're discussing are actually playing out online so directly from person to person in social media so we see this on a global scale and i think it's important for us to discuss what we're actually countering what's the point of the counter narratives that we're talking about and for us there's a couple different things that are very specific and very actionable are we trying to stem the flow of foreign fighters or are we trying to stop recruiting or are we talking about the capacity for ISIS in particular to to radicalize its scale they have access to a communications platform that is being used in a way that's unprecedented and i think not only encouraging people to leave their home countries to go participate in the conflict on the ground but then also to perhaps self-radicalize and commit acts of terrorism where they already are with that in mind while we do of course want to talk about the content of the narrative that that we might use to counter the ideology of an organization like ISIS i think it's also important to talk about the actions that we can take immediately these narratives are difficult to coordinate there there's a number of different actors who may want to contribute to what that narrative ultimately is is it local actors is it state actors etc etc we're in an interesting position in the technology industry that we are the conduit for this messaging so we're in a position where we can take we can we can take action we can take very specific action and so what i think it's interesting that everybody was voting on the different ways in which we might establish an effective counter narrative i think we all in this room tended to side on engaging with people directly and having a dialogue and i understand that that is it's effective and it's nice and it's popular particularly perhaps in a more academic context but what we've seen i mean and we're twitter we know is that it's effective when you stop people from having these discussions online we are able to effectively degrade the networks the capacity for these organizations to reach the large audience that they currently enjoy by suspending people's accounts and so while we again want to talk about the words that we're saying and the content of the narrative i think it's also important to talk about the direct actions that we can take in the digital space not just the actions that we can take on the battlefield but the the direct action that we can take in the battle of ideas to ensure that we are sort of limiting the extent to which these organizations can share their message online and protect the communities that we've established in the digital space on social media like twitter and facebook and youtube from the kind of voices that are a direct threat to ideologically the way of life that we enjoy and that is part of the counter narrative this is part of this direct opposition to the ideology of these organizations like ISIS thanks very much and i think jonathan built naturally on kathryn's comment by going or restating the what as the how and looking at the technology component of it and saying we have ways to degrade them through taking specific technological steps last night you heard tom donlan and today you heard steve hadley saying another one of the houses actually defeating them on the battlefield and while that's not directly in the ambit of us and talking about a peace game here it does pertain to the narrative right if if if they're unsuccessful then that degrades their narrative and and so this big question of how what are the steps what are the tools is something i think we'll return to throughout the day you've heard now both of these comments and i was just wondering if you had a reaction to either both i have a reaction each on kathryn ground's very good points there's one thing i think we need to clarify in terms of how we think about it it's very easy and common to say there is no military solution to the problem posed by dash there has to ultimately be a political solution and that is true but when you're dealing with somebody like dishe with the brutality of their their tactics there is no political solution that does not have a military or kinetic element and the trick is to have a kinetic element that is reinforcing of the other elements of your strategy political economic social and doesn't run counter to it and also doesn't get in the way of your being able simultaneously to conduct your own kinetic operations and discredit dice for the brutality and inhumanity of theirs so it's a tricky business my point is the conversation doesn't end when you say well there's no military solution that's the beginning of the conversation of how you use the military element of what should be your solution and johnson morgan's point a very interesting point there we all talk about how you rebut the narrative of dash the other question is if you were a Chinese if I was a Chinese official sitting here I would say well you where you counter the narrative of dash is you cut them off you you know you control the internet you control social media you don't let them to get their message out and I think our solution has to be a combination of both but there is a dilemma when in the early days and jim jeffrey will remember part of the military came to us and said there is a social media internet channel that is being used as a recruiting tool and it's resulting in fighters who are killing our men and women in uniform please shut it down if we went to the intelligence community and said oh don't shut it down it's our principle of intelligence on what al qaeda is doing so there are dilemmas and trade-offs in this business but I think we've got to be we're all sort of marketplace of ideas and free flow of information I think we're going to have to be hard headed about this and both flow and affirmative narrative and look at measures we can do to cut off the access of dash to the tools of communication go ahead it's a balancing not only for that reason but we're seeing in Malaysia for example we there was just some reporting on how Malaysia is starting to do greater control of certain aspects of the internet for exactly this reason and the question is how do you balance the ability of young people to create their own narrative to have access to those those tools and not feel alienated or repressed against that other effort so it's it's a number of balancing acts it is and there's another one which we have to put on the table which is the role of religion and if you talk to the Moroccans for example they have basically used state control of religion to establish an infrastructure of training facilities and certifications of imams who will put out a counter narrative to the terrorists from the mosque now that's not our view of how you do church and state relations but you know a hard question in this part of the world is do you use a religion affirmatively in that way through state control to really institutionalize a counter message very tough issue yeah and in fact I think all of these have there is a there are tough issues embedded in all of these that I think we need if we are going to be intellectually honest to deal with today you know if we take a strong military action in order to degrade them on the battlefield and undermine their narrative there we may feed their narrative by saying look here is the U.S. in here or here is western powers in here doing this that proves they are trying to manipulate our world on the other hand if you are a country and you are an imminent risk of destabilization because of an extremist group you may not seek to choose the most democratic solution openness may not be your primary issue at the moment because the alternative destabilization loses all control and will give an opportunity to the other side meanwhile if of course you crack down you create a different kind of narrative for them and so you know this is part of the complexity that we want to deal with here but we don't want to not acknowledge these factors we want you know we want to be as practical as possible now we've got about 15 minutes here Manal is going to lead the way with bringing this open and then I'll go to Tony and we'll open it up so Manal I guess just a few points one is with the phrase countering narrative extremism it limits it almost to two sides recognizing that there are several narratives both in terms of the extremists I mean ISIS is only one form of the extremism there's other groups that have different types of narratives that we have to also be aware of and those lines continue to blur as we're looking for allies on the ground but also on our side you know it's it's not a matter of in my opinion creating counter narratives they exist they're there they're on the ground and I think particularly in terms of the question of the role of religion finding those connections between state being involved in religious institutions I think has always been a dangerous road in that context not only for the issues of legitimacy but also it will then stunt the organic narratives that are emerging most religious leaders have come out to condemn the type of violence from ISIS but the the other challenge that I think and particularly what is the role of the international community because I fully believe that it has to come from local voices in terms of the narratives but the international community might need to really do a better job of role modeling if we're saying that we don't want to see violence if we're saying that there has to be alternative solutions then what are the techniques that we can introduce that don't resort to violence it's not just a matter of the military intervention it's also a matter of who we talk to who we bring around the table it is often armed actors and if that's the case then those who are choosing not to have a violent form of uprising is missing and so I think the international community needs to role model in a much stronger way how to work with nonviolent actors people who are more interested in bringing the national dialogue or the peace activists together and I think we tend to really marginalize those groups and see them as ineffective yeah and I think Manal has brought up another point here which I'm glad she brought up early right the our focus here is not countering Daesh it's not countering the Islamic state it's countering violent extremism because we've seen what happens if you say let's eliminate core al-Qaeda you know you make progress towards eliminating core al-Qaeda and you end up with al-Qaeda and a bunch of other places and the Islamic state you know and all the other manifestations of violent extremist groups here and so one of the things we want to try to do and again it's highly complex because it differs country to country it differs region to region it differs insect to sect and it differs in a lot of other factors is periodically step back and stay what are we doing against the broader problem because if we defeat this group we are going to end up with five other groups do you want to respond to that we had a USIP board meeting here in April and Georgia Homer who's here with us today made a very interesting distinction on language and it's something it seems to me the group might think about she said there's actually two meetings of countering violent extremism countering violent extremism conjures up sort of kinetic responses directed it the terrorists how do you counter the terrorists themselves she said there's another interpretation and if you'll correct me if I get this wrong preventing extremist violence which actually talks more at the societal context and how do you build resilience against the narrative and attraction of the extremists I think in this conversation we're going to have our eye on both of those elements it's true and particularly since the second one is leads you towards more practical solutions very often as opposed to saying if only we offer a nice counter narrative and everything will be fine well I mean we're delighted that the UAE is sponsoring this but I'll offer them up as an example for another reason but there is a poll just done of the Middle East and of young people in the Middle East and it said where where would you like to live and they said well I'd like to live in the UAE there's jobs there it's growth it's a tolerant society in many ways it's you know it's changing it's evolving there's lively cultural life there's a there's a counter narrative right there yet this is still happening so it's not that there are the absence of narratives that's not the whole problem and I think we have to sort of go go to the next point Tony thank you I agree with you there's not an absence of narrative I'd like to sort of focus on some practicalities Tom last night referenced in Steve you also picked up on the fact that the Arab world is steeped in a legacy of weak governance and institutional structure let's go back this isn't new it's the Arab human development report of O2 and the four deficits we are all keenly aware of it I think we need to build a toolbox that is that underpins and narrative Tunisia is a great case study having just also returned and done a conference there we have an opportunity there both in terms of the civil society space the role of women and now this new government but you can't just talk about narratives and if you look at the White House press statement that the whole first part of it is about counterterrorism you have to look at the waiting generation and what is the and how that provides a funnel of opportunism for recruiting and radicalization so it's interesting for us too and I look at it as a tripod and it has to be integrated and part of our problem and I look forward to engaging with our government colleagues the concept of a coordinated comprehensive integrated approach that deals with these issues that underpins on the economic level we've seen poll after poll after poll you have a robust economic space you have an involved and you're incentivizing a government to do reforms that are corollary with civil society and the business world that then is reinforced by a robust counterterrorism strategy you cannot do one without the other and I'd like to put a big idea on the table early on David and our colleagues and I know it's difficult I'm keenly aware of the difficulty but the issue is emerge national security budget as long as we have no tools in the toolbox of a 150 account and we are constantly piecemealing whether we're going to our friends in the Emirates or the or others or we're looking at the private sector to underpin a public-private partnership to help fund some of these other economic and civil society spaces we're going to constantly be facing these dualities and not able to leverage an impact on the ground so I'd like us to start moving down the path of considering some new ideas that will help because we've got to tackle this it's not going to change and we keep it's the legacy of Charlie Wilson's war frankly easier to vote on the F-16s and the counterterrorism strategy much more difficult to have a robust non as I call it a hedge fund approach to this early four-year return on your investment high yield and nobody wants it they want to have show me now what are the matrices and then we can move forward but it'd be interested in having you all three of you comment do you want to offer a comment on it we uh in my time when I was national security advisor the 150 account was underwater and we basically got it reframed as a national security account we didn't merge the accounts but we got it reframed and and framed as a national security investment and it helped it helped save the account I think we've got to have a broadened understanding of what is our national security interest and what are the national security what are the tools we need to protect that interest and you know a lot of people around this room reflect some of those tools so I think you're exactly right but it's a little uphill because you know it's the hardware you know that people love to vote for I would just add to that and there was an effort with the OCO funds to use that strategy to augment the 150 and with with some success but with some vulnerabilities as well and what I think the biggest threat is making sure that the hardware doesn't overwhelm and creep into and subsume what would what what's in the 150 account otherwise so it's really about having national security understood in a broader frame that would enable us to but if I could suggest there is no understanding I think you can do the firewalls on the hardware but the 150 account is not only under water it is there are no tools and that's I think what we have to underpin the narrative with the tools in the toolbox okay we're gonna go around and take take a couple more questions I'd like to just add one thing in response to what what Tony said first of all it's useful to have a practical idea thrown out on the table because it's going to be very possible for us throughout this day to list the reasons why the challenges we face are profoundly complex and just as very often we see the perfect being the enemy of the good frequently in Washington and in other capitals we see complexity being the enemy of action in other words we see extremely you know we could sit there and we'd say well there's so many things we have to do that we either do tiny incremental things on all of them or we don't do anything at all and one of our mandates here is to focus on actions we can take now this was a very inside the Beltway Washington DC oriented action but it's an action and I you know there there are no points off here for coming up with concrete ideas I see Tom and then I see down here so let's just guess I see I see Tom, Susan, Jocelyn I see several people go ahead Tom Thank you I wanted to echo a couple of things first off the first is this issue of narratives I have to say I'm a real skeptic that this is a big question or a big answer I'm here representing your organization today which has the alliance of civilizations we believe in a culture of peace global citizenship we spend a lot of money promoting these I think they're good things but whether they're a solution to the one percent of the one percent that actually wants to go out and commit violent acts I'm deeply skeptical of that we've heard Tunisia held up as an example of a success story but I can't help but note they had a major terrorist attack just two months ago and that's not the only terrorist attack we've seen in Tunisia it's very very hard to reach extremists with narratives it's very hard to change people's opinions when they've been made we know this from cognitive psychology so while I think it's good to have narratives it's good to know what you stand for it's good to promote positive values I'm really drifting towards George's point and I know the Secretary General within the UN we've had a shift in thinking from countering violent extremism towards preventing violent extremism at the UN we think a lot about conditions conducive I know a lot of people in the academic community might take issue with our list of conditions conducive as actually having real causation for terrorism but addressing those conditions is an absolute good improving people's quality of life in those countries is an absolute good and that might be as much as we can accomplish I always love a reference to the statistical concept of sins of omission and sins of commission I started out life as an intelligence officer and as an investigator and I'm going to offer you up another thing though in forensic science we call it look hard to exchange principle which is the idea that you cannot interact with a crime scene without leaving a trace and as actors we face that anything we do has an impact doesn't necessarily have a positive impact I could take an American positive narrative and destroy it with one tweet of a picture from Abu Ghraib but it's very difficult for us to promote these narratives so the question we have to ask ourselves is when we do something are we doing good are we doing harm and I think that's a really good starting point okay Susan and then Jocelyn we only have four minutes so I encourage everybody to be crisp okay I'll be I'll try to be very crisp first thank you for putting on the table the idea of a March 150 account you know as representing the U.S. government but also having spent a couple decades with USAID I would put on the table that we do have the tools we don't have the flexibilities and the ability and I think that's what you were getting at in order to iterate to respond in a way that really uses all of our tools in our toolbox and we have in different countries I served in Colombia for four years and obviously we used all our tools in our toolbox and looking at a country that was on the verge of being a failed state at the end of 90s and where it is today is truly transformative as far as just a couple of the points on the narrative we've been talking a lot about a counter narrative but really having an affirmative narrative and picking up on your point about prevention as a matter of fact we chose very specifically not to use CVE when we issued our policy four years ago we talked about a development response to violent extremism and now changing that frame to prevention I think it's something we need to keep at the forefront as we move forward Okay, Jocelyn Yeah, briefly if we are aiming to counter extremism talking from the point of view of people who are living in the West extremism is not the major trigger for joining groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS the first demand on the ground is about religion and it came in your presentation the people who go online first go to look for answers to religious questions so we have to address the fact that there is a theology of hatred that is circulating and it's bigger than I would say the strategy of group like Al Qaeda and ISIS so if we do that it is an international community responsibility cannot be the responsibility of state whether they are Western or Muslim state it has to be about empowerment of groups in different civil society contexts that are already conveying or carrying narratives that have nothing to do with this theology of hatred the problem is when we think in terms of counter strategy we are already weak the problem is how do we reach out a level where the global market of ideas is not dominated by theology of hatred some of it even brought out by the so-called friends of the West these are questions that we're going to have to address very very helpful remark okay I'll take one last comment here we are right at the end though so you can get 30 seconds we talked a lot about I mean there's many solutions and it's multifaceted and I think that's why we have all these different perspectives it's not just one truth but we've talked a lot about the supply of foreign fighters you know in this counter strategy and I think less and we need to talk a little bit more about where they're going and the fact that when you have failed states and places where these fighters can congregate and you have an increasing number over the last three years that augments the problem immeasurably and you know when we're talking about the UAE they're doing as much as they can in protecting their area in preventing let's say Emiratis from going in different strategies but you have these places such as Libya, Sinai, Afghanistan, Iraq failed states, vacuums of power and I don't think we've had the discussion of where does that fit into the counter strategy where does aggressive diplomacy fit in for example Libya nothing is happening I think that these things are more shameful we pontificate in a summit in February on CVE and yet nobody's going and saying let's actually solve the situation in Libya at all you know so put that back to you guys that is a profoundly important point because the narrative is fed by opportunity or a sense of mission and so if there are places where there those exist or where they crop up or they can be created it draws people in and it gives them a sense of a role and a purpose we've now come to the end of this opening session I'd like to turn to Steve for last comment Nancy for last comment then I'll explain to you what happens next I have nothing more to say I think this is going to be a terrific conversation I wish I was with you I would just note I think the conversation has brought us to a really important place that will tee up for the rest of the day about exploring more deeply with more nuance the motives for why people are motivated to go especially in some of the places that are so failed as Tafik just said and how they search for meaning and what forms that meaning and just having that deeper understanding may better inform what we may or may not do and I'd like very much Tom's phrase conditions conducive as I think a good shorthand for what Tafik and several others were bringing forward just to have a shared vocabulary going forward thanks absolutely superb opening discussion I thank everybody who's joined into the discussion because you've set the stage that I hope everybody follows the peace game is as good as your contributions it's as rich as you make it so if you do not intervene if you do not seek to bring your ideas to the table there is no other way for them to get there and what you've had here is a series of examples of people framing ideas and putting them out there and advancing the discussion and we are enormously grateful for you doing that we're going to take a 15 minute break at the conclusion of that break we're going to come back and we're going to do our first scenario focusing on some of these questions of recruitment and I'll explain what the structures are and how that'll work when we get there please respect the 15 minute break which means that we will you should be back here and in your seats and ready to go at 10 but before you get up and before you go please join me in thanking Steve for helping to kick this off in a break okay if all of you would take your seats we'll get ready good excellent excellent okay so we're gonna now begin the first of the scenario sessions and that requires your attention you can keep eating what you've got before we begin though I'd like to welcome Ambassador Alatiba again those who were there last night so him who is our patron here and making this possible thank you very much again now here is how this is going to go we're going to do a few of these questions just again to sort of set the stage and give you a sense of glimpse into each other's views on this and then we're going to go to a little mini deck which will describe the scenario and then we're going to go right up to the sort of the first move of the scenario they're just three it's very simple and after the first move there's going to be a 10 minute break where you're not to leave but to actually interact with one another and to say given this situation what will we do now that may mean you interact with the people in your group it may mean you interact with other groups in your role and say well we're the united states we might want to work with turkey good luck with that by the way but you will then go and try those interactions and then when you come back you can say here's what we had in mind but playing within the rules of the scenario now I know because all of you have strong inquisitive minds full of complex insights that you will look at the scenario and many of you will go this isn't the way it would happen okay keep it to yourself okay rule number one of scenarios is go with the scenario we've got the breaks and the panel discussion so we can talk about the context but here we're just trying to create circumstances which can focus us in on some of these solutions that's all these are okay so just accept them for what they were kind of action forcing fictional events okay so let's start with the questions we've got I think five just to kick things off agree or disagree Dacia's use of social media has been the single most important tool in their recruitment of foreign fighters and we'll go from strongly agree down to strongly disagree this is what we call range question and the clock should start you don't even have to wait for me to finish you can start with the clock okay well that's not terribly helpful folks you're all over the place okay so 54 percent of you strongly agree or agree that the use of social media is their most important recruitment tool but 28 percent of you strongly disagree or disagree so there is some range and some tension and that would lead to a useful discussion 18 percent of you just couldn't make up your minds all right next question which has been the most effective dish use of social media to recruit foreign fighters dissemination of high quality propaganda materials that could be by high tech or not direct peer-to-peer recruitment or something else interesting dissemination of high high quality propaganda is 42 direct peer-to-peer is 47 so it's got a bit of an edge and then there is other who said other why did you say other because I really think it's both they create a media ecology in which this worldview is really accepted in which it has a lot of fans but then to actually get someone over there you have to peer-to-peer recruitment is extraordinarily important so I think it's the fusion of the two combination somebody else say other anybody else yes it's also the ecosystem in which all of this lives this is not in a vacuum so it's multifaceted so the choice needs to be and more integrated comprehensive understanding excellent anybody else but we'll come to audience questions a little bit later as we as we get into this anybody all right next which dish recruitment narrative has the most powerful draw the push to establish a caliphate the excitement and adventure of jihad opportunities to defend Sunnis from Shia oppression for combating the brutality of the Assad regime or five other okay again a bit of a spread the push to establish the caliphate has the lead here although it was mentioned several times in the conversation this morning so I think there may have been some campaigning for it and excitement adventure of jihad is next interestingly very few felt combating the brutality of the Assad regime fueled it who said other Jocelyn Farah Farah you seem to be very contrary I'd like to be that okay good well we'll come to you in a second Jocelyn I think the most helpful part of the narrative is to tell people that Islam is in danger and that they have to fight for it it's not about specific phrasing about the caliphate or the jihad or the local circumstances it's like presenting the fact that Islam is at threat and that's what motivates people especially the foreign fight thank you Farah yeah and I think that what we tend to do is try to put everything into boxes so that we can understand it very simply and so I'm rejecting the idea that it's one thing or the other because experience has shown me that indeed it's a multifaceted feeling it's emotional as well as psychological there are lots of dimensions to this so when we put it in this phrase that's why I keep putting other it is complicated okay however the phrase is most powerful and the reason is we know it's several things the question is try to pushing people towards finding one that may have precedence because again if it's several things you may not be able to actually take action against all of them but the question doesn't talk about region and the question doesn't talk about particular state actors and so it depends on what you're who you're asking which is why it is important to understand that the Zanzibarian and the Norwegian are not going to have the same draw but they're also going to all be interested in ISIS okay anybody else with another yes I think fundamentally their message comes down to we're strong I mean there's multiple aspects to it but one of the reasons that they're so eager to use brutality is that it demonstrates their strength that's why they're not bothered by it and if their message of strength erodes then ultimately they could experience a brand reversal the same way that their predecessor al-Qaeda and Iraq did brutality went from being a message of its strength to a message of how it overplayed its end okay next question we have two more okay what is the largest domestic factor pushing foreign recruits to Daesh in prominently Muslim countries lack of economic opportunities security state crackdown on Islamists political marginalization or other okay again other leads the way here political marginalization and lack of economic opportunities tie with state crackdowns lagging substantially who says other that isn't one of the I mean I can imagine that you both of your both of yours would apply here as well so we'll stipulate that Jim David it gets back to the same motivation that we looked at after 9-11 where we took a look at most of the people involved in the actual attacks and we applied one two and three to them and we said we just don't think that that's really it isn't push factors as much as it is at least in those cases pull factors of the ideology of the religion of the sense of identity and the sense of shame at the identity being unrespected and such that disrespected that tends to get people into this more than one two and three which and I'll get into this later one two and three of course are things we can kind of we think fix or at least try to fix whereas the other is very hard to fix slightly simpler answer but a lack of a social authentic place in their own society both of these though echo right there's I just want to feel better about myself how will I feel better about myself will it be for a theological reason will it be for an action but they're they're looking for some kind of a new mission or an improvement in their circumstance yes you know it's interesting that the other category has generated more and more responses because I like others probably saw that as all of the above plus other factors okay on you know I can cite a couple of other factors that my drive domestically some of these fathers to to the battlefield one would be the perception that the government is not Islamic enough and they want to go to a caliphate and live under an authentic Islamic government okay and by the way these are multiple choice questions right I mean we they have limitations the idea is to just crystallize thinking yeah but no I think in addition to all of the above the other factor is just what I would say the daily grind I mean the amount of corruption the amount of humiliation the amount that people have to go through in a lot of these contexts particularly those that are in transition and conflict but even the more stable leads people to suddenly care about their identity I think it's dangerous to see the identity as a driving factor identity only becomes important when it's threatened and when you're humiliated so those factors that lead to identity becoming such an issue I think is is one of the primary factors on the domestic front yeah there's also something which I sometimes call the stability tipping point in a society and to me the stability tipping point in many societies is when there is a sense within a population that working within the system actually will serve them versus working outside the system if the majority of people feel that they should work within the system it tends to be fairly stable if at a growing number of people feel that they have to work outside the system in order to gain their lives then that produces instability yes I you know I think we have to distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions I think that the if you look at the two if you look at the kids who went and attacked at Bardo in Tunis he had a brother who decided not to do this sort of thing he led a completely different life what distinguished a young attacker in the case of Bardo was he had the opportunity to train on the Libyan border so the collapse of states the collapse of borders the capacity to take advantage of alienation or to have alienation challenge a certain direction is really the sufficient condition it creates the opportunity to take somebody who's unhappy distraught and turn that person into a combatant so these structural conditions I think are absolutely fundamental okay one or two more quick comments I actually saw number two and three as variations on the theme if you have security state crackdown on Islamists you're that turns into and manifests in political marginalization I think political marginalization you could actually define much more broadly than we typically do to include you know if you talk about the polity include social marginalization if you look at social and political marginalization everything else fits into that umbrella okay Salma I think that what pushes away these recruits from there on societies is a sense of alienation and loss of hope that it can be different that it can be changed and this sense of alienation is the result of many factors has been the religious one economic one the political one and I think that it is extremely difficult to say which of them is more significant thank you the last question what is the largest domestic factor pushing foreign recruits to dice in western countries perceive western indifference the Assad regime's atrocities struggle of Muslims to integrate economically and politically anti-Muslim sentiment is there something else that you think is driving them in western societies to go and seek a role in this so 31% and struggle of Muslims to integrate economically and politically almost the same in anti-Muslim sentiment now in other let's set aside alienation let's set aside the theological motivation Jocelyn talked about before let's set aside the opportunities created by the disruptions in societies which have come up several times what else other than those others yes Mary that personal search for meaning yeah I mean I think there's an entire psychosocial issue with you know teenagers girls and boys similar to what we have gang and culture recruitment you know in different places I think can't forget that it's a more generic one okay anything else yes the fact that they are living in largely functional societies but looking back on largely dysfunctional societies in their home region and I think compelled to try and change that in some way if it is their home region yes what I call the lack of symbolic integration which is more than economic social or political which is to feel part of the national narrative of the country in which you live okay which is alienation in another form alienation because it means that the counterpart which are the political institution have to make an effort to include it's not about alienation it's about enlarging what is the national narrative of the country no but the people are feeling alienated and one needs to enlarge the national narrative to bring them in yes all right so those are the five questions team this up if we could switch over to the slides and move quickly into that before we get to the slides do either of you have anything you want to say in response to any of these questions or any of what you've heard I think we always tend to find or at least search for what we think is the one reason everyone joins ISIS or the one reason that they feel alienated and I think it's like a lot of the feedback I heard there is no one reason there's probably 10 or 12 or 15 and everyone has a reason why they think it's better for him to join Daesh than it is to be part of a national country with borders and a flag trying to find the one reason and therefore fix it sometimes doesn't work yesterday one of the questions and the dinner was well how do we prevent radicalization I think the simple answer is to prevent to present a better alternative is to present a better narrative is to make sure that there is a choice for him other than Daesh that seems or at least appears more attractive and I think that's the way the UAE looks at counter radicalization is to create a society where people feel empowered feel part of the country and feel like if they stay in the UAE their future is going to be better than if they join Daesh Do you want anything? You know I think that the conversation has really reinforced how important it is to get specific because of the complexity the importance of context the nuance and you know both Steve Hadley and Minaal talked about the particulars of living in a very difficult transitional environment with the daily grind of corruption and humiliation I know that we've got a guest here from Somalia who's has that very much on her mind and so as we look at struggling with these issues taking it into a very particular issue which I think your teen us up for really becomes critical so that we don't get lost in the complexity Exactly and clearly the purpose of this is get a temperature get a sense of what's on people's minds what do they think top issues are but as we've said in the opening last night and as we said this morning there's no one approach we joked at the beginning where I joked with Nancy at the beginning I said I know where we're gonna end up you know there is a spectrum of choices there's a you know to use the structure Catherine brought up earlier you know there's a range of time standard vene there's a range of ways standard vene there's a range of areas standard vene there's a range of themes that differs country by country you have to use all of them but if again that gets us to the point I made earlier about complexity being the enemy of action if we say that the mind boggles you've got to you've got to sort of start someplace and so setting some priorities helps us with that and that's that's the purpose of doing it but let's do it a different way let's do it in the scenario context now this is not technically a war game with multiple moves and all the complexity that some of you have been in war games before may be familiar it's a simplified version where we're going to essentially describe a situation circumstance and three developments within that circumstance and use those to catalyze discussion and search for ideas and this is where we really want to move from the abstract discussion to what would work here what could we do here to advance the idea of peace broadly of countering violent extremism specifically countering violent extremism in this circumstance specifically so the title is you know what if they gave a war and nobody came commanding the virtual high ground and other strategies for preventing and defeating information age insurgencies there are a couple of setup slides here let's go to the first of them just to give you a sense you know the foreign fighter presence is growing as of early 2015 the number of foreign fighters to have joined the Syrian Iraq conflict has surpassed 20,000 as we heard Tom say last night the latest number is perhaps 25,000 some of the estimates have heard have been even bigger foreign fighter countries of origin listed here Tunisia leads the list Saudi Arabia is second Morocco Jordan Russia and France interestingly all have roughly the same number of foreign fighters contributed Lebanon has 900 56% of the fighters come from the Middle East and North Africa 19 from Western Europe 14 from the former Soviet Union and 11% from other countries by the way we'll give you these slides if you don't already I think you have them in your notebook correct are the slides in the notebook if you don't we'll give them to you anyway the next slide so Daesh recruits through sophisticated campaign they leverage social media they've created highly successful online recruitment campaigns and they they've used a number of factors to pull people towards them one is the brutality of Assad one is the sectarian battle another is kind of five star Jihad compared to some of these others they portray the conflict in Syrian Iraq as an exciting adventure where you can you can even have a good quality of life in the midst of it and then of course they touch upon historic and religious implications these are themes that recur in some of the the tools that they've been using and they've they've had a quite a successful social media recruitment effort using popular social media sites to allow them to infiltrate and influence the consciousness of young people Tom Donlan mentioned this last night and you know one of the areas that we're going to want to obviously address this is is is through that next and obviously factors at home as we've discussed push people towards it there's youth unemployment and middle east north Africa youth unemployment is 22% for men 39% for women there's security state crackdowns in some places you have political marginalization that we've talked about or alienation in what in western countries you have perceived indifference to west to the Assad regime the sense of otherness that we talked about a minute ago you've got anti-muslim sentiment 52% of the people in Spain have negative opinion of Muslims 50% in Germany 38% in France those are seriously negative conditions and frankly the turmoil can exacerbate it migration flows and other things can exacerbate it the next one okay so the next thing is going to be our first move again these are fictional moves they're not intended to represent anything that's actually happened they're designed to catalyze all of you into action and take it for nothing we're not endorsing them we're not predicting them we are simply using them as a tool okay next so the first of these is widespread barrel bombing by the Syrian government is met with inaction by the security council okay and so we have a statement the security council issues statement they say well we think this is terrible but we don't do anything about it and so the goal here is to determine how the international community can combat the perception of indifference in the eyes of the communities that are vulnerable to radicalization and recruitment this is obviously a broader you know it's a illustrative of a broader issue you know we have things happen bad things happen it could be barrel bombing it could be the the Syria conflict writ large where there's brutality and we don't respond to that the West doesn't respond to it broadly and so this gives an opportunity to recruit it gives an opportunity to say they don't care it's up to us we need to deal with this or their lack of care their lack of action is a sign that they just you know want to solve the kill each other and you know however it's characterized and so now the question becomes how do you combat that how do you combat that particular kind of message and so as as as Nancy said let's get specific in this move address this issue from the perspective of your organization now al-qaeda is probably not going to con you know counteract it you're going to try to take advantage of it so the question in your case would be how do you take advantage of it and the business interests it would be where do you stand in this how do you how do you how do you how do you how do you deal with that so does anybody have any questions so it is now about 25 after 10 I really would just like you to take five or 10 minutes don't go far away this is not a time to check your email all of you I know none of you will follow that guidance but in in 10 minutes we're going to get back together and we're going to dive right in with this and then move on to the next move and I'll give you a three-minute warning if you've got an idea where you can coordinate the United States can coordinate with somebody or wants to reach out to the telecom industry reach out to them create that kind of cross-pollination and we'll see you in 10 minutes or so ladies and gentlemen we'll begin again in three minutes we'll begin again in three minutes six or seven million of Herodian Americans considering that we only have one million UAE nationalists who are pretty much in the world that's for cutting exactly we've got to go back we're gonna folks we're gonna guys guys guys we're gonna okay we're gonna begin in a moment we're gonna begin in one minute one minute one minute all right ladies and gentlemen if you could resume your seats please thank you very much there's only one group here that's being uncooperative but I'm not gonna socially shame you all right okay everybody thank you very much I hope you've had a productive brief conversation because we are discussing social media here I'm not gonna say this throughout the day I just want to say it now but to give you a sense that we practice what we preach or you practice what we preach peace game is the number one topic trending on Twitter in Washington D.C. right now so that's positive it's ahead of Amtrak Stop Fast Track Stop Fast Track TPP wearing orange don't know what that's about Cuba growth Ivanovic which clearly is a French open reference run Warren run which is a reference to Elizabeth Warren Nick Young Rick Scott and more happy than not I hope all of you are more happy than perhaps that's all of you as well in any event so the question is how do you respond to this and and you know what's what's what's the first reaction and I'm gonna ask everybody to you know I mean if you've got something to say raise your hand but I'm gonna go to a couple people first and as is always the case in these things you should be ready to respond and I think what I'm gonna do first because of the nature of who we are and what we're doing is I'm gonna go first to Daesh and then Al Qaeda and then open it up to the rest of the group but when you see that what do you do the propaganda value of this for us is obvious we have a media team already deployed what we're going to do is undertake provocative attacks against Assad's forces with the goal of having them come out and try to pursue us when they do we'll have larger forces that are ready to surround Assad soldiers kidnap them and then we're going to produce an excellent video one which will show the barrel bombing juxtaposed by the execution of the Assad forces to show that the caliphate is at the forefront of taking revenge for such heinous attacks we also anticipate that to compete with us other rebel groups will also undertake an offensive when they do we anticipate that the forces of Assad are going to try to withdraw back towards Damascus when they do that we're going to capture other sites as we did with Palmyra okay you got despite the fact that you're yesterday's terrorist organization how will you respond Al Qaeda has actually got a much better stronghold closer to Damascus than ISIS does so in many respects ISIS needs Al Qaeda at this point in order to affect any kind of you know power struggle against the Assad regime however Al Qaeda is also looking to get more recruits and gain more and financial support so part of our goal here is to play against of course the western infidels that are you know allowing this to happen in addition to pointing out that ISIS isn't doing anything to protect the actual community and the civilians in the area they're not doing anything to help with Syrians we're actually going to go in and help the community provide some logistics food water in addition to attacking the Assad regime and possibly capturing more territory closer to Damascus okay so this is this is what's happening this is what's being fed out into into the network and we're starting to sort of see reactions to all of this on the ground now let me go to the NGOs that are on the ground then I'm going to come to some of you here here you guys are on the ground you're seeing this just what are you seeing in response to all of this and how are you responding to it so I mean I think you know it's not a perception of indifference it is in fact indifference to the suffering of the Syrian people through barrel bombs and other of course terrible weapons of mass destruction so first obviously the NGOs we don't have a I mean it's not our agenda to counter the indifference for Western nations and that's obviously that's not why we're there we're impartial we're neutral we do think that increased humanitarian assistance is very important it also needs to be widespread it can't just be to for instance Assad controlled areas or areas of the country where the assistance that can go in and can somehow the funding can somehow be traced in a way that that suits donor governments meaning that it has been siphoned off to you know basically extremist groups which is going to happen no matter what and that's the reality local groups should be more involved so they shouldn't be local actors local Syrian actors who work on humanitarian assistance they need to be involved in the planning they need to be part of the meetings they need to not just be seen as deliverers but in fact seen as actors who have you know capacity and the ability to serve their own communities they're in their own communities and by seeing them be empowered that's very important I think for the whole community um finally the social services as has been has been raised will be provided by someone inside of Syria to some extent and if it's not humanitarian actors then it's going to be some sort of militant organization more than likely and so that's that's another vacuum and that's another obviously opportunity to create loyalty in places that people may not want so funding humanitarian action making sure human rights violations are documented and that the media is also providing a platform for it okay so what I would really like to get is you know reactions that are coming of this at dealing with how this is spreading or how you might counteract to guess okay so first of all you know we are at the front lines of this fight is this you speaking as as Bashar al-Assad himself I think you know who I am I'm happy that you said my name twice out we are fighting the dirty fight that many people are on the table don't want to say they want but do want us to do they we have the support around this table of countries we know who they are I'm we know who they are we know who they are and they tell us behind the scenes and they're collaborating with us to confront Dash these attacks killed Dash rebels terrorists al-Qaeda whatever you want to call them this is these are the people who want to destroy Western civilization who want to destroy Islamic civilization and we can have the media propaganda we can have the NGOs who are being fed by local activists on the ground propaganda at the end of the day look at what's happened in the last three years you said al-Qaeda is dead well they're being supported by our friends Turkey and Saudi Arabia to take over the north part of our country right now so thank you Saudi Arabia and Turkey you've brought back al-Qaeda that's what's happening so we can have a discussion here about Dash we're fighting them I guess people here don't want to fight them but thank you very much okay well that's it that's it that's by the way that's a response to violent extremism right you know it's not it may not be the one you want it may actually not be one that actually is an effective response but that is one that is being articulated and you know Barbara here wants to in a completely uncoordinated way with the government and Damascus speak about from the perspective of the government in Tehran hello hello Bashar it's your good friend Kazim Soleimani I want to echo everything you said I think the last few years have shown us exactly what the alternative to the central government the legitimate central government of Syria is it's a bunch of murderous extremists as we have seen with with Dash we are supporting the government in Damascus financially and with military support training our generals have been killed in Syria trying to defend the legitimate regime against the violent extremists that are supported by Saudi Arabia Turkey and others we have of course the support of local Shia we have helped to encourage the formation of many small militia groups in Syria to defend our sanctuaries there Sayyida Zaynab and others and we have encouraged of course Hezbollah and Lebanon to cross the border and support the legitimate government of Syria against these murderous thugs but there is also a political dimension to what we would like to see as you may recall Iran was prevented from taking part in Geneva two discussions by the Saudis the UN invited us and then disinvited us and I think my my colleague ministers Arif has something to say about a political solution in Syria well that's we're not at a political solution in Syria we're just responding to this particular circumstance and I will thank you so much the Iranian government from the beginning of this conflict has been seeking a political resolution and as we've mentioned we see that processes are happening on the ground and we continue to stress that there's only a political solution the hypocrisy of the UN Security Council in even attempting to make a statement about barrel bombs while ignoring what is happening right now to the Yemeni population by the Syrian aggression with U.S.-made armaments okay so I am Saudi aggression against the Yemenis and I too no no I hope this feels good but look I love the play acting and you're doing a great job but we were on a sort of move towards the response I'm going to ask for one more local response and then I'm going to sort of widen it out we've heard from the Tehran we've heard from the Syrian government I do want to get what the local Sunni reaction is and then I'm going to open it out a little bit to other governments okay okay so speaking in the name of the people who are actually barrel bombs so we're not talking about perception of indifference we are talking about actual indifference that's killing us every day and it's all the most shocking that these planes that are barrel bombing us are actually operating alongside the USF force and the forces of other countries it's happening exactly in these regions where the coalition is operating and with regard to violent extremism this does not make us more supportive of Daesh because anyway Daesh does not defend us they're not fighting for us they have their own project more than often they're helping the regime as we see now in Aleppo but whether you like it or not al-Qaeda is helping us actually they're fighting they're dying for us it doesn't mean we agree whether everything they do and the kind of model of governance they're promoting in Syria is something we dislike I mean we've been doing we did an uprising four years ago to have more a more inclusive government for representative government so the kind of model they promote is certainly not what we we want but if barrel bombs continues like continue like this we will be neither willing nor able to try to check al-Qaeda's ambitions in Syria we're not willing because why would we oppose the only people that actually who actually do something for us when the rest of the world is watching and able simply because as you know these barrel bombs they displace people and that's my last point but if you would I mean the most effective check on these jihadi ambitions of governance is to have vibrant strong organized local communities you know local administration local councilors and so on so you know what you have to do we want on the fly zone to put it clearly okay okay so you've requested no fly zone but but let me say this you know in each one of these discussions we have 20 25 minutes to do it and we'd like to get people you know as many people as possible to join in you won't all get into each one but we'd like to have you know focus on the actions you may take to in the next to sort of counter the spread I think we've talked about some you know sort of the root bubbling up of of how an action like this may lead to to recruitment efforts now I'd like to talk about how do you counter it and what the responses may be in an effort to be not U.S. centric I will turn to the EU known for their swift action and almost everything but go ahead Thank you we're the European Union we'd like firstly to note the suffering of the peoples of Syria and Iraq in the current forms of conflict and we would therefore like to request to send in European Union observers to ascertain the facts on the ground and in partnership with that and alongside the United Nations and their facilitation we would like to invite Iran, Russia to dialogue with us the European Union in order to look at a sustainable future for Iraq and Syria and on that note we would also like to invite local civil society groups within the European Union to engage with our foreign policy actions through dialogue at the European Union level Wow how effective do you think that's going to be so I think it's problematic to involve Iran in trying to come up with a resolution to the Syrian conflict since they're a big part of the problem itself so for the UAE we'd register obviously our outrage disappointment at again the security council's failure to address the problem in Syria but more importantly against discussions involving Iran and Russia as if we can get a solution through working with them we'd like to work with our friends the Saudis and the Egyptians into trying to come up with a regional response to this problem that highlights our concerns Okay does Saudi Arabia Egypt want to respond to this? So Saudi Arabia's verbal responses that were increasingly disappointed in the continued ineffectiveness of the international community to combat the brutal Assad regime into attacks like this that targets civilians so our action is to work with the UAE to work with Egypt but what we will actually be doing is continuing to increase our funding to the opposition groups Okay Hi Saudi just saying hi over here She thinks she's the opposition group you mean by the way She would make the checkout to Leigh Ann Egypt Well Egypt has been very consistent over a number of years and we've supported the idea of a political transition in Syria and this latest outbreak of violence is reinforces that position we think it's critically important to bring in appropriate opposition members and to be responsible in the way that both sides engage in a political transition in Syria which we think is actually So now we've got some discussion about the political pardon me who said thank you thank you Egypt we appreciate your involvement all right thanks you wanted to well no did you want to make a point about a potential response that you think well I'm just curious what the impact on this security council in action what the impact of a massive humanitarian response is and how the various players are understanding that who does the massive humanitarian response okay okay but okay thanks so so so let's explore let's unpack that a little bit okay there's this event has taken place the security council isn't doing anything just how massive is your humanitarian response in Syria to these victims well we've deployed considerable resources in the region on the borders of Syria and are providing a tremendous amount of humanitarian assistance already we are speaking with the NGO community to leverage the resources that they have and we've also spoken to our friends in the media to ensure that the tremendous amount of work that our dedicated staff are doing in very dangerous and trying circumstances is well covered and given the credit that it deserves so Nancy this sounds to me like there is no humanitarian response no I think that the question I have for for a number of our colleagues here is why aren't why isn't that having any impact well but what that they're but what he said was we deployed on the borders there's no response in the country no no no there hasn't he there's nothing new there's nothing new and it's media spun that's not what I heard I think that's a misinterpretation of my statement okay so what's new we do have a very limited presence I believe on the ground in Syria not my area of expertise our camps and primary humanitarian assistance obviously is in more peaceful environment so across the border away from the fighting in response to situations like this where we can deploy more resources we do I would note after the is the Grisha attack in Kenya one of the responses of the Kenyan government was demanding the closure of a refugee camp that is run by the United Nations and we push back very strongly against that understanding that it was only likely to make things worse okay we'll take that for what it is well we have a much broader response which the ambassador will test to in a moment but on the humanitarian assistance side immediately we would obviously be working we're working very closely with our partners in the United Nations with our NGOs who are already on the ground who are on the front lines we're mobilizing our resources through the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and we're dialoguing across the international community and within the NSC in order to have a much more robust response given the security council statement your twitter ratings might take a dive as you listen to the U.S. response to this first of all we've done a lot of coordinating we've shoved to go along with the dialog exactly we have told the Turks no way to the no-fly zone implementation UN folks wanted us to think about a red line even the UN and we didn't like that because we're against military force we looked at options with the intelligence community to increase eyes on also we need to coordinate with the NGO community but again with the intelligence community we don't want anything to go bang over or on Syria nonetheless we'll do we'll roll out the usual suspects we're going to condemn this thing terribly we're going to issue a statement of regret that the UN Security Council didn't join us in this condemnation due to unmentioned states not allowing that to happen but the problem we have in our internal deliberations in the U.S. government is how do we pitch this in our anti-ISIS or not ISIS anti-violent extremism because it looks like we're not taking any action when you have horrible events happening in the Middle East so what we will cite is we're against Muslims dying we're going to help with humanitarian assistance we're going to stay seized with this and we're going to hope that some other event will come up and this one will go away because this one puts us on the horns of a dilemma because we really don't want to do anything active because of our other equities Iran negotiations our unwillingness to get involved in Syria on the one hand yet we realize this is a good recruiting tool for ISIS and al-Qaeda and violent extremism generally so we feel we need to do something about it even if that's not very much okay can the people of South Carolina respond to this please they must three quick points on the half the voters of the great state of South Carolina first the fact that we were 20 minutes into this conversation before we even heard from the United States is I believe a symbol of the abdication of leadership the abject failure of leadership that has brought us to this moment in the Middle East the second point I would make is this is a moment that demands leadership and we need to be serious about this we need to recognize that these problems are not going to solve ourselves and I would say to our friends in the region you're going to criticize us if we sit on the sidelines and you're going to criticize us if we act well I would rather be on the side of action and I think finally we need to recognize that that going forward the United States is going to have to play its role its rightful role in the world if we want to live in a safer world and solve these problems thank you thank the gentleman for healing thank you senator Graham and that may explain exactly why you are where you are in the polls let's hear 30 seconds each Western Muslim community Turkey business interests and then very quickly back to you guys but very quickly yes so I think it's totally typical that you look to civil society so far down the discussion why were you not asking about the impact of movement from Western Muslims you know I don't like the tone of this this is turning on the moderator it's a scenario I'm looking at my colleagues around the table having a conversation about what state actors should do when in fact it's Western Muslims that are moving to join the ranks of ISIS well how do you respond to all this are you going to join so this is part of the conspiracy theory you don't care about Muslims this is typical the usual voiceless lay Muslims in the West they they are appalled I would say by the current state of discussion of these issues and we Muslims in the West do not feel taken care of because what is at stake for us is a sense of justice it is not so much state interest and the more the sense of justice and fairness and dehumanization of some conflicts the more we are indeed attracted by people across the table who give us a strong positive quote unquote or helpful way of dealing with that and our hope would be to have a more neutral or supranational entity where we could have a discussion because if I shift my face and I am now a Muslim leader in Europe I am trying to reach out to the EU for example to create different way of foreign policy on these issues and until now unfortunately we have failed this is exactly where this thing this first session appropriately ends up and I know a lot of people want to jump in and I am just going to ask you to hold off 10 minutes and jump in in the second section because essentially what you saw unfold here was a development a set of response by those who could capitalize on the development essentially moderate inaction on the part of those who could have done something to develop a counter narrative and then the response of the alienated who might be recruitable saying we're ready now our goal here is not to recapitulate what's actually happening our goal here is to come up with solutions that might actually counteract it and try to identify ways to get to places we haven't gone yet and so one of the traps in these kind of scenarios is that you say well my government hasn't done anything so therefore I won't do anything and so then we sort of relive life and that's not something so what I'm really going to encourage you to do in each of these next steps is to say what might happen that could shake lose some action I think Nancy brought up the issue you know a big humanitarian response would actually resonate you know and the question is how do you get to that how do you get to that with the players we've got in the circumstance I know the tech community wanted to weigh in and we'll get to you in the course the next one there are ways that that there might be a response there there are intelligence responses that we might have in this we will explore the law enforcement responses that we may have in this and I want to explore those in the next one but I think in this first one we've achieved the goal of recapitulating what's actually sort of happening and what I really want to move us towards in each of the next ones is constructive action that hasn't happened yet because clearly we've got this problem and we're not solving the problem so let's go to the next move and the next move is police arrest 20 Muslims following student protests in Italy well this is what just happened there were people in the community which we just described they start protesting because they you know say students were decrying western inaction following the recent bombings it's amazing that we were able to predict this outcome um and and so they protest and now the situation is ratcheting up a little bit and the question is what can we do towards diffusing the situation and developing strategies to preempt the flow of recruits out of Italy and elsewhere in western Europe how do you work to promote the flow how do others work whether in intelligence or in law enforcement or in the government or in the media or in the tech community to counteract the flow to come up with something constructive we're going to take 10 minutes which will put us right at 11 um 15 so take time work it out and let's focus on constructive steps that can be taken thank you two-minute warning we're going to begin again in two minutes okay ladies and gentlemen can i encourage you to return to your seats all right so here we are and what we want to do in this section is talk about now that we've had a development an international development the barrel bombing and there was a response to that development to take advantage of it by extremist groups and not a particularly strong response in order to counter it from others it escalated and so now it's more important than ever that we actually find concrete steps that can be taken to counter violent extremism and I think in illustration of how that works in the real world and what we need to change comes from the example that Nancy brought up and so maybe Nancy want to talk about it for a second well just very briefly that was a very illustrative session in that it underscored the inaction that was available to us through the Security Council and it gets to Tom Donilon's comment last night of a very high level of dysfunction among the great powers in the ability to coordinate and move towards solutions in the absence of that there was in fact significant Western action around humanitarian response and probably one of the largest most massive most expensive humanitarian response since World War II was and is being undertaken in Syria with half of global UN appeals going to the Syria crisis right now and yet that doesn't register per the slide that talks about the sense of Western indifference and for obvious reasons when you're still being killed by barrel bombs but it goes to this critical issue of when you don't have the tools and the levers that you can legally take and you reach for the ones that you can and they don't register and you continue on with the narrative of Western indifference it provides it yet a different set of conundrums for action so as we look here we see we've seen this movie the question is if a lot is being done and that could be turned into a positive narrative what do you have to do to turn it into a positive narrative that's the question for us the narrow one right one is you could promote it better that might resonate to some degree it might not or you might say well it's not resonating because frankly the bombing is still going on so you actually have to take some action so that people say well gee they're not just doing this they're also doing that and it resonates more and that could be a step and even if you know there are steps between total inaction and all out war right and so even on the military side if you can't achieve peace without some kinetic action then we have to have that in our plan right you know I mean even though our goal is peace we have to recognize that and frankly it's a credibility issue in this and it's going to come up again so I think Nancy brings up a good point because it gets us a little bit there but let me go back to your European Union now because this is happening in Europe and I'm going to go to you and then I'm going to go to law enforcement in Europe and then I want to go to the intelligence community and say in this context what do you do to avoid this turning into a new stream of people flowing into these regions we're definitely turning to law and order implementation forces so the EU has already created links across the European Union to how to how to do crowd management for example has reached out to intelligence across the new member states so we would implementing more security police advisors we would turn to a EU best practice model which is situated in Denmark in Arhus the experts in putting this right they can deal with young angry cults also with young Muslim angry cults so we would turn to them and look to their expertise and draw on their expertise and in that way I think we would have immediate access to the young and could follow up with innovative community policing strategies okay so we just happened to have since you've mentioned Arhus we just happened to have here the guy is responsible for that is a big it's very convenient but so Jurgen or you and Georgia perhaps you may want to address this but it's been very disappointing on to now to listen to all these very interesting high political discussions because it doesn't really bring us forward in a solution of the problems so I'm representing both myself and my police district all police commissioners in Europe in looking for ways to solve this and we didn't really hear any solutions when we heard what the different countries were talking about okay well what the police agencies should do by themselves and collaborating with the EU and bilaterally is that first of all there's an intelligence question you have to of course be aware of vulnerable communities Muslim communities extreme Muslim communities you have to if you haven't already created contact groups between the intelligence and leading Muslim figures leading imams in your countries you should create some of these contact groups in order to raise the understanding what is going on in the Muslim societies extreme Muslim societies in order to be able to influence so this is on a more national intelligence level on the local level that's where I work you have to use community policing strategies it's important to stress that the police like much of the other social society has an important role in addressing this problem so what we should do within the police community policing strategies is that we should take contact to the Muslims local Muslim societies local use Muslim youth centers local imams and open the discussion what is going on and what is your perspective you young Muslim person what is your perspective on what we've seen in in Syria and in Italy open up for the discussion in some way express that we understand your anger of course we are all more or less angry with what's going on we we are unsatisfied and then again try to show them another path tell them what are the bound what can you do within our democratic society within the framework our legal framework how can you protest without crossing the line to become violent extremists could you perhaps join the European Red Cross or something if you wanted make a difference in in humanitarian perspective but is it those are the concrete actions we well though those are talk like the countries do we act okay new act and those are positive steps to be sure but do you also identify people who are a potential threat do you arrest people do you you know I mean what what other steps do you take Georgia so let me add the international police advisors here what we understand is how we do what we do is as important as what we're doing so so that we're not actually contributing to the problem and actually fueling the problems in the unrest how we do community policing how we pursue arrests how we manage crowd and protests is very important and then we have to do that and transparent and adjust and responsible and accountable way and we understand that and that is the sort of ethos of policing that we would like to encourage whether it's in Tunis or in Copenhagen okay the intelligence community is was invoked here by the EU as well and clearly there there is some connection here between crowds of people and identifying people who might be extremists and identifying people who might be moving forward what keep what can constructively be done here as well Peyton thanks for having us here we're not used to seeing the light of day but with that I'll do it by best to represent I would just like to put it on that the intelligence community informs the policy we're not the policy makers the reason why I mentioned that is that we will defer to the government as they make the policy but if I had a bell I would be ringing it right now we are very alarmed with what we're seeing in the communities we for years now have had concerns with certain threat groups that information has been reported up but it's not been acted upon if you want information about what's going on in the communities it takes time to develop those networks and to build those networks and to build those relationships it's not something that happens overnight it's not instant instant no matter what technology is involved whether it's communication or not communication is two ways someone's putting out a message and someone wants to receive it as long as you have those two options that communication that will occur some of the solutions that we're hoping that the government we can work with is is to kind of think outside of the box when you're making recommendations and policy recommendations we're asking to bring the intelligence community to the table when those are being made and not after the fact right to come up with a solution we see that often something else that we would like to do is remember that these bad actors if we call them our threat groups are working with intelligence communities it's just not the one that your that your government's working with if they can build those relationships and have those relationships we challenge people in the NGO community local citizens religious community state to also work with the intelligence community because those bad actors in your area are also doing that one of the other things is this multi-prong approach is something that we're very very interested in and we'd like to work with some of those groups to better surface some of the intelligence information to help law enforcement and our policy makers do that okay telecom community IT community clearly you're playing a role in this and the IC has been working with IT what do you suggest well I'd like to remind government the intelligence community and perhaps most specifically law enforcement that we have the capacity to monitor public discourse in a way that's well beyond your capacity and so we are of course open for business in that regard are you excuse me are you open for business in that regard will you work with them will you share this information will you shut it down what will you do well we're a very multifaceted technology and telecom community so well on the one hand an organization like Twitter or Facebook or some consumer facing organizations may be reticent at least to discuss publicly the ways in which they'll share that information I think it's clear that they will but I think it's also important to note that many of this information much of this information is already public so if you're an organization more like Palantir we're obviously willing and able to consume that data and provide actionable insights specifically to the intelligence community and law enforcement so as law enforcement was discussing identifying individuals who may be at risk or may be marginalized potential sort of potential for communicating and aligning themselves with bad actors these are people that we can identify based on the way that they engage with social media not perhaps to take to increase surveillance but perhaps just to initiate a conversation if that's the end goal and so I think it's that kind of identification that kind of monitoring of information at scale that we can provide and I think frankly we're also often overlooked or come to us when a decision has already been made as opposed to using the tactical intelligence that we can provide to inform the action in the first place I think we are at absolutely critical juncture in our discussion here which needs to be flagged the nature of the threat we're talking about unlike past threats cannot be dealt with by governments alone it requires public-private collaboration of a sort that may make some people uncomfortable but it requires the police working with the local Muslim communities both to help present an alternative narrative but also to gain intelligence it requires the intelligence community working with them but it requires the intelligence community and the police and governments working with the IT community who have much more information about who these people are and what they're doing and what they're saying and who they're relating to than exist elsewhere this requires a kind of it requires as was noted earlier the NGOs to play a role in this that is not the role that people have typically played but there is no role when one is dealing with a non-state threat or there's no there's no initiative when dealing with a non-state threat that doesn't involve some degree of this kind of expanded public-private partnership which is new territory and uncomfortable for a lot of reasons for people to deal with Tony you represent part of the private sector as you know I'm the CEO of a major multinational corporation and I am a little in your dreams you don't know that yeah right I am really struck by the cacophony of confusion that I hear in this conversation do you know the guy from South Carolina you sound a lot like well I do and I will actually posit a question to him but on the telecom side I'm I'm going to pick up where my colleagues left off we're brought to the table we as the private sector after decisions are made language on public private partnerships which is a new tool in a 21st century toolbox is a good tool but our government colleagues whether they're in Europe or in the Middle East or in the U.S. don't know how to use it don't haven't defined roles and responsibilities clearly and are really dissipating a very important tool Farah talked about the ecosystem we're tiptoeing around the ecosystem our intelligence colleagues say there are alarm bells I have alarm bells I have major interest in this region they're not being protected I'm thinking about pulling out in some places that will have a downward spiral in an already fragile environment give me some tools in my toolbox how are you going to incentivize me to stay and to remain engaged I will end with a positive note and since we are searching for solutions yes on the technology side and on my own business interest we know the world of business but and we have many partners in the region we're doing what we're doing because we see the value of engaging in this region and the huge opportunities for growth but frankly our government colleagues are not making it easy and I'd like to put the question to them what are you going to do for us how are you going to incentivize where's the conf you know give me some clarity Mr. Ambassador well okay we can turn to we'll turn to them and then I'll come back to you Manal but you know I had a conversation once with a senior official in the Jordanian government and talking about long-term stability in Jordan and I said what's the key to long-term stability in Jordan and he said oh that's simple six to seven million jobs and so this is this is the point that Tony is making in terms of you know can something constructive be done there so turn to the U.S. government put the point again not with I don't want to recapitulate past inaction but what is possible in the area of the public private partnership we talked about what would you do to work with the IT sector what would you do to work with the local Muslim communities what would you do to work with the business community are there specific steps you would take in these circumstances that may not have been tried but you think might be possible yeah based upon your urging us and all of our friends around this table to think outside the box of current policy we've thought among ourselves that aside from the usual coordination that I went into in boring detail before and talking to everybody one thing the U.S. government can do is to lead in taking another look at the crises you have given the humanitarian disaster that's a good pivot point to look at policy again and decide maybe we should take a more active role both diplomatically and militarily and in terms of assistance humanitarian and other in the Syrian situation to try to send a message that we do care about that region that we are engaged in it that has downsides in terms of combating violent extremism but in terms of dealing with the worries of the intelligence community and the downward spiral that would be generated if global business starts pulling out of the region undercutting all of our efforts you come to the conclusion that we have to deal with these weak governments these problems of limited legitimacy that they have and the economic and security problems that this is just going to involve more U.S. engagement and to supplement the ambassador we feel strongly that we really need to have all of our actors come together in the region from the private sector to the NGO community the IT community obviously host country governments because this has to be a whole of society strategy and the intel community and others in order to address address the underlying issues and the drivers whether they're the push factors or the pull factors and we would propose that obviously this not be hosted by the United States and not be in the United States but really be driven by the region Let me say a few words now on behalf of the people of the great state of New York and specifically my colleagues on Wall Street because I think that we've reached a really critical moment constructive steps okay We have a situation right now where large long-term asset holders control 40 trillion dollars around the world they are too big to hide from market volatility and what that means is they have a vested interest in addressing the root causes of the challenges that we are speaking about today and we've gained this out financially this is not just mumbo jumbo and cliches there are hard numbers that go along with this so what we are calling on large asset holders pension funds, endowments and the sovereign wealth funds from the countries represented around this table to do is to dedicate one percent of their total holdings to investments in social impact investments in development finance investments in civil society that are going to help address the root causes of this volatility and to leverage those investments in ways that will incentivize good governance in countries in the region and if we do that we'll find that it's not only going to make a much better world it also is going to be good for business Senator, if I could Wait, wait, wait I don't want to go too far down this I'm listening to you talk I wonder how much money you leave under your pillow when you lose a tooth because there's no way that Wall Street is giving one percent of its money to do that okay, particularly in a low return environment and I want to deal with constructive solutions that can lead us towards progress Manal as a former general under Havas and Assad I was really interested I was really dedicated to following him but Bashar is no Havas and after taking great risk to myself and seeing the barrel bombings and what's happening to the people and the international community's response of humanitarian aid which is like volume and numbing of people I've decided to defect I am thankful to the EU for offering me asylum in a place Saudi Arabia for your packages and to the U.S. for the intelligence and since I have now defected I feel that I must share a very important strategy that we had when I was working under Bashar Assad's regime that's you and that is to distract the international community to make everyone focus on the manifestation of the clash of civilizations it is a technique it is a strategy by Assad that everyone continues to fall under and continues to do and it is something that concerns me as I see my people dying as the strategy continues to work and so the counter strategy is and the counter strategy is deal directly with the Assad regime with the support from the EU and the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that I've had we the Syrians high military officials have formed an opposition that's willing to fight directly it is the injustice it's the humiliation under these dictatorships that has led people from all over the world to flee and to join the cause it is nothing to do with the Islamic rhetoric that you guys are discussing you do not have to send your soldiers in support us train and equip us we will do the primary fighting we will take care and restore stability to the region okay good luck I'm pardoning good I'm searching for concrete solutions here and and by the way you know there is a continuum we're talking a little bit about a continuum here you know the police go and meet with Islamic organizations they talk about they identify people who might be persuaded not to go they do what they can to carve them off there are others who might go the intelligence community and the police identify them they try to keep them from going they use the IT community to help identify them you know these are constructive steps we need to take identify elsewhere along the continuum where constructive steps can be taken okay as a Muslim living in these poor suburbs in different European countries the first thing first reaction when an incident of this kind happen is fair if I am a Muslim and I belong to Islam it doesn't mean that I wear the hijab it doesn't mean that I dress like a Salafi my first reaction will be oh I'm gonna be in trouble if people see me as a Muslim because the limp will be you express your Islam then you are terrorist what is expected from my point of view as a Muslim citizen is a political discourse and also an implementation of law that can debunk this kind of continuous narrative and it requires courage from the constituency in Europe because the association of Islam and terrorism is not anymore an extreme right discourse I see it everywhere in all my representative in different national context so how do we do that this is a clear step in terms of communication and rhetoric doesn't cost a lot of money it requires a lot of political courage I'm not finished with it I want to add one more thing the ideal thing is I was very interested by the law enforcement in Denmark but locally we are not the only one on the ground why are we turning to Muslims only to deal with issues of security the security of the local community is a concern of everybody if we talk about local stability where indeed the question of ISIS can stop we have to encompass many more actors than the Muslim ones and just one thing Mr. Law enforcement the mosques and the clerics are really not the place to stop in my family I have a young cousin he never goes to mosque he doesn't even know within his local community but he knows very much about the strategy of ISIS in Iraq how do you reach him through the mosque and the Imam of the mosque okay yeah and as a millennial I just want to add as we think about what's happening in Italy and we look at things that have been happening over the past several years efforts of people like Imam Pallavaccini or Yalla Italia organic Italian Muslim organizations that have not been scaled up I would say that the kind of thing that's happened at this university is just the beginning of the kind of movement that's going to happen with my peers around Europe so I want to echo what Jocelyn said about going super local and going to what communities of Muslims and non-Muslims have to do on their own and non-Muslims have to do on the ground but talent scouting and finding the local voices and make a difference for my generation okay yes that's an extremely articulate millennial by the way I think we're encouraged by stepping up of security responses and obviously the UAE was ready to cooperate over issues of intelligence sharing and counter-terrorism but I think there is a problem when we talk about theology there is a problem when we talk about the mosque I know some people here may disagree but a lot of the people who are being persuaded by ISIS's message are finding Islamic voices from the region to be more genuine or more credible the UAE has plenty of initiatives that work on countering violent extremism promoting moderate Islam and we propose to cooperate with European governments with local communities in Europe linking up moderate Muslim clerics in Europe with moderate Muslim clerics and institutions in the region to scale up that kind of work because I think it would go a long way into dissuading people from joining such groups and you're using modern technologies to do that? I think, you know, moderate he's got his hand up here the whole time I'm just trying to connect it over it seems to me if you're trying to build networks of voices of a certain type and make it easier for moderate theologians to connect to each other there are tech-powered solutions to help do that I mean sure there are tech-powered solutions but you need people to engage I think personally inside these communities as well exactly but see I was just setting up a segue here to Sasha so yeah go ahead sure so first of all let me say it's great to see all of the Google's on twitbooksoft.com users here and I say that because all of you every single one of you is in fact a user of our platform and to me that really reminds us of the power of these kinds of open systems for communication and debate and therefore we believe it's fundamentally important to keep this conduit of information flow open for our users to the global media and for everyone on the planet and we're going to reiterate the importance of maintaining this open and uncensored series of systems that make up the Google's on twitbooksoft.com platform now the UN is an elitist political antiquated 20th century bureaucracy but we and since you've all signed the NDA included in our acceptable use policy I can share this with you are creating the UN 2.0 platform which you all are a part of as a Google's on twitbooksoft.com user so we would encourage the use of this new platform for a 21st century debate over these issues so what you're advocating is the existence of the internet I think we need to be a little more specific in our constructive suggestions here yes just I want to go back to the example up here and throw this on its head a little bit what we're looking at here is the violation of the human rights of students to peacefully protest to assemble to be free of arbitrary arrest to be free of excessive force used by the by the government by the police against them specifically because there are Muslim students protesting that's a real problem that's a European problem that's not a problem of the Muslim community that's a problem of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Europe so I think we need to all be clear about that we've seen statistics that 50 percent 53 percent of people in some of these countries are anti-Muslim that includes the government so we got to get real about that ethnic profiling is not okay the government needs to say that that the government needs to make sure that's not happening arbitrary arrests are not okay treating an entire community as suspicious and talking about Muslims in shorthand for for extremism is not okay so as advocacy organizations in Europe we want to see European leaders US leaders but in this case European leaders stand up and actually act in ways that are consistent with the human rights of Muslims and other minority communities that are sort of seen as somehow more likely to be extremists in those countries also every time European countries turn boats back with refugees in them from Syria and neighboring countries they are telling people from those countries they're they're telling them we don't care it's another clear demonstration of indifference to their plight okay very very quickly we've just got a very limited time here so we're going to represent the media and media are nothing if not constructive we had crowds around us which could lead you to conclude the media was nothing but we'll we'll zero back in on it just like everybody's sort of 30 seconds each yeah we had crowds around us of different elements around this table trying to persuade us to project their particular views and their particular solutions and their particular ideas and we think that one of the services that we can do is first of all explain of what is going on the politics behind the UN Security Council resolutions and the decisions and the inaction but then also raise the heat on the policy makers and on people on the ground and those involved in coming up with alternatives coming up with some kind of solutions and really investigating to see how hard did they really try to reach a solution at the UN Security Council or were they withholding some potential bargaining chips because there were other considerations at play and at the same time we're also considering overtures from the UN to to write more about the humanitarian actions fine but what really counts is the origin of the problem at hand and how can we bring that to light and turn up the heat very quickly as enlightened international police advisors we just like to say how much your comments human rights activists how that resonates with us and how we understand that if we don't approach this with the balance of security and rights we will not be successful and I think this is what takes us back to the Danish model of a good example of how their outreach to the communities is not just about reaching out to the mosques and the Muslim communities okay next at the end go ahead these students understand the root cause and origin of this problem is in fact the criminal Assad regime and the criminal elements that support it we call upon the international community to support us the revolutionaries from the people who have been with the people since the beginning of this conflict and not making a decision to leave from the regime as a matter of expediency we have been with the righteous revolution from the beginning okay excellent and I'm all for the role playing but we've only got a couple of minutes here so if you don't have a constructive solution I don't want to hear from you okay I would just like to from the Iranian perspective to introduce what Iran has done in the past when they were engaging with their Western European partners in terms of religious dialogue not just amongst Muslims but I think it's important that we expand that as you've mentioned the European problem with the Islamic identity it's a major problem the anti-Islamic sentiments are a major pediment to you know collaboration and coexistence so Iran suggests like the past to create a working group that engages with the European partners within the EU with Iran and other Islamic nations and I invite the UAE and Saudi Arabia to play a part in this and Turkey to bring a more collective and expansive view of Islam to the European continent okay yeah the European Union would like to stress that we are an organization founded on peace on democracy on human rights and the rule of law and we are working and we would like to work more closely with our national states to reiterate the importance of human rights and the rule of law especially with the various institutions currently being challenged we would therefore like to reiterate our invitation to local communities to work with Lady Aston and others in order to promote dialogue both at a religious and political level and also to work and share best practices with internet with local law enforcement just addressing the business interests from Tunisia actually we currently have a public-private partnership draft law in parliament and we welcome your feedback on how to improve the provisions we had an investment and entrepreneurship conference back in March we welcome your business and in terms of this scenario here Tunisia has a very large diasporic community in Europe we'd like to enhance dialogue with those communities and build social, cultural and business ties with those communities and we think this will not only help to harness the potential of the Muslim minority and tackle marginalization in Europe both perceived and real but it will also indirectly help to create opportunities in Tunisia for which the EU has expressed support thank you okay thank you very much now we've made little baby steps forward here in terms of some small constructive steps that might be taken in response to this police outreach outreach to local Muslim groups creating dialogue identifying some bad actors working with the private sector to identify them working with the tech community to spread the message trying to spread a message successfully more moderate message countering negative feelings towards the Muslim community also trying to take steps to counter negative feelings here I have to say just as an objective listener to all of this it sounds a little bit you'll forgive the expression social workie to me it sounds a little bit nice friendly you know let's do all the stuff that isn't you know doesn't get dirt underneath our fingernails all of the stuff is good I'm not saying it's bad but I do think there are issues of bad actors trying to cross borders bad actors trying to do certain things there are strong negative forces here that have to be addressed at the same time as providing positive forces and so as we go through the future stages of this thing just to ask yourself the question what are we doing with regard to the really bad actor what are you know what else ought we to be doing and I think you know some of the US response here in terms of well we've got to take stronger action in Syria we've got to do something as Nancy referred to at the beginning to show that we are going to take action and people aren't going to keep dying this ties to Manal's suggestion you know of rethinking other kinds of alliances there we need to think of both what the the positive steps that can be taken here and the positive cooperation but also the strong steps to counteract these negative forces and we will do that in the in this next round the next slide is the following that needless to say as you would do you look at what happens in Bologna and a big counter propaganda campaign has launched in response to the Bologna raid and the question here is now what are the counter strategies to dealing with recruitment and I deal with that everything they're doing a propaganda campaign they're going to try and attract people from these communities both in the EU and throughout the region they're going to try to bring them together into Syria and Iraq into the Daesh community there but they're going to try to bring them across Turkish borders so there are issues that have to do with borders there they're going to try to you know find funding for them they're going to try to do other kinds of things that might be interdicted so think about all of that as you're thinking of this and the last thing that I would say is as we're getting into this last round of this first session we know what your roles are we know what your politics are it's fun to play the roles but if we can because we have a limited amount of time try to focus on the concrete solutions without sort of rehashing or resetting exactly who you are we know who you are focus on the solutions this time I'd like you just take five to seven minutes to talk among yourselves closer to five and then we're going to reconvene so five minutes we'll reconvene hey folks we're not beginning lunch at this particular moment that begins after this section so if you go back to your seats we'll finish the session and then we will have lunch after that okay so if everybody could return to their seats can I encourage everybody to do that so that we can start again I don't think that's nothing I think the Bretton was too no we're mobilizing the UAE among others have been very interested in leveraging their solar power but you're not going to go and take one percent of assets and apply them to CSR stuff it goes to a volatility flag I can give you chapter and verse okay well let's talk about it afterwards I'd be interested okay we're we're about to begin if you if you return to your seats please okay all right even if not everybody is here we're going to start again nice to meet you if you we're gonna okay so ladies and gentlemen let's let's let's resume here for this next the final portion of this first scenario again focusing in on this issue of how do you deal with these recruitment efforts and they manifest you know there are a lot of choices and not all of the choices have been talked about here and so it's useful to get an idea of some of the other choices and and by the way you know Western countries you know U.S. takes choices in the context of U.S. standards other countries take choices in the context of their own standards we have to realize we're dealing with an international response and I'd like to get a full sense of what the international options and how different parts of the community will respond and since Ambassador Alatiba is here perhaps you can talk a little bit about how the UAE has dealt with some of these things yeah we take a relatively robust approach to prevention we have as many of you know a center for countering violent extremism called the Hedaya Center and it's been represented here several times in previous peace games and that is a long-term solution to presenting the alternative narrative to extremism however there's also a prevention model and I was mentioning to David earlier that and I know this will be judged as harsh and drastic by by the by the West but we had a case recently where a UAE student studying here in the US started acting different started following some suspicious Twitter feeds and so on so one of his colleagues came to us and informed us he said hey this guy looks like he's heading over to Turkey to go through Syria and I just wanted to bring it to your attention so we informed our friends in Abu Dhabi they instructed us to send someone from the embassy to go over there take his passport away from him and as soon as he finished with his exams that we were to put him on a plane to Abu Dhabi directly where he is going to be picked up by the authorities as soon as he lands now yes is that harsh yes is it a little overbearing yes but that's one person who's not going to Syria to fight with ISIS that's one person who's not going to be on the battlefield and between the government and his family I think the goal is ultimately to rehabilitate him and make sure that he understands it's not a good idea to go but that's one form of prevention and it has to be a part of the package along with presenting a better narrative for why there are good alternatives to ISIS now I don't I can't speak for other countries but we take this threat of extremism very seriously we have since prior to 9-11 and I think that's why the number of Emiratis fighting with ISIS today are somewhere between 40 and 50 so that's that's how we approach it okay I look if I can I turn to you Georgia for a second because Steve mentioned at the beginning a distinction that you flagged between countering violent extremism and I think the term was preventing preventing extremist violence and I was wondering if you could and I may have that wrong but I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the distinction because they're both components of what we're talking about here I think that when we talk about prevention in the context of countering violent extremism we use it differently than was just represented when we're talking about preventing violent extremism we're talking about answering the question why does somebody engage in the first place it's about addressing the root causes of why they become engaged whereas the response right there was a tactical response and for every student who's going to respond to something on Twitter there'll be another one whereas the preventative response is a more strategic tactical response that has to do with understanding the reasons people are going in the first place and addressing those larger structural reasons so a preventative policing model for example would be having the police build strong relationships in a community with parents with religious leaders with schools with teachers so that they're on the forefront ahead of the curve not just responding to people who've already passed some sort of criminal threshold who already present a threat of radicalization okay no it's very helpful and one of the reasons I bring up both is there's a spectrum of actions to take and I think part of our goal here is to identify the things that are along the spectrum and then to say every decision that every government and every company makes is an asset allocation decision and essentially where do you apply the assets to get the most likely positive return so I'm going to turn to Tom and then I'm going to turn to the rest of you for your constructive responses to what we have here thank you we may be an antiquated 20th century organization but we do have a very good global counter-terrorism strategy that is organized around four pillars and is designed to take a multi-sectoral approach to addressing not just terrorism but also extremism and it's organized around four things that we've talked about we've talked about conditions conducive for root causes phrase we don't use in the UN for reasons that I'm never entirely clear on but it's the same thing we talk about enforcement harsh edge enforcement whether that is finance financial trafficking type stuff whether that is border security whether that is training effective interviewers all of these different things we do capacity building part of the big problem that we face is in the areas of the world we're talking about capacity is lacking that may not be true of Turkey but it's certainly true of Central Africa it's certainly true of Western Africa and it's certainly true of parts of the Middle East so building capacity finding funding to go out and train effective law enforcement and effective military is a very important part of the program as well and then finally for us a very huge part is the resilience of rights and the rule of law you know when one looks at these narratives again and again and again it is a narrative about abuse of rights it is a narrative about corruption it is a narrative about state failure so building and reinforcing these values is a very important part of the response so I as the UN would encourage member states to look at that strategy implement that strategy it was passed as a unanimous resolution of the general assembly I mean that's pretty powerful when you stop to think about it it gives you a fantastic roadmap to a comprehensive response and if you can look up from Twitter or all these fantastic 21st century devices for a moment you'll see that there's actually quite a lot to be said for this somewhat staid old fashioned approach would you say that the greatest inadequacy of the response therefore is its adoption or is there more than we because clearly extremism is spreading right so what we've done thus far is actually not stopping its spread because we've done it and it's not stopping it so the question is what do we need to do and that's you know it's very overwhelming for people right I mean we're talking about four different pillars lots of different types of actions one of the things we started doing at the UN is taking it down a notch and moving away from a comprehensive international response which we obviously support and promote to look at regional responses so actually my job within the UN is developing regional counter-terrorism strategies within existing organs organs like say SADEC in southern Africa or you know co-incentral Africa we've already got a regional counter-terrorism strategy in central Asia it's the same strategy but it's working with local government so they can adopt it locally okay so we're going to kind of get into the lightning round of constructive responses here that we haven't touched upon yet Dan you've been very patient hit the microphone so we can hear in the spirit of getting beyond social work solutions from Turkey's perspective we've been talking about the symptom and not the cause and the cause or one of the central causes is the government in Damascus and it's continued the government in Damascus in fact promoted Daesh as an organization to justify its attack on the opposition its unlawful and inhumane attack the humanitarian solution with an inhuman government will not work therefore if the international community expects Turkey to do what it needs ultimately to do and that is shut down the border so there is no flow of international recruits into Syria we're going to need a much more robust American policy and we've been conferring about just such a policy a new form of cooperation and a new deal as it were between the United States and Turkey that would do just that would shut down the capacity of these recruits to go into Syria and fight this war which of course Assad has promoted so I'll hand it over to my colleague Ambassador Jeffrey to outline the elements of this policy if possible under NATO but otherwise bilaterally after the this is important after the Turkish elections on Saturday will announce a joint operation to seal the border with a very large deployment of Turkish troops again with American and possibly NATO support in return for which or as that begins to stand up US support for the Turkish no-fly zone safe zone in a range of cities and towns stretching from the Turkish border to areas just short of Aleppo over a two month period and we are convinced that this will do two things one it is will more effectively than almost anything else limit the ability of people to get whether they want it or not to get to Syria to fight with ISIS secondly it will begin to the long road towards finding a solution to the Assad regime you know in some respects as you listen whether you think that's practical it's going to happen in the near term or not shutting down that border is clearly one of the most important steps you can take in some respects it's useful to think of all of this as a supply chain problem you know and that there is you know there are origins and then there's a supply chain and you want to get it at the point of origin if you can't then you want to get it at the pressure points within the supply chain and that's one of them and so that you know I mean whether that one can happen or not clearly if one could take steps to close that border that would be a gigantic step forward in dealing at least with the problems of Daesh yes you know we've had this whole discussion and we haven't talked about the root of the ideology of ISIS and we're talking about countering narrative we haven't talked about Wahhabism we haven't talked about the delegitimization and dehumanization of people we just had ISIS Daesh attacks we're talking about Syria and our country we're facing it but so Saudi Arabia they're not concerned they had attacks on their Shia community and the same clerics inside Saudi Arabia have been calling the Shia Rawafid Mahjus fire worshipers Safawien and they're not saying anything about this so we're talking about countering a narrative and from our perspective in Syria and yet we're enabling supporting and not talking about the other groups or wider society saying that these people do not have worth as human beings so how are we countering the narrative I would ask everybody around this table who's speaking about that from their respective countries and we can crack down on those other accounts and clerics as well Ravi great first of all to the US and Turkey I hope if they close the borders they don't close the borders for humanitarian assistance as well as refugees crossing into Turkey because that will create more enemies than necessary second we need to focus on reducing conditions conducive to recruitment and that includes increasing activities in recruitment countries and that's essential services be it medical or food or humanitarian assistance and Libya and Tunisia and some of those communities focusing on education as well as focusing on creating economic opportunities in order for people not to be easily recruited and obviously we'll need the support of our donors we're working with the UN and the business community as well by the way you know in that is there's another implicit point which is this is a global problem but you can't actually think globally you have to act locally you've got to pick places and we have a list of places that supply a lot more foreign fighters than others and so you have to focus on those places those conditions those supply chains how they get from there to the battlefield as well as focusing on the conditions in the battlefield and so I think prioritizing in the in that regard is a is a constructive suggestion yes well as media we don't do counter strategies we don't do propaganda or counter propaganda some people think we do propaganda or should be doing counter propaganda but what do you recommend but in our job is to to report on on the strategies that have worked and what what have not I think what the media can also do is to really push this issue to the center of public discourse without taking on the role of without doing advocacy and try to strike the right balance between reporting what's happening and promoting ISIS propaganda becoming a propaganda tool for ISIS so that's that's the tricky thing and trying to put more resources into into reporting and and pushing this to the forefront of public discourse okay can we do and we would do that by forming a consortium of 10 news organizations with a particular dedication to reporting about this issue specifically in a comprehensive way and looking globally including news organizations on the ground in the affected zones constructive just we've got five minutes so if you if you don't have a constructive specific idea then save the comment for later yes some of my friends find the videos really appealing I do too but this is millennial you this is millennial you yes I'm playing my role oh I hope but what I would find really appealing is to hear the stories of formers people that went and came back and then tell me what really is going on so what I'd really like the communities to do is to help fund films online and also opportunities offline and on the radio that can tell me the stories of the real people that have gone that will help me understand what the journey to ISIS would be by the way you know a very powerful idea in the context we talk about foreign fighters we talk about the return and the threat but a lot of them are returning extremely disaffected and having seen the horrible stuff and so you can harness that into an alternative narrative very briefly briefly internationally and I would like to pick up on the previous comment on political Islam is not the monopoly of group like ISIS and Al Qaeda it has been diffused by some friends of the West we mentioned Saudi Arabia we can mention a lot so as a even secular state that are not up to protecting religious freedom so what do we do with that is the West equipped to work with that the ideology of intolerance start a lot in national context if we look at how kids are taught about their religion in all the even so-called friend of the West what do we find so is there any way that this can be done one way in my opinion is to work with clerics and religious actors that are not paid by the state they exist and they are network for that and they have to find a voice internationally that can counter the neo Salafi voice okay specific concrete suggestions Simon Saudi Arabia hasn't been saying a lot they are a big voice we are the leader of Islam and we've got the money to back it with some of that money is we will now be investing in Europe in order to set up cultural centers so that Muslims in Europe true Islam be distracted by the callings of Daesh etc where the existing this is not new okay okay well well let's just keep moving around the table quickly and constructive please yeah it's a joint statement from the local Sunni and local insurgent groups two points rapidly one is I mean there was a mention of the Turks and Americans sitting the border of course we are our best place to do this on the other side of the border and also we can make the experience as I mean this is off the record but quite unpleasant for foreign fighters in order to deter the most risk-averse people in the future and also we're happy to contribute to a media campaign to encourage people who sympathize with our struggle to stay home just a reaction to something that was said by law enforcement people I don't think it's productive to tell people who are in in sense about what's happening is that they should do necessarily humanitarian work I mean they should also be free to do advocacy I mean that's what happened in Italy you know protesting against western or western policies it's not I mean because humanitarians have been a bit like you're asking them to to sit idly by and just help the people who suffer but they should be able to act as well politically in western societies in our interest okay briefly yes Iran believes that Saudi Arabia can do a great deal more to foster tolerance and to end the sectarian conflict we don't think opening cultural centers in Europe is is an answer to the problem it'll probably just make things worse we believe that the Saudi government should show more tolerance to the Shia within its own country stop bombing Yemen in a useless civil war oh okay okay okay and agree to a summit meeting with the leaders of Iran to discuss practical solutions to the problems that are at the root cause of this radicalization okay strongly encourage people not to speak in press releases we've already read Catherine trying to avoid press releases we think one of the great things about the European Union and Europe and this is not a press release is actually its diversity of Muslim voices and actually the ways in which we can foster non sectarian violence within Europe is really really important and getting the diverse Muslim communities together is something the European Union can do and can fund and I think that's a really practical way forward to help build across Muslim communities so that that then can reach across our borders as well Slamo we think that focusing on the last stage of the movement of recruits to Syria the border between Turkey and Syria is a mistake to close a long border in an unfavorable terrain is mission impossible one have to look at the route okay the stipulate that and look for chalk points like okay the airports in the entry to Turkey which are few and controllable so you need better border control there and not in the border with Syria okay can very construct it very quickly yep two quick things one immediate which is major international investments in helping us since this is all done on the Google's on twitbooksoff.com platform helping us curate identify and create alternative communities for this kind of content number one so funding for us number two international norms so that we are not in the position of being pulled in a thousand different directions by this hodgepodge of different rules and regulations about acceptable content on a case by case basis and a state by state basis that all of you who are states need to get together and come up with what are the rules of the road for our platform okay last last comment just a point on the propaganda you're a little bit closer to Mike sorry just a point on the propaganda I mean on this table is represented between 70 percent of the producers are consumers of media in the region Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE and I think that there is a role for these countries to play and the media organizations they own and control in creating a counter propaganda campaign explicitly countering the propaganda not narrative not social narrative but just the propaganda on joining the fight in Syria on joining ISIS and I think there is a role to be played and I think it's under exploited very very interesting very constructive have we solved all the problems that are dressed with recruitment here no have we identified some pathways and some priorities yes has it been constructive will we shown some progress yes before we wrap it up I'd like to turn to you either of you and ask if you have any last comments on this opening session pick it up later pick it up later so this is what's going to happen we are going to go we have in the way the schedule works now is 1215 to 1pm and by that I mean now to 1pm we're going to you have a buffet lunch break in there there's an opportunity to sit down relax have a sandwich and then at 1pm please because we will end precisely at 515 one way or another if not before 1pm come back here we have a framing session which is a chance to just get out other ideas that you may have that you've hit upon over lunch and so forth in which we're going to talk about offering alternatives to today's insurgent myths and realities about what works want to really break down some of what's been discussed here and then tea up the afternoon session which is going to be combating contagion which is the other side which is what happens when foreign fighters either go to other conflicts or go back home and what can be done along the way and then we've got a concluding session in which we're going to talk about shaping strategies and we're lucky to have joining us for that concluding session by the way Greg Treverton who is the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council which is the forward-looking part of the Directorate of National Intelligence here and Graham Allison of Harvard University who is a well-known strategist who thinks about these things and has got a lot to contribute and is beginning to work with us in some aspects of peace game and so we'll come to some good conclusions we'll draw the themes together in that session but we clearly won't get there if we don't get to lunch now so have a good lunch thank you for a great morning and we'll see you at one o'clock who's that? Yeah, that's what we've got so much to select scientific we have a cheap critical all right ladies and gentlemen if you would take your seats all right in order to start off this lunch and discussion I think the best thing to do would be to turn to Nancy for a little bit of thoughts on how the morning went and what we can do to ensure that the afternoon goes even better so let me turn to you Nancy great thank you hope everyone had a good lunch I was impressed with the amount of energetic conversation that was going on and the number of solutions that seemed to be surfacing in the lunchtime conversation and I also just wanted to note earlier David said that we were trending on Twitter for DC tweets and I wanted to note that a number of our players are playing the game online as well and I understand that Viola on the media team is being lobbied by all numbers from Iran to the UN all kinds of players who want her to represent their views Minaal tweeted early on that she was going to possibly defect and online arranged to deal with the EU if we just want to see some of the productive ways that Twitter can be here and I understand also that one of our foreign policy colleagues was retweeted by somebody who is apparently an actual ISIS supporter Tom asked him what he thought of the peace game but we haven't heard that response yet Thank you for that endorsement As some of you may have read number of copies foreign policy were actually found in Osama bin Laden's library but they stopped once we went online so we assumed thereafter he was just going to foreignpolicy.com Afterwards afterward exactly so you know I think what was very instructive about this morning is you know everybody did a very faithful rendering of their roles and what we saw in especially the early part of the morning was a fair amount of both inaction and finger pointing which reflected I think a lot of the reality that we've all been living within in for the last five years there was also I would argue evidence of action or latent action especially by non-state actors where they're in the absence of something more comprehensive and more coming out of the UN and concerted state action we did see the police at a community level some of the IT communities some of our local communities already moving forward and doing things and latent action in terms of the IT community the business community asking to be brought into the solutions so there are definitely there's there's additional capacity to harness there was also towards the end of the session some ideas at David's urging that were put down that we didn't have a chance to go into deeper exploration of you know for example thank you USG for coming up with some innovative ideas like the well also the no fly zone that you suggested towards the end you know ideas that have been floated but we weren't able to get into more detail on them but above all it seemed to really reflect the complexity of having these macro level conversations when we were telling with so many so many affected countries and regions and the challenge is bringing it down to some evidence-based approach of what works when we're trying to deal with particular aspects of this problem I think as we go forward into the afternoon session it would be a useful evolution if people could think about playing their best selves if if you in your roles were able to find your interest in finding a solution and working constructively with everyone else at the table if as if that wonderful constructive world existed but for the purpose of finding solutions that really intersect with a lot of the interests around the table to push ourselves to what might move us forward and I want to just especially as we move into the next session underscore a couple of of the points that are very relevant from the previous session into the next and that is this whole issue of really focusing on not just the tactics but also the strategy and Georgia spoke earlier about staying attuned to the motives what is it that people are searching for when they join and it's not it's not only the ideology but it's the very specific motivations of individuals as they as they move towards these approaches and as we look at the afternoon scenarios there are that as a basis really under undergirds a lot of what of the solution set that we're seeking for so with that David let me turn it over to you and get us started on the afternoon okay let me pick up on it actually just re quoting something Nancy said to me a minute ago which is that the best way to make the most productive use of a session like this is to understand the outer limits of constructive possibilities you know and but you have to take all of those words you know we we have to understand what the limits are to what's possible because we don't want to deal with what's not possible but we do want to be constructive and we know the roles now clearly those of you playing al-qaeda and Daesh you know the objective here is for you to catalyze some of this action and we don't expect you to grow halos overnight um but more broadly we do want to look at what's possible within the parameters of of you know your various political economic geographic and other kinds of constraints and having said that we thought it would be useful at this point to stop and have a bit of a discussion about what works both in terms of the myths of what works um uh you know well we'll just put out a nice counter narrative and everything will be fine and the reality of what works the nuts and bolts of what actually helps counter violent extremism either for the purposes of this discussion on the recruitment side or on the containment of the threat side which touches upon what we'll be discussing in the next scenario which has to do with foreign fighters and their their either return home or or their movement to other kinds of conflicts and a few folks have have been talked to in advance and have agreed to frame some of these ideas in terms of myths and realities of what works and let me turn to you Farah to kick that off and each of them will speak for three to five minutes and then we'll open up the discussion some of you may have some thoughts from this morning from lunch other things you'd like to float out there and so make this a kind of a constructive working group session Farah thank you very much and I just want to underscore that I'm playing me I am me as I'm speaking um so one of the the biggest myths that we have in dealing with CVE is really that we can't beat this and that is in my view a real stumbling block and I don't mean to be cute about it but it really prevents us from being imaginative in terms of what's coming down the pike the reality is is that we actually over the course of the last years since 9-11 have pilot tested a wide variety of things online and offline that we know can work so my my frame in all of this is that the solutions are available and they are affordable I know firsthand that the role of governments are obviously very complex in this whole matter but the thing that the U.S. government has shown us that we can do is to be the convener and the facilitator and the intellectual partner with the ideas that we hear on the ground in my view that is the the greatest strength of the United States government and it has been demonstrated in the pilot initiatives that we have seen both in the Bush administration and in the Obama administration so what are very specific things that we can do that will work because they're working at a very micro level and if they were scaled up in a bigger way and mobilized so that the machinery exists to build the capacity for these programs we will see an actual change the first is a very structural one this was hit upon both last night and today in various ways as we think about the strategy for CVE we have only looked at a hard power component to this we do not have the capacity and we have not built the capacity to both build a hard power and a soft power strategy that is integrated and not just integrated but given the money and the resources and here's the most important part the respect for most of the interagency when you talk about soft power CVE, ideology the war of ideas eyes glaze over nobody wants to hear that part of the conversation the first part of how we fix this and beat this is to be able to integrate those strategies in a compelling and real way the second thing is a very obvious one for this international group that's sitting here around the table today this issue is not about a region this is about a demographic the vulnerable demographic to the ideology of the extremists that we're talking about whether it's AQ whether it's ISIS Boko Al-Shabaab or other affiliated groups is the demographic of Muslim millennials and that demographic because they are millennials is global we must look at how that is taking place and rooting in the experience of Muslim millennials across the planet so the way we integrate the strategy and how we do this has got to be a global one what is happening in Mauritania and in Zanzibar and Hajikistan and in Norway is connected and we need to act like it is the other the third thing is that we need to understand very importantly that in terms of the kind of programs that we put money towards we've looked at players on the ground in a very local way now we've heard the word local being used today in a wide variety of ways let me be very specific I mean neighborhood to neighborhood I do not mean country to country nor do I mean city to city I literally mean neighborhood to neighborhood because the local players and the impact for young Muslim millennials in these particular community shifts and we don't have the time to get into the deep on that but it is important that we think at a very, very granular level toward that end some of the initiatives that have been seeded that can be scaled up I'll give you a very good example that one that is housed here at USIP Generation Change is a network of over 600 young Muslims around the world with 30 chapters from the Camaros to Ireland to Malaysia young people who are change makers who want to push back against the extremist narratives what happens when you catalyze a movement of young people that is my point we need to be thinking about how to catalyze the millennials who want to make a difference for their own future and in my view we have not even tried yet this brings me to my final point we need to stop talking about this as if we're limited we are not limited we have innovation and inspiration in a wide variety of ways we haven't even tried to do this in the way we need to what I would say in terms of how we we can do this and what the reality is on the ground is if we stop talking about all the obstacles and understand that some of the really inventive and experiential experiences for countries all over the world if they were mobilized and scaled up in a coordinated way meaning all day every day that's what I mean by coordinated not government telling people what to do and unleash and let go and allow those organic things to start blossoming we will see an absolute shift in the way millennials think about what they're doing and the reason I know that is because we have pilot tested some of these things so when I think about in my three minutes when I think about the myths and the realities again it is really about what we have seen over 13 and a half years what we know we can do and what needs to be done as we go forward this is not about ISIS this is about an ideology that is seeping into Muslim millennials all over the world and the numbers tell the story which is why if we do not shift the way we think about what is possible we will be doing this kind of thing for years to come can I ask you a follow-up question when you say we must think of them as millennials that seems very smart but and as clearly true I think but maybe it would be helpful to everybody if you would clarify a little bit of by what you mean in the sense of what is different about a Muslim millennial than another Muslim okay what what what where does that provide an opportunity or a challenge so Frank as I have experienced firsthand in more than 80 countries around the world talking to young Muslims under the age of 30 there's something very specific that is happening to this generation that has not happened to their parents generation or their or their grandparents generation every young person you heard the term terminology around here in terms of crisis of identity and you can say anybody any young teenager has a crisis of identity but there hasn't been the kind of machinery all day every day online and offline that is forcing itself upon a demographic that is asking themselves in a post 9-11 world what is the difference between culture and religion how can I be modern and Muslim what does it mean to be Muslim on the planet today questions like this that are speaking directly to who they are when I see that pattern happen in more than 80 countries around the world with this demographic the data points are super clear to me and I see the same kind of patterns that happen because Frank they are digital natives and with a swish of their finger they can connect ideas around the world it doesn't matter if I was in the jungles of Cambodia it doesn't matter if I was in Zanzibar it doesn't matter if I was in the UK these millennials are asking the same kinds of questions and they're going yes in some places to shake Google to get answers but in others they're going to local people in an offline space to tell them their own peers to tell them how they need to belong and until we understand that particular thing that's happening to these millennials we will not be able to get and talent scout and find the right kind of voices that can speak directly to them okay very very helpful so again we've got a couple of other folks who've offered to speak about this and I'm going to turn to them in a second but I do want all of you to be thinking about what are the myths what are the realities about what works so you can contribute not in your role but from your own personal experience anything that might either debunk a myth or offer us an example of something that may work and let me turn now to Jurgen because you have had a lot of hands on experience in developing what you've done in Denmark maybe you could talk to us about some of what works thank you I'll try to do that and tell you a little about the experience that I have from my police district just following up on this morning discussions it was said that what we talked about was a soft response it was nice and gentle and so on well in a way perhaps but it's to quote the famous Swedish researcher in terrorism Magnus Ransom he said well the soft approach is in fact the hard approach because it's how it's hard to do and the hard approach legislation is in fact easy it's easy to pass a law but who knows if it works so I think that's a good point but to make it quite clear we have of course legislation we have laws against terrorism against participating in terrorist activities and funding terrorist activities and we if we have reason to believe that some of these guys are violating this legislation or other legislation they will of course be punished we'll prosecute investigate and prosecute and they'll be sentenced and no doubt about that but that doesn't exclude the fact that we also can work in a preventive way with preventive measures so this was in fact when what would be started what we began with in 2007 after the Madrid bombings after the London bombings we set ourselves and always we have to do something in order to prevent young people from becoming radicalized politically or religiously so we began by racing the awareness with police officers school teachers social workers youth club workers and so on race the awareness against this new phenomena and afterwards we well we we build a road as you can say as we went along so we found out well now these people might be concerned of what they've seen they have to report this concern to a place so we created locally a so-called info house where people could report their concern and these incidents these concerns were then assessed in this info house and we decided should we do should we do something about these specific concerns or not if we found oh this is this is normal juvenile behavior in search of finding yourself politically or religiously this is really something you have to be concerned about we invite the person and question in interview him offer him a cup of coffee at the police station he said oh we'll hurt something what is going on what's going on in your life and we have several occasions where we we are able to offer them mentorship and this has changed their minds they're still religious persons but not to an extent so that they we hope become violent extremists furthermore we have created family networks we found out that the families are just as concerned about the young people as we are so we want to include the families we want to empower the families they look at us for help so we find out we can work together so we have we have created these self-helping family network groups we offer them guidance from my psychologist how should they react when they see that their young kid is starting to behave differently what should they what should they talk about when he suddenly calls from Syria and say mom I'm not coming back what should what should their breath rig be and so we have been reaching out also to these to these families after we realized that a lot of young people from our district went to Syria we also found out that quite a number of them had been attending a specific Salafist mosque and been part of a use center there so this we went public with this information and we took contact to the mosque and to the use center and we have been continuing this dialogue and contact with these Muslim communities and what we can see is that the number of people leaving from our police district to Syria has decreased dramatically from 30 in 2012 to one in 13 and two in 14 it might also be because of some other causes I won't know but we believe that our outreach work has brought the answers to this problem and we have several examples of where we have succeeded in making young people change their minds and not to go to Syria before they before they left from our police district then we have a special program for the returnees we work in of course work within the the Danish legislation and you aren't allowed of course to join terrorist groups ISIS for example that's self-evident but it's not illegal in itself to go to to Syria so what can we do with people whom we know are coming back from Syria well if we have reason to believe that they've been joining a terrorist group so they'll be prosecuted but if we don't know and normally it's hard to get evidence from Syria well then the alternative is doing nothing so we we want to do something so we invite them into the police station again and assess the situation and see if we can help them being being integrated reintegrated into the society which is what most of them want so these are the some of the tools that we use and it's really I'd like to emphasize it once again it's it's it doesn't exclude enforcement so we enforce the laws but we also work within prevention area and prevention field and last point I should make it this stage is that because of our outreach work because of our contacts with families we've been able to build a trust between us and the families so when the young when the young guys come back from Syria very often either the young person in question or the families they contact us and say okay he's back could we could you do something could you perhaps help in any way Joergen if I could just ask a follow-on question you you talk about your approach seems to have a specificity to it that is important where you really track exactly who are we talking about where do they come from what moss do they go to what are their families about can you say a bit more about how that kind of specific evidence connects to what you do and what implications that might have for the broader dialogue well first of all the information that we get from about these these young people we get from frontline workers who are very close to these people so or from their families so so we get information as what were they before and what is what is happening to them and this is the information we get and then we make this assessment well is it something these information this is something that should worry us we have a possibility of getting in in in a dialogue with a psychologist who is part of this program and discussing this assessment this situation for this young people in question with with psychologists in order to to assess if we have to do something react on this information that we get okay if that answers your question yes so Masood has has offered to provide also some perspectives and then I will turn it to the rest of the group but Masood thank you I just wanted to make a couple of quick points here one on how the media approaches this this problem I think number one is understanding the prop the phenomenon of violent extremism and the the grasp that the media has on the issue and the connection that the violent extremism has with Islam that debate has not been really resolved in the media the prevailing narrative is that there is very little there is little connection between the two but I find this semantic debate that's going on over whether whether ISIS is an Islam Islamic or not the kind of pointless and petty when people when Muslims say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam what they're not saying that the ISIS members are not Muslim or that a lot of their beliefs are not through that in Islam but rather that the Islam that they subscribe to that they practice the beliefs and the practices that they have are not the beliefs and the practices that most modern Muslims believe in that's an important distinction to make over that in that debate of course ISIS is an Islamic extremist movement and a lot of their practices and beliefs are grounded in scripture in the Quran and Hadith they may be selective about their use of Islamic scripture in justifying their practices but they do make references to to the Quran and to the Hadith and traditional Islamic books so that that debate is in a way pointless is ISIS Islamic of course it is but it's not Islamic in the sense that most Muslims practice Islam that's number one and number two I think there's also a tendency in the media to construct archetypes of the so-called foreign fighter or the Islamic fighter and that can be quite counterproductive I think the reality is a lot more complex and nuanced than what the media likes to portray media has and it's easy to categorize the Islamic fighters into those who are alienated and marginalized and who are see themselves as victims of discrimination but when when you look at them closely I think each one has an individual story and that individual individual individualism of every fighter has to be recognized so stereotyping constructing archetypes of this of the foreign fighter can be quite counterproductive and not conducive to finding solutions I in discussions about dealing with the issue addressing the motivation of foreign fighters and the route I think the literature and discussions often focus on two things on the root causes of the problem social and economic and unemployment the marginalization and in western societies and in terms of solution one of the solutions that some countries have focused on as community outreach reaching out to to engaging family members community members and finding solutions and helping the returnies to reintegrate in society but one issue that's conspicuously absent from the debate is the impact of American and European foreign policy and their discourse and that is that features prominently and it's a major motivation for a lot of a lot of you know the young men and women who had to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq so when we when we discuss when we try to find solutions to to this phenomenon I think that this year has also that this year needs to be addressed as well with well let me let me test that for a second and then open it up to everybody else but which US foreign policy is it that's having an impact is it the super aggressive foreign policy that led to the invasion of Iraq or is it to the leaning backwards policy that led to doing nothing in Syria in other words you know I hear this often that it's American foreign policy that's somehow driving this but which one I think it's it's a combination of that and in South Asia it's the perception that the continued conflict driven largely by the US presence in that country has created has led to instability and has created conditions which which country Afghanistan and Pakistan for example in the case of Syria of course we talked about the inaction that's a major major seen as a major contributor to the appeal of Syria to to foreign fathers in the case of Iraq again you know the this withdrawal and the instability and the tens of thousands of deaths that have been caused we're all seen as counterproductive US policies and not to mention in across the Middle East and North Africa foreign US foreign policy that has traditionally supported dictatorial regimes and and oppressive governments are seen as as resulting in this in the appeal okay well thank you very much I look the the idea here is to bring together many perspectives and and we won't always agree on those perspectives I personally have a degree of skepticism on this front I think US foreign policy just like European foreign policy and regional foreign policies all contribute to this but they're all different and they change all the time and you know we've seen circumstances where the United States was aggressive and extremism grew we see in circumstances where the United States was more passive and extremism grew we've seen people employ hostile or aggressive foreign policies elsewhere and the reverse and so it's very difficult as we've proven throughout the course of today to break anything down into one component but you guys come from many many different experiences and have seen some things work or have been frustrated by myths that are out there like in my mind that one what are they what's work Georgie I'm going to give you back to just make one point of clarification that I think is going to be helpful for us as we move forward with this discussion especially if we want to get into specific examples of what works and what doesn't work and that is that we've been using the term counter-narrative in very different ways all morning and you know this whole field of CVE is beleaguered by jargon and conflated ideas but I think it's really important that we make a distinction between the sort of alternative narrative that Farah just described or that Mr. Hadley referenced this morning in talking about identity be it national be it cultural be it religious an alternative identity versus counter-messaging or counter-narrative in a tactical sense which is about poking holes in the doctrinal basis of a recruitment message or discrediting an extremist recruiter which is a very different level of counter-narrative and I think we need to be careful especially if we're going to start talking in it with evaluating sort of language about what works and what doesn't that we we're clear which kind of counter-narrative we're talking about when we make that point Do you think one works and one doesn't? I do my personal opinion is that the first works and the second doesn't I think that counter-narrative is a tactic if you're talking about poking holes in the doctrinal basis of an ideology is not going to work to de-radicalize someone because the reason that's only the how of how they're recruited it's not the why of why they're recruited Well I just on that point again I'm not trying to promote conflict here but really get clarification but your suggestion earlier about using the media I think you are getting more towards the second point of countering their assertions their propaganda so I just wondering if you have a response to that Oh no no I think I think that we have seen over the last three or four years this constant propaganda stream coming from groups like ISIS, AQ, etc. that has worked in convincing persuading young people in the region outside the region to join groups like that and I think I don't know if there has been an equivalent effort that is indigenous to the region led by people in the region to counter that propaganda you know we have extraordinary capacities when it comes to media and I don't think it's been used so I can't I don't know if we can say it wouldn't if I remember correctly you said you'd disagreed with the second what I I guess agree arguing for but I don't know if it's not worked an indigenous effort substantive sustainable indigenous effort to counter that propaganda by the but let me just throw one concept in here which is one that we bandied about back in the old days of the Clinton administration which was the meta message it's not the message that you speak it's the message that's actually heard you know the one that's in the middle and it's colored by a lot of things not just words so for example if it's from local publications if the source is different it colors the substance of the message and it might be received in a somewhat different way and so I think again even within this we need we need to draw certain distinctions anyway I didn't mean to interrupt did you want to respond briefly or I think when we get into the discussion of reintegration of foreign fighters and deradicalization I think there's a lot of there's a lot of research there evidence-based research that's rooted in sort of the psychology literature that actually shows that it's not the actual belief system that's bringing people to engage in violence that it's much more complex than that and it's not just about the ideology so I think we can get into that discussion of what works and what doesn't work in a very real sense once we start talking about deradicalization and reintegration and I hope Lorenzo and Tom will back me up on this because I think we both share a perspective on that as well will you? I do of course I'm a guest here so obviously no I wanted to talk a bit more about another issue that has come up a lot because engagement with communities and I think one of the lessons that we have somewhat learned I think particularly from a European perspective is really that it's a neighborhood by neighborhood approach I think if you look 10 years ago most of the engagement was done with self-appointed gatekeepers to communities so there was sort of a laziness there in reaching out the most visible and vocal voices which were not necessarily representatives of the community and I think that has changed a lot so it's done much more at the local level in a more proactive way and that has given a lot of results which leads though to another point which is how do you and this goes for all kinds of CVE whether it's the more strategic or the more tactical how do you prove of what you're doing is effective if not counterproductive but also just you know that you're not squandering money if you're not actually making the problem worse sometimes it's very difficult obviously on disengagement de-radicalization is relatively easier you will see in autos with this 25 30 people if they're going to go back to militancy but obviously for more preventive measures it's very difficult you have to prove a negative you have to prove what you're doing is preventing people from radicalizing I think when it comes to engagement there are ways of somewhat unempirically seeing that in Europe that engagement started 10 years ago more or less 10 years ago we had the mobilization for Iraq on a much smaller scale but we had a few hundred people from Europe who went to fight in Iraq I'm hard pressed to find to think of one example of somebody of some family that went to the police went to intelligence agencies and said my son is getting radicalized my son went to Iraq on so on and so forth now that's a very common dynamic and I would argue that movement of people that goes to authorities and seeks proactively in a way in some cases in a very frustrating way because they don't understand why police cannot arrest people so we know who the recruiters are arrest them and you have parents knocking on police doors and demanding arrest something that you know police cannot always do for legal reasons obviously but that dynamic has changed and of course it's difficult to prove the causation there but arguably the engagement that has been done that the tea drinking with a lot of people sort of the derogatory call has given some some results so obviously it's a lot of the CVF was particularly in Europe is you got to prove results you got to prove the big budget that you're asking is warranted by some results and sometimes you see the results 10 years later and that's obviously not the time frame that politics normally has well you know it's another thing that comes up as I listen to this is you used the term community and it made me think about community policing community policing as it took place in place like New York and how you know but now almost 20 years ago they went from crime statistics that was reported on a monthly basis to crime statistics being reported on a daily basis and so the consequence of that was that you were able to say after three days that there was a crime wave instead of after three months and you were able to respond to it and so it suggests that in these particular cases collecting and sharing data very broadly in real time enables people to trace when an event pushes people towards radicalization see where there's a little surge and if you've got granular data it allows you to say well perhaps there's something there that's driving the surge and enables you to move it and so there are kind of big data solutions to some of this stuff that might also be drawn from the policing that could actually be applied particularly more broadly between countries. Leanne. So one of the things that I've found very useful in trying to think about the extremist phenomenon is actually to think about it through Maslow's hierarchy of needs and that extremism plays onto all of the different hierarchy of needs from the physiological to the safety to the love and belonging and esteem and at different places is depending on what your needs are is where extremism can fill that void. Part of the theory behind I guess a prevention agenda is that if more of those needs are met then extremism will have a harder time making its inroads in those needs but if the inroads have already been made into those needs trying to then say that extremism is no longer the meter of those needs is a much harder case to prove and I think this is what Georgia was saying a little bit along this is that once the cycle of radicalization has already hit it is much harder to just use the other knowledge the 50% on the black and white spectrum to try and convince off of it. So I'd maybe offer a little bit from a law enforcement perspective that could be useful which is the difference between your incoate thoughts to a conspiracy to a willingness to act to an action to a accountability and if we're looking at extremism actions and the actual actions of individuals along that spectrum then when you're trying to actually have some sort of rehabilitation for those who have the thoughts or the conspiracy or even the willingness to act that that is different than those who have actually acted and that's different from a level of accountability for those who've already taken those actions and possibly getting back into society. So I think there's a lot that social science can really teach us about this field and I think sometimes the militarized look at this prevents us from taking a true individual social science perspective. So I really hope that I get to play Al-Qaeda so I don't have to be constructive for the rest of the day but I do hope that you know we can think a lot more constructively about what you know the last 50 years of social science can help us here. Thank you. Well that was very out of character and constructive in the best possible way. We'll go Tom and then we'll go John. I think along those lines I'd like to come back to a comment that David made earlier about the inflection point between order and disorder in a society being a function of how many people are willing to work in the system versus how many people are willing to work outside the system. And I think that aligns nicely with Steve Hadley's views on civil society even if it's not a perfect solution and the Tunisia example clearly demonstrates that it's not. Civil society is frequently the best source of the alternate identities that we're talking about. It's the best way to keep people working within the system and it is usually the source of the meta-narratives that you were alluding to earlier. If those don't come from government at the end of the day those come from a deeper place and they come from civil citizens and civil society but in too many of the countries in the region even if we had the perfect people and the perfect organizations wanting to organize those discussions the environment is not conducive to that happening. And one of the things that I think all of us need to start thinking about is how do we create an enabling environment for that type of engagement because if we want to create an alternative you have to create an alternative and at the moment in too many instances there isn't the foundation on which you can build that counter-narrative or that counter-engagement. Now you know by the way one of the points that you bring up here which you know is important you were talking about communities and Tunisia in the context of communities is a generalization you know it's too big because a lot of Tunisia works and the foreign fighters aren't coming from a lot they're just coming from communities and so if you deal on a country by country basis you'll be deceived by the generalization right now I said Tom and I there are a couple of them so I'm going to go to you and then I'm going to go down to you John okay I wanted to chime in a little bit on the social science side as well and one of the the frames that I found tremendously useful is Louise Richardson's triple cocktail idea not necessarily the specifics of her idea but this idea of three buckets to think about almost a Venn diagram if you will one being the personal experience it could be self-actualization in the Maslow model one being the environment that could be conditions conducive but it could also be narrative and then one being social networks because it's difficult to join a terrorist organization unless you know someone in the terrorist organization and once you start thinking about radicalization as having these these three different sort of centers of sort of driver centers if you like I find it becomes a lot easier to start thinking about solutions and of course there's clearly no one solution that covers all of those three different areas so I mean it has to be created for multifaceted the other thing I just wanted to chime in on as well was community policing and we've been pushing at the the UN community policing as a sort of a new big idea recently and one of the big problems we we often come across is it works terribly as a CVE idea right if you're just turning up in the neighborhood and saying we care about you now because we're worried about terrorism that's exactly not how to do it community policing needs to be a policing response to community problems it can have a CVE benefit but it's not going to have a CVE benefit if it's a CVE strategy so this is kind of weird as well so how do you have solutions to problems without even articulating that it's a solution to a problem but actually with something like community policing that might be the best way to go about it that's a very good point John I think this is actually to link together a few of the different ideas that we've heard just recently in this discussion about social sciences I think you've touched on big data being potentially part of the solution here and then I think you've touched on Georgia the complexity of identifying why radicalization occurs and I think given the typical background of participants in this sort of discussion we tend to have very qualitative discussions about why a particular message works what message should we come up with that would counteract the message we're very focused on the content and I think to piggyback on some of the social science discussion we're actually in a position where if we focus on people's actions these are things that can be quantified these are things that can be understood more at a structural level I think it's actually possible as opposed to focusing on a solution without truly having identified the problem because it's too complex to articulate as opposed to imposing our concept of what a solution probably should be on top of a problem that we don't fully understand I think with a kind of science-driven understanding I think the patterns that lead to the patterns of behavior the patterns of communities the patterns of societies that lead to the either the probability of radicalization or an individual being radicalized actually will emerge from a research a quantitative driven approach to understanding these problems as opposed to always coming back to this kind of I don't want to say academic because I don't want to sound like I'm being pejorative about academia you can't go on it just among friends here yeah sorry academics no but I don't I really don't mean that what I it's I think to avoid only looking at this through the lens of understanding the content and having this qualitative discussion about the relative worth of different types of words and different types of language I think that there's actually a more fundamental pattern that we can understand with a more scientifically minded approach to recognizing the pattern look I mean this this echoes things that we've talked about throughout soft plus hard there is a whole spectrum social plus science please with the social science in other words you know database solutions evidence-based solutions as George was saying so how many people are going to weigh in here okay we've got about five six minutes so I'm really going to have to get into the the 30 second to one minute response I know this it's not you're even possible for you but go on give it a shot I'll go for 29 seconds I second the the whole data point I'd love to see more geospatial mapping going down to a sub-regional on a local level and if we kind of interwoven had inter we're able to intervene with that the reasons why people join we could see why people are joining in you know whatever Southern Tunisia versus Northern Lebanon I think that would be very very interesting the other point I would just make this is a discussion and it seems to be very fruitful on foreign fighters and counter violent extremism and we've got to be very careful that we don't conflate what's happening overall in terms of extremism particularly in parts of the world that are not ours in Western Europe and North America in many parts of the world today and in the sub-regions extremism is unfortunately too mainstream and we have genocidal hateful ideologies that are very much at the core of mainstream clerical establishments and those also need to be confronted so when people are talking about narrative what is talking about that from within those are very important they might not prevent necessarily the Danish person from a particular neighborhood or maybe some person from Minnesota going to fight for Shabbat but we have a very endemic problem of extremism and significant groups where al-Qaeda and Jabbat al-Nusra in Syria has broad-based support right now in many many different ways in what they're doing and if you had the attacks I mean I alluded to in my role as as Syria but take away what Bashar is saying you know in eastern province and Saudi when you had this attack there's a lot of people who are denying that the attack actually diagnosed different person absolutely true Mary as we were talking about civil society being important to in the strategy my question is looking at society or states where civil society has been clamped down on especially since the uprisings so what do we do there and especially when CV strategies actually used to continue to clamp down on civil society okay Viola John's comment about often having qualitative discussions here also made me think of kind of numbers and quantity and I wonder about how the resources and energies and passions that we put into a lot of these efforts compare if you were to quantify them to the resources energies and passions that our ostensible adversaries are putting into this I don't know whether any kind of measure of that has ever been attempted but I think it'd be an interesting question the other is something that a few of us were talking about last night and that is that when we talk about the roots of some of the extremism radicalization the disenchantment to it's the precursor part of that seems to stem from go back to a phenomenon in transitional societies of where you have ruled by the majority but we're missing the other part of that that we sort of take for granted in in a lot of Western thinking and that is protection of the minority so what if you were to what if we were to emphasize you know rule by the majority we talk about all the time elections we don't talk very much about the protection of the minority in whatever type of minority we're talking about political sectarian whatever I think it's an interesting question to look into Phil of course I'm going to try to speak to my strengths and not talk about social science or anything else I mean I'll I'll talk about my Shia groups I find it very interesting if we're talking about myths and I guess reasons for why there are these foreign fighters after Nasrallah Said Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech in May 2013 this is when there was a huge jump in foreign fighters suddenly foreign fighters going to Syria there's a sectarian issue here it's a sectarian issue that's also being driven by another radical actor which is Iran with its own extremist ideologies and if we're just going to kind of brush this out of the discussion and not even acknowledge that they're putting in foreign fighters I mean I saw on the map it said 900 from Lebanon you know excluding Hezbollah all 5,000 of them at various rotations then we're running into a much bigger geopolitical problem okay very briefly and then I'll go to you just to build off that point the proliferation of the Shia jihadist network is not only a threat to countries in the region but also drives conflict on the local level speaking from the perspective of local insurgent groups but just speaking out of the roll I would say that one of the underreported facets of the struggle is that we don't know to what degree there's community cover that is being built in the region for example in the areas of eastern Syria where you have this large vacuum social demographic and economic vacuum that's literally being served by various local actors in the grounds and as that allows to be to root itself over time that community cover has an effect and without being uprooted we'll be dealing with the same issue going forward and forward and forward Thomas yeah obviously these same kind of discussions and concerns are going and taking place within the countries of the region and they're trying to struggle with how do they deal with the violent extremism but I don't know that we are very linked up with those discussions and I think we need to find a way to better link that to encourage them and in fact the the voice of you know the counter narrative needs to come from the region from Arab from Muslim voices and so we need to find a way first to link up and then to better support that and then finally there is a long-term issue here I mean we're trying to deal with something that we can do relatively quickly but we also have to deal with the long-term making governments more accountable in the region and we can't sort of forget about that as well okay Barbara oh sorry just quickly not sorry go ahead I didn't mean to skip yeah sorry very quick point I think we have to be very careful I think particularly in the west not to frame this as a CVE problem you know if we're doing policing among Somali communities in the suburbs of Minneapolis because it's the right thing to do because we know what's best that that's the best method if it's well we're going to do this because we don't want you to to go to Somalia and join Al-Shabaab rather than we want you to be integrated into the people of Minnesota those are two very different frames okay sorry Barbara yeah just briefly speaking as myself and not as Iran I think that that while I agree with Farah Pandit that this is a something that is perhaps common to a lot of young Muslim millennials we have ongoing conflicts that are focused in the Middle East that are serving as a magnet for foreign fighters and without efforts to actually resolve some of these conflicts or at least diminish the level of violence in these places we're not going to get a handle on this and that means the United States acting as a convener as a mediator if need be between powers in the region like Saudi Arabia and like Iran that are feeding feeding these conflicts until we get a situation where the Saudi regime where the UAE can sit down with the Iranians and and talk about dialing this back it's just going to get worse and worse okay you might again we're very we're a little over time here so let's sorry to be the last one no you're not you're not oh not yet perfect and I'm just going to build on a few points I will not go too too long the problem that we've discussed what I'm here around the table has been quite a piecemeal approach we do need a bottoms up and a top bottom approach to fighting extremism and just as a a small sort of solution we have to as you've mentioned as a choking point for the supply chain for Daesh at least in the short term we have to acknowledge where the money is coming from the arm mechanisms from new technology and other forms to you know stem the flow of the money the arms we have to have responsibility from the Western powers who have over militarized the Middle East we can just look at the numbers in the past few years what's happening and therefore the arms you know procurement channels has to be choked in we're talking about people crossing people or the fighters are going into these zones how are they getting there again comes to border control and again the involvement of the Turkish government to be more responsive to that the most important point that I would like to bring up again is the ideological because the ideological tendencies of Daesh provides justification for their actions so here again to stem it it needs to be bigger voice within the Islamic community to basically provide this more varied sort of perspective on Islam that Daesh has actually hijacked and has taken the most extreme form finally on the PR campaign that Daesh has been very very good at again I think going to detect communication industry side these are platforms that are run by the Western companies and I think at this point we need an international convention that brings in the United Nations to some extent which provides sort of like a prevention of extremism online platforms what are the measures what are the ball points that that can red flag these things we've done it on the European continent in terms of you know anti you know semitism or pro-Nazi propaganda I'm sure we can achieve that on this basis throughout the day I'll discuss on a more multi-track approach with varying timelines because some of the measures are short-term some have to be thought about in the future what Daesh has provided is this franchise and this illusion to youth is a vision of the future and that future vision the communities and the government in the region have not been able to provide to their disfranchised communities so we need to think about a long-term vision for the Middle East maybe possibly with more broader regional collaboration and dialogue that creates something like post-World War II sequences that resulted in European Union think about that okay couple thank you very much couple of brief questions Catherine okay very very quick very very quickly gender matters pardon me gender matters we raised it at the very beginning of this but we haven't then followed up through it there's been an assumption I think implicit in some of the discussions that gender doesn't matter but it really does matter and that's not just about including women it's about recognising how masculinity comes into play and it's about recognising what forms of femininity and masculinity are being promoted both by countering violent extremism narratives but also by extremist groups okay do you want to say okay I think that listening to this conversation we're confronted by multiple dualities but I'm also struck by the last several comments of a timeline so for me as I look at what's worked and what can work in the future we know that the motives for are there in terms of those who are are attracted to Daesh or other radical groups faith, alienation, adventure, anger, personal crisis all blended together but I think what we're not doubling down on is the ecosystem Farah and a couple of others have really touched on this that ecosystem is critical it can be addressed if we put efforts into the economic civil society and governance structure it'll create some breeding space that will allow a re-engagement and not and close off some of the sources of radicalization I'm struck by two countries Jordan and Tunisia and that's where you're seeing this pipeline and I think that again we need a comprehensive approach and not a piecemeal approach and we need to recognize this disparity between heightened expectations the job and youth bulge and the reality that with not so much effort we can address that so I think as we move forward throughout the rest of the day maybe we can double down on some of the practicalities okay Jim did you want to say something you away okay great well I know what our agenda says but I've actually done a conference before and I know that if there is not a 10-minute break after the panel after lunch that can cause problems and distraction let me leave it that way so what I'm going to do is pardon me mutiny it can also cause mutiny so so what I want to do is I want to give you 10 minutes please be very you know observant of that amount of time use it as best you can and return here in 10 minutes thanks very much all right if you'd take your seats we'll begin again in just a minute so okay let's let's start off with four quick questions which we'll do in the polling just to get the blood flowing to your fingertips it's the afternoon we have to do everything we can to counteract the brownies that you had how prepared are countries to deal with returning foreign fighters very prepared through very unprepared just a range question what do you think I've eliminated all questions that had other as an answer okay so 70 a 66 percent are in the prepared to very unprepared or alternatively and this is perhaps more salient only four percent say prepared zero percent say very prepared so there is a general sense that there is not a lot of preparation for this next on a scale of one to five how big of a threat are returning foreign fighters a major threat which warrants it being a priority among national security police and other policy makers in these countries or no threat you know they're just a few of them it's not such a big thing to worry about let's try and put it in some perspective in this simplistic way okay and this shows you know 54 percent on the threat side and 16 percent on the no threat side so it's a little bit of a skew towards a threat perhaps not entirely unexpected given the nature of this discussion next how should go see there's another anyway how should countries deal with returning foreign fighters refuse them entry at the border charge them with the crime in prison place them in a reintegration program allow entry and be monitored by the government or other by the way I know you could do many of these things so that's not other but if you have something specific that's another you could you could do that so number one in this is place them in a reintegration program and the lagged one is refuse them entry at the border who said other all right so I think there could be creative plea deals that are developed that put them into former's programs to be community outreach to talk about the disillusioned fight excellent we shouldn't conflate foreign fighter with jihadists right if we'd said deal with returning foreign fighters who joined terrorist organizations that's one thing if we look at the data from from returnees they're very few foreign fighters who have actually then become jihadists in in the west and so that's a that's still a relevant distinction and we should think about which groups they belong to and which groups they fought with excellent point other others yes I chose other because I mean the first one refused entry at the border for me as an NGO in real life as well human rights person like entirely unacceptable it doesn't mean that person can't be monitored but I mean obviously people's motivations just depends I mean as has been brought up everybody's these people of different ages of different backgrounds and what they're going to need and what sort of trauma they come back with should be reflected in the response okay is there one more did I miss one okay is there another question or is it one more question how effective are rehabilitation deradicalization programs such as they exist right now from very to very ineffective okay well only 1% say very effective and 47% say something in the nature of ineffective they're considered to be important in the context of your earlier answers so this is clearly an area work can be done let's move swiftly to the slides now and to a set up this discussion the idea is combating contagion what's next for the defeated or homework bound extremist so we'll go into it and we'll describe it very quickly there's a significant foreign fighter contingent set to return thousands of foreign fighters expected to leave the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq destined for their home countries or non-conflict zones or other conflict zones and we got to deal with their with their rivals the numbers of foreign fighters are growing some some will will die perhaps up to one in five of them will die and some will continue fighting in other places perhaps 10 to 20% of them but the rest are going to come home seek a location and then the question is do they return to their home country travel to a new conflict zone travel to a third party country and then how do we deal with the choice between peaceful integration or them engaging in extremist activity next there's a debate over the threat we've talked about it you know historical data shows that one out of nine returning foreign fighters between 1990 and 2010 were later involved in domestic terrorism there have been some plots disrupted authorities have already disrupted 10 to 12 alleged plots organized by fighters who'd returned from Syria and we have to weigh issues just as those we've discussed reintegration versus imprisonment can returnies be de-radicalized if so how next and there are different approaches and we've talked about the Danish approach at some length here so far today that's relevant in this context in Saudi Arabia there is something called jihadi rehabilitation where they go to facilities rehab facilities potentially after being sent to prison and go into counseling and reintegration but apparently it has a recidivism rate between 10 and 20 percent and then in the UK the UK government passed a legislation that allows for the suspension of passports for people suspected of leaving the UK and in connection with terrorism and then they'd have to be escorted back and potentially face prosecution and de-radicalization so you know that's a stronger measure next so we're going to get up to the move and we'll talk about the move and then we'll break into little discussions for perhaps five minutes and then continue on and the first move here is fictional we knew that so here we have a you know a thought right where we can take Tunisia and use it as an example here following a movement Tunisia offers a 10-day amnesty for returning fighters and you know you know here we have the president saying we we must bring back Tunisian citizens from conflicts we must reunite sons with their mothers and transition them back the international community has been asked to develop strategies and provide guidance to the Tunisian government for managing the return of these fighters so we're just dealing with one country that's welcoming fighters back for a brief period of time what advice do you have for them that you think will work best with dealing with these foreign fighters okay so again within the parameters we talked about here the best possible advice the most forward-leaning possible advice not you know just rehashing things that have already happened what advice do you have what might you suggest are there other cooperative things that might be done around this and we'll reconvene in five minutes but so talk to each other Tunisia is here awaiting your discussions generosity and I'd love to get a little bit of the flavor of these discussions after you have them so in five minutes we'll talk also about what the interactions were like all right folks if you would resume your seats we will resume our conversation so I see Tunisia in the clutches of Iran here right at the moment so embrace sorry did I say clutches I meant embrace yeah no I don't know what I don't know what came over me no no Soleimani hero of Iraq yeah exactly um so so Tunisia you you were launching this program what kind of advice do you need what what kind of guidance would you like from the international community first of all we'd like to define the international community we saw lots of people we weren't so happy to see like our Iranian and and Syrian colleagues uh we did not see the U.S. or the EU but I'm not going to say anything I noticed Jim just sort of sitting here looking the other way and I thought that's very similitude also but Tunisia was his first posting in the diplomatic service I don't understand must have been a bad couscous or something things we did we were approached by the UAE who offered intelligence cooperation and UAE intelligence cooperation is obviously something we're going to need I think we'd probably look to Saudi Arabia and to the European Union for rehabilitation reintegration advice but not just advice assistance and tangible financial assistance and part of the problem is because this is not the first time Tunisias had foreign fighters or a high number of foreign fighters who went to Iraq last decade and any that came back there was a very simple solution Ben Ali would just throw them into into jail and obviously this government is going to take a different approach and then longer term to address the problem both the folks leaving and folks coming back a serious jobs program is going to be necessary and at this point that is not something that our government i.e. the Tunisian government feels it's got the capability to do on its own it needs both private sector involvement and also assistance from other countries and you feel good about these offers do you feel they're adequate to your needs or do you feel that there's some area where there's a glaring need that's unaddressed besides funding for example the glaring in terms of no no these I mean more jobs are needed more investments needed and as far as the reintegration that's something that Tunisia just we use Tunisia just don't have experience with what did you offer them I don't know if Tunisia remembers correctly we just asked for the identification of all these returning fighters to be circulated see this is how that we've earned a three billion dollar investment program no but on a serious note I think the amnesty is something that Tunisian government would decide on its own but I think regional countries would need at least some form of intelligence sharing to be able to deal with the threat the other conversations we had were about where are these fighters returning from how is Tunisia going to be able to identify who's coming from where are they coming from Syria are they Tunisians who are abroad so I think better intelligence sharing from you know Shiloma talked about countries you know Turkish airports etc I think you know cooperation with these countries from which the fighters enter or leave Syria it would be useful for them and there is a there's an idea in that right I mean if people are in Syria and Iraq there are likely several routes out for them there are likely therefore several points that are particularly fruitful places to do intelligence gathering and therefore can become hubs for intelligence sharing right so there is an opportunity in in in these flows here does the intelligence community agree with that or like to just bring up that the monitoring would need to take place for years so how comfortable are these countries with monitoring said individuals for three to seven years that's that's what would be required also we're we're having to monitor every aspect of their life so they may not be taking a part in attacks but are they adding to this narrative of the CVE are they continuing to do that because that's still that collection makes it very broad the other thing that we had concern about is this off ramping into some kind of physical location to kind of debrief or to kind of reintegrate them into society we see a lot of concerns with that think of it the prison model Abu Ghraib or anything that you think about that as a place where it brings like-minded individuals in this case threat actors together we would rather have them disperse in the community to have influence from other people in the community so we don't necessarily support that we see a lot of concerns in that area but generally the surveillance is we suggest that that had that that does happen but we want to know if the countries especially EU and others would support that because it won't just be to Tunisia it will be who those people contact in other countries as well okay there's several places that I can turn to here let me let me turn to pardon me yeah go on yeah it is she's sort of the American intelligence community even though she's sitting over there but the reason I was steering off into the distance when you posted this thing that's misdirection she's she's embedded over here but we know she's working for yeah the reason the reason I was steering off was that exactly the concerns that Peyton raised based on my own experience is the problems that the US government would have particularly swept up in all of the talk and examples today my instincts would be let's support this thing I mean if we're going to get to the bottom of this thing we're going to have to find ways to reintegrate these people and to deal with this in some kind of broad manner but once you try to turn that into a specific US government decision action telegram going to our embassy in Tunis to tell the Tunisian government what we would do and you would have to get the clearances you would have exactly the problems that Peyton raised there would be so many caveats there would be so many concerns there would be so many worries that maybe one of these people would have slipped through and showed up in New York one day that it would have been very high for the United States to come up with anything rational and coherent that would be helpful to the Tunisians that's why we're steering into the distance although let me let me just throw one thing out here that you guys can chew on collectively right let's say there are 20,000 foreign fighters out there and let's say a bunch of them die and a bunch of them go someplace else to go and fight let's say 10,000 of them return home someplace and let's say that contrary to the prevailing per capita incomes in most these countries we'll just stipulate that they need $10,000 a year to support a job well that's a hundred million dollars to employ these 10,000 high-risk people for a few years you know so maybe it's 500 million dollars that's not much money that's not a big... here you've got all these people that are this big giant threat for half a billion dollars you could go and give them all a job surveil them in their job know where they were integrate them into this isn't that cheap? it's not how the U.S. government works I can I can tell by our labor participation right yes Jonathan well actually the the technology community has a proposal given that that's not how the U.S. government works we're happy to come to Tunisia and invest in infrastructure and job training we have a shortage of technical expertise in the West and this is something that can be done remotely so we'd be happy to train people that are coming back into the country in return we want to collect data on all of their behaviors so once the European Union and intelligence community kind of sorts out whatever they need to logistically and legally then you can pay us for the data that we'll have on all of the people that have been working in Tunisia so it's kind of good for us it's good for you it'll eventually be good for you what do you think? I'm sorry I just want to clarify this is like the entire labor force that you're going to be or the ones that have returned and that are being integrated into your work programs well you can use the work programs for whatever you want we'll come in and set up the work programs and then you can send either people who are returning as foreign fighters or people that are already living in Tunisia I really I really feel like I've passed through the looking glass into a future where Google is world government well the U.S. I'm trying to be forward thinking here no no you're definitely forward thinking again I'm like maybe a little too far I'm I'm I'm about to move to the EU they'll never let this happen in the EU the EU the EU is very interested in best practice model and has created the RAN Radicalization Awareness Network and they are creating testing best practice models and the emphasis on they are is on they are coming home so we have to look at the relationship building under resilience building and bringing them back to the to actually to their homes to train the members of the families and the communities to deal with them because this will be the emotional support network and it's not surveillance it's relationship building and these family members need mentorship processes as well so I think investing in a new upcoming relationship model based on family and community relationships would be a way forward in which the European Union could invest Georgia I'll come to you I'll see you next time as international police advisors we do not endorse this program at all to have a 10-day amnesty period we think it's a short-term solution that's going to bring more problems than solutions and instead we would advocate legislative and legal reform that works on not criminalizing the act of traveling to Syria and Iraq but rather seeking evidence-based responses to people who actually have a problem okay that that's fine but you might want to think about in the context of this what the you know what the best course of action might be in these kind of cases right I accept what you're saying is wise but but in the context of the scenario one of the things we want to do is figure out how you deal with the influx you know how that you know what one of the things that strikes me is you're a foreign fighter until you're home what is home you know home is your family to some extent if there is no job then you are still alienated or if there is no religious community to integrate yourself into you're still alienated so a big part of dealing with the foreign fighter is creating the foundations of home somehow and that requires an investment Barbara yeah I just wanted to raise the issue of Libya and what the international community can do to try to revive peace talks there how many of these Tunisian fighters are going to Libya for their initial training before they go on to Iraq or Syria and and how many pass through Libya on the way home how many of the refugees from Libya in Tunisia are actively involved in this or they they merely economic refugees from Libya so one would hope again that the international community could do a better job of addressing the root causes and the conflicts that are drawing in these foreign fighters okay over here at the NGO corner I think there are a few things that we need to look at first of all what are they coming back to are they coming back to the same conditions that actually probably forced them to join the ISIS leave their countries and force join ISIS we need to look at the infrastructure some of the social services that are being provided working with the Tunisian government as well as with donors in the UN we need to look at mental health for the returnees as well as their communities social services but also employment and we need to be very careful with employment we cannot just target those that have returned we have to look at the community as a whole and have a community approach because if somebody is unemployed and somebody went out to Syria fought and came back and suddenly we're targeting them and giving them economic opportunity that the unemployed will actually go to Syria with the hope to come back and get reintegrated as well Okay, I'm just trying to do this in the order I saw it Mary So we consider our program to be very successful and it's been a model for many other states so we would be very happy to work with Tunisia on it and send advisors and such and help with funding one thing we do offer is yes a jobs program we also do offer salaries to some people and other opportunities so creating an opportunity that's an alternative to fighting so maybe after the 10 days they don't go back so Will you help pay for this? Yes, but we've got money so and then we heard about the families and the strength of the families in utilizing that network and that's something that we've been doing as well so to go to the families but then also social networks so other outlets not just religious outlets but sports participation other social outings that people can do as alternatives okay but I just I mean I wasn't being flipped with this ultimately these programs will be as good as the checks that pay for them in other words if that if it's if they're if they're not well funded they're not going to be big enough they're not going to be rich enough in a variety of different kinds of ways and so somebody's got to pay for it now one question is who is it the international community at the IFI level is it international donors of some other sort is it regional donors and obviously regional countries that do have cash have a greater stake in addressing the issue of these foreign fighters that are returning to the region or they're going to settle elsewhere in the region so that's why I'm asking I think it's part of the solution mix here Tom so I have two questions the first from the United Nations perspective I have to raise is impunity if you're going to have blanket amnesties some of the people returning from these places will have committed crimes we have reporting about crimes against humanity and crimes that might amount to genocide so I would have to raise a flag at any program that was just going to welcome anybody back and say or whitewash now and so very much in in tune there with the law enforcement folks the second thing is I'm just very struck that we seem to be offering these returning fighters a better deal than we offer our own veterans that might prove quite difficult to sell certainly when we talk about programs like this one of the first things we hear is great they get breaks let me get this straight you're gonna reward people for going to fight in Syria but I don't get this deal I don't get this deal as a good citizen and you could actually be in a situation where you're creating more fractures within society rather than less simply by privileging a certain experience which frankly is not one of service to the state so let's just throw them in jail I think if they're war criminals you certainly want to have an investigation yes no I mean I think if you're gonna have a comprehensive response to returning fighters it has to be anchored in the rest of society we have this tendency to think of it in in very linear fashion or very slivered fashion and you know if we do offer a good deal to returning fighters there are gonna be other people in society taxpayers and so forth who are gonna say hang on a second that's not fair and you can't ignore that that's going to be part of it and you have to have at least some sort of plan that explains it to your fellow citizens or to your taxpayers no question about it okay let me say what others are thinking and don't want to say the Tunisian fighters when they are in my country are not a problem for all these other countries the moment they step out and this is why this program is so surprising they are a problem because now the UAE not to speak for them are scared that they'll come to the UAE the Libyans who aren't represented here are scared that they'll come across the borders are coming from Syria so these fighters are now actually going to be a problem now we're happy to get them out of our country and think that this amnesty should be longer but again there's no revocation of their passports they're allowed to travel again and the doubles speak of calling them fighters I mean maybe there's distinctions some of these are killers of beheading Christians as part of Daesh I guess they're called fighters and they're given amnesty so I don't know if this has been taught through to the full extent and I'm just speaking on behalf of the some of the silent countries who are afraid now of these Tunisians and I'd be happy to hear what they'd have to say if they're willing to speak up so speak on behalf of all those people who like to have Bashar al-Assad speak for them I would ask Egypt for example directly ask Egypt there's 90 million people in that country go on Egypt one of the very few Egyptian leaders named Shlomo by the way but I Shlomo Mubarak but I have good relations with some people that is also something I think the issue is not the financial cost of such a program that is the smaller problem the issue is the risk of this kind of problem that it may turn into a program that will encourage recruitment to this kind of GRD organizations I know from another arena about cases in which people initiate minor terrorist actions which are low risk the probability that they will be killed will not be so high but they are arrested once they are arrested they are getting amongst the Stebend by some organizations so they can take care of their families and so on so you can have this kind of program if it is conditioned first of all no people that were involved in serious crime second an effective monitoring mechanism to to see that they are not reverting back and third an effective snapback mechanism I am using I use the term snap use the term snapback carefully here namely if they are punished strongly so it's a kind of parole right not amnesty okay one or two more comments here before we're going to go to the next move yeah just briefly I think the return of these fighters or terrorists for some others is a very valuable intelligence you know gathering source so I think in part and part of a deal with these returning fighters should be first an assessment of what level of intelligence they can provide in the fight against you know the groups in Syria and Iraq secondly I think it must be a more comprehensive program I agree with Shlomo in terms of a parole look at this and also something like bringing in the tech telecom industry again more the incubator for change now what does that mean we've got new startups that go through incubators and I think this will require mentorship reskilling these new fighters and possibly a 12-step plan that I can go into detail without Tunisian counterparts in terms of how we can reverse that tendency for extremism but I think most importantly they should become at the end of this rehabilitation program as the ambassadors to against extremism that has to be a condition that they will now we have 3,000 strong former fighters who are going to then disseminate information about how vile extremism is and what is this fight about so we turn around okay we will continue with other components of this but let's make the next move before we make the next move Nancy what do you think of the responses thus far I think Tunisia got a lot of good advice on this one we started drilling down some very specific conditions upon which various programs might or might not work and it is that level of analysis that each country will have to go through to determine the kind of response that will fit those conditions and with the kind of help both financially and technical that the region and international community can provide so I think there were a lot of interesting suggestions not each of which would be appropriate for each situation but a number of them that makes sense yeah I thought so a lot of the suggestions were very useful but I also thought one of the things that was quite interesting was the presentation of some solutions that seem quite useful on the face and then you drill down a little bit and they've got some downside and so it does suggest a little bit of you know well we've solved this problem but then you're creating a next problem and you need to look at the unintended consequences of these kind of programs as well and I think this discussion illustrated that well if we move to the next stage here the return of the fighters now has sparked protests by Tunisian secularists in the wake of the government's recent amnesty program protests have erupted across the country largely led by members of the secularists Nides Tunes party protesters have called for prosecution of returning foreign fighters and urged the government to reverse the amnesty position and there have been counter demonstrations and observers feel the situation could deteriorate the goal here is let's confront the issue of reintegration and determine the strategies for dealing with fighters in this kind of reintegration environment okay and I'm going to just for the purposes of keeping you guys engaged in this discussion I would like you access of evil folks here to think yeah no no two terrorist groups in business but what I'd like you to do is imagine yourselves now the returning fighters in this case so they can turn to you and judge your response to the programs that are being created here let's take five minutes and talk a little bit about the kind of advice you would offer them and you can broaden it out if their programs pertaining to your own countries or issues related to this we can talk about those two so we're resuming five minutes all right we will begin again in one minute if you could just wrap up we will begin again in one minute okay so let's resume our seats and we'll get back into the discussion I assume by the way you've all been on your email following all the important news of the day sep bladders resignation which which just took over the internet soccer that was the blankest express completely blank express who's sep bladder there's just also something on the wire saying that Saudi Arabia has just announced an ambassador for Iraq for the first time in 25 years which is you know that's something and the New York Times has a story saying that Iran has grown its supply of enriched uranium by 20 percent so the whole Barbara Barbara pardon me it's it's uh it's low enriched uranium and and under the understanding that was reached in lozan they have to get it down to 300 kilograms if there's going to be a deal right there assertion was that the program was not frozen as was asserted but i'm sure the Iranian government will promise us it's it's actually the good kind of enriched uranium all right so Tunisia now there's problems breaking out in the streets didn't you did you expect this when you announced the stupid program of yours you got to miss yeah did the prime minister expect that his party was going to go against his party's plan evidently not apparently not it's not not the first political leader in any country to miscalculate that being said what what what what could be helpful here what would you like what would you what would you look for in this case or is this something that just Tunisia has got to solve on its own i mean to me this is a domestic political issue i mean i think what this reflects is that as in the the first move in this scenario the government took an action because of mounting pressure from civil society and that's going to continue to be a factor that's going to balance these kind of protests in the second in the second move that we have up on the screen now and they're they're going to be faced with all the messiness of democracy which they're not super they've had four years of experience dealing with and they're still working out all how to compromise and all the mechanics of that the track record to date over the last four years is they've done a pretty decent job of two steps forward one step back but i welcome all as the government of Tunisia we welcome all good ideas from our our friends on deal with it but speaking personally i think it's a domestic issue for the domestic political issue for the Tunisians to address and i'm sure the US government agrees with that this is their problem but having said that it does sort of tag on to the tail end of the last discussion we were having right that if you don't take this from a more holistic point of view if you're just dealing with the foreign fighters you're likely to breed resentment elsewhere across the the community and so i think that there becomes a question of how does one frame programs for dealing with these because i assume in the EU one of the things that you will also have sorry one of the things that you also have is resentment when foreign fighters come back as reports filter into the media that there's more and more foreign fighters into the communities presumably you're going to have more anti-muslim feeling right you're going to have that kind of backlash right yes the european union has noted for the past five years an increase in Islamophobia and a backlash in the rise of the far right and we think it's important when dealing with the rise of extremism that we also look at the rise of far right extremism and anti-semitism as well and how that brings to can bring together competing forces that dive sorry and that can tear apart communities that otherwise work together we also note that in the united kingdom a number of years ago there were race riots and as a result of this perception of competing resources amongst local communities and i think it's really important therefore that we reiterate our initial request that we look at training local communities and building relationships so that those that are reintegrated are not necessarily considered a burden by those local communities but also that other communities are not necessarily seen as being excluded so there is in this thesis extremism begets extremism that one if you're going to deal with one kind you need to deal with the other kind is that something you guys would agree with three and i think one thing with the u and by the way and then how would you deal with it one of the things that the un is stressed and i think the language to some degree some of the language of the resolution of in 2014 is to not specifically identify one conflict but to talk about the issue of foreign fighters in general i think from a european perspective for example there's a lot of debate on whether the issue is just foreign fighters from syria and iraq or the issue of ukraine you got europeans fighting on both sides of the conflict in ukraine there's obviously less focus on that but some of the very same dynamics are there in terms of backlash in terms of returnees and so on so if you focus simply on just one group of foreign fighters that can create certain resentment in certain communities of double standards right within one group of foreign fighters but there's also the issue that if you've got the rise of far right extremism it feeds into the narrative of the other extremists as well right and first of all absolutely but first of all we we we don't really have and that's been um um speaking more from a european union point of view i'm kind of looking at stepping out of my there's been an imbalance in resources i think i would argue 95 percent of resources go to islamic extremism and arguably in some countries zero goes to right-wing as much as the language of a lot of the strategies try to be neutral the hard data point to the fact that there's an over emphasis on islamic extremism yeah and i just think one of the reasons i just started out there is you know we're talking about these scenarios but we also as we're doing it and we're trying to look at the context in which piece is going to be made need to think about other potential scenarios and you know if you have major flows of foreign fighters and it produces backlash that backlash produces more right-wing extremism and that right-wing extremism could actually exacerbate the problems you've got at home fairly dramatically which is just another reason to address these things underneath jocelyn yeah to to follow up on this idea of what reintegration means it's not only an individual process i think that the ecosystem of the reintegration is to be taken into account and the scenario here is pointing out to a sort of divide between secularist versus islamist which i think to a certain extent is still in is always trying to be overcoming the tunisian politics i mean what we have seen since the jasmine revolution is an attempt to pull everybody with a tunisian concern beyond the secular islamist divide so one way to avoid this tension is really to maintain this level of cohesion and trust building between different groups and it goes beyond the state responsibility it is also the responsibility of the different communities it has been said several time but there is a fantastic tool that the tunisian government could use which is most of the people who are who are aware in government are part of a diaspora they were part and are still linked to the one million of tunisian that are in europe this is fantastic tool because they defy right there the narrative of groups like al qaeda and isis who built on islam versus the west and i'm not talking about secular actors i'm talking hanushi spent 25 years of his life in london if this didn't have an impact on the way he sees islam even in this more consensual way there is a lot of potential here and we should not underestimate the fact that the tunisian in in charge especially on the islamic side know about that and can use that to help overcome the divide here i have to ask not you you guys um you know you're you come you come back you're in this situation in tunisia there are some programs luring you back but there's also this big backlash how do you see it you're you you may be somewhat alienated by your experience in syria but how do you how do you deal with with the situation you find on the ground here i'm deeply concerned and i lived for years under ben ali's dictatorship were just for being religious or growing a beard you could get thrown in prison and now i'm seeing the same people who were part of the regime that were jailing us before i went over to syria who are protesting as though i have no right to be here in the country it's not only alienating but it it makes reintegration frankly extraordinarily difficult for me i think that um i'm still struggling with the concept of identity that drew me to syria and iraq and when i come home that sense of identity is even more troubled and so the idea that there is within my own society you know protest against me coming home i think that there's there's a real um there's a real trouble within and i wouldn't be surprised if i were to seek out others who were like-minded like me at home um you know other disillusioned fighters others that were part of various movements whether they fought in iraq in the early 2000s or if they fought in other times to try and find that community because my identity doesn't seem to matter to anyone at this point so one of the things we're dealing with here clearly is the consequences of backlash that almost inevitably will come along with this those of you in the international law enforcement community how do you deal with that i mean you've talked about how you integrate people you talked about how you identify people who are potential threats um but clearly if there's any number of people coming back you know you talked about you had 30 go but if there were a newspaper article saying 30 had come back that we're now living in the community you'd have a different kind of problem and the question is how would you deal with it well first of all we would say that we warned the Tunisian government against this decision they wouldn't listen i had hoped that they had foreseen the consequences they apparently didn't and so the advice that we can give from a law enforcement point of view is on a very practical level it has to do with the crowd management crowd control and we have some experience in how that is done based on the rule of law and that's just going about managing or controlling people they also have to in order to maintain the credibility they have to go on with the reintegration program and i think one of the lessons that can be learned from from this decision is that you have to foresee all possible impacts and you have to first of all you you shouldn't offer benefits to these people that you don't offer everybody else in the society so that is what we are we don't in Denmark we don't just let people in and start a reintegration program unless we feel sure that this is what this is what they want as i said early on today if we have reason to believe that they have been involved in in illegal affairs or violating the initial legislation or legislation whatever they'll be punished and only the people who want to come back and be a part of society we of course we try to offer them some some of these benefits that are open to everybody else in the society so getting them back to work getting them back to school or university or whatever it seems like an important point though is to mainstream people you know in other words to bring them into programs that are available to everybody in society not to set these programs apart visibly because that's likely to produce some degree of resentment yes so in that vein i'm happy to report that after over 300 seconds of intense buying multilateral negotiations we are now ready to unveil a collaboration between tech industry the governments of Iran Iraq and even we're in exploratory negotiations with Saudi Arabia for a MENA-based digital Marshall plan that would provide digital literacy training tech training and job placement and we want to unveil this to begin with in Tunisia as a more holistic approach towards providing economic alternatives both to returning fighters as well as the general populace does anybody here have any skepticism towards this plan or critique or questions that you have regarding the people in the audience are walking out but Saudi Arabia and Iran are going to solve the political and economic problems of Tunisia that's the outcome let's put it this way if they move together to do it they might be able to but but you said what you know I think Nancy's terms were they you know the outer limits of possibility and so I think we just crossed the outer limits of where we're into just the outer limits Mary we did not support this we were talked we were talking with him but we did not support it this is just typical Silicon Valley arrogance Masoud speaking for the media I think the media can play an important role here there's always a there's always a first time yes a couple of things I think there's an excellent opportunity for conflict sensitive reporting you know it's a somewhat controversial concept that has not been really taken up by mainstream media but is practiced by local media and especially in this context where the local media has a lot at stake it's important to to cover this kind of protest with a great deal of sensitivity with a focus on solutions rather than conflict that's number one there's also an opportunity for I'm not sure which is less likely that or the Iranian-Saudi cooperation but keep keep going a second there's also an opportunity for the media for the local media to educate the public about you know the the highly successful and effective reintegration program of the Tunisian government if in fact they have taken the advice of their friends in the international community so everything to to educate the public that while actually these returning fighters will go through a rigorous program of monitoring and education and that they won't be just they're not a bunch of terrorists that brought into society to go around and terrorize the public but that they will be monitored and properly reintegrated so an important role for the local media to play yeah now I've been on the editorial side the local media would also editorialize very vigorously and go on a campaign to first of all encourage you know push the local leaders the Tunisian leaders to take this opportunity to develop their a new national narrative of inclusiveness and of of a pluralistic society that where not only the secularists are respected but also those observant Muslims are respected and the returning fighters become part of society and are embraced by society in the same way that everyone else is and we would go on a campaign to press the authorities to finally get their act together to provide the services to provide the explanations and more importantly to communicate to their populace in an effective consistent strong way what the new national narrative will be and how they can be how the citizens can be part of it I've been gently teasing the Iranians here so they should have their chance at the microphone thank you so sorry I just wanted to point out that we have wonderful graduates from places like Sharif University who could contribute a great deal of expertise to a MENA internet project and I'm just questioning the apparent bias of the moderator in always assuming that Iran is the source of instability yes in many cases but Iran also has solutions to propose that's all I embrace that it's just briefly it's the moderator's twisted sense of humor no absolutely no problem Iran has been used to this type of disrespect but it's perfectly fine we are very patient country and we are very ancient yes no you're noted for your patience but let me just please let me just please just make a very important point just so that I give my support to the tech telecom industry and this comes back to Farah's comments early on the demographics of the individuals who are involved in extremism all the millennia what do they care most about the reason why the extremist propaganda is so effective is that they actually watch these videos to like video games they have actually very similar similes to US military videos of recruitment so there is some parallels to that however where I want to point to is that the MENA region with the demographics that we are talking about of 70 percent below the age of 30 at some most of these countries requires a shift to a knowledge-based economy one that has worked in many emerging markets and I believe that Iran has a major economy of the Middle East actually one of the largest with a very dynamic knowledge-based economy that is mushrooming throughout the country can play a major role in driving this shift and including to that will address unemployment under employment new skill sets and introduction of this new generation that are tech savvy but to use that in a more productive constructive manner we have to provide them the tools and I believe the private sector and telecom sector can play a major role Iran supports it and I will again stress to our Saudi brothers and sisters that the fighters that are returning are not coming to Iran this ideology is rooted in your country and when they come back to to their masters it will be quite a problem much bigger one for you than for Iran so I hope that you support this regional dialogue and this initiative to move to more knowledge-based economy thank you for that and just in future we hope that the Iranian delegation uses the word mushroom less frequently I just want to say this as a returnee that I'm really encouraged to see this focus on a digital economy and I want to point out that a lot of us are coming back with excellent technical skills like I personally ran several official ISIS Twitter feeds and some of my colleagues helped to design games edit fairly beautiful beheading videos and I'm just hoping that we can be reintegrated using some of the skill sets that we picked up on the battlefield by that you mean the technical skill sets yes I mean we have very good digital skills all right sir I just want to echo some conversations about regional responses assisting Tunisia with the protests and the backlash against the return of these foreign fighters I guess I don't mean to be pedantic but I suppose there is a question to be asked as to why these protests occurred is it an opposition in principle to the idea of reintegrating foreign fighters or is it born out of a sense of dissatisfaction with the government's economic performance and then on both counts as the UAE and as a country that is extremely close to the current Tunisian government I think we would propose working with the Tunisians to address you know both both sides of the issue so whether it is an economic issue obviously there are investments and programs of economic development if it is a security issue you know might the Tunisian government might approach this amnesty and a tiered approach the way low enforcement people recommended and obviously in terms of counter-terrorism we would strengthen and sort of national security strategies we would strengthen our cooperation with them make this public to at least calm some of the backlash that's occurring in Tunisia did Turkey want to intervene here if I may I mean I put my Tunisian hat on for a moment because I work the last two years actually on Tunisia I'm going there on Friday and I want to say just a couple of things after the discussion of the domestic response first of all the issue of returnees has been part of the political debate already for two years Tunisia has a range of NGOs that have been going regularly to Syria to try to pull back young people to Tunisia and the very creation of these NGOs became a great political controversy in Tunisia a year and a half ago it created no small amount of dissonance between the Islamists and the secular parties so there's a history there to keep in mind I also think that Tunisians will I think the context of these protests will matter greatly if they're in response to a policy a reintegration I don't think it presents as much of a problem as if they're in response to a series of violent attacks that kind of context would create a much more polarized situation because this the sense would be that the situation is deteriorating and we have the return of domestic violence funny funny funny you should bring that up I'd like to move to the next move if I could the next move is a bombing in Tunis is attributed to former foreign fighters thank you very much and so you know now why are we raising this move here well clearly the you have foreign fighters returning home that's one thing and how you're integrating them but if any of them act out if any of them start behaving as these frustrated terrorists here might well behave then you've got a different kind of foreign fighter problem you've got a police problem you've got an intelligence problem you've got a backlash problem as well as what do you do about the other foreign fighters you still have the foreign fighters problem so that's what we want to talk about here in this last bit of this round take five minutes talk among yourselves and then we'll resume for about 20-25 minutes of that part of the discussion we will begin again in just one minute so if folks will get back to their seats we'll begin in one minute seen this Boston story the story of Boston today okay ladies and gentlemen if I could encourage you to return to your if I could encourage you to return to your seats you're trying to attract attack the collect millennium Muslim data and sell it back to Coca Cola and yeah exactly exactly okay you know the fragility of societies that have been exposed to even moderate amounts of terror and these circumstances as well illustrated by this story that's taken place in Boston today where young man was shot dead in the street for possessing a military style knife he was Islamic he was apparently being followed by the FBI counterterrorism task force because there was a suspicion that he had been radicalized by online ISIS messages now we don't know whether he actually has we don't know anything except he had a knife and he's dead now but it gives you a sense in a very palpable way because it's right now and this is the breaking story in Boston of what can happen in a society where there is an attack as it happens there was an attack in Boston by two people one of whom at least was radicalized probably both of whom were radicalized and now Boston is on edge and it's sort of an analogy to this scenario that we are talking about here and I think for the benefit of what this discussion is if you would like to respond to this scenario move which is to say there is an attack and it's attributed to foreign fighters and how does that change how you handle the issue of foreign fighters do that if you want to deal with it in a broader sense do that Dan I rudely interrupted you in the middle because you had walked right into the next move okay yeah sure wink wink you'll get your check in the mail but why don't you talk a little bit about how you see the consequence of this kind of thing in the microphone I think it's first of all it's important to say that in the wake of the bardo attack we were just talking about this the reassuring thing was and this was an attack undertaken by a Tunisian who'd been trained in Libya and came back and undertook the attack that the political response of of both Islamists and secularists was very encouraging they really tamped it down they were able to deflect an escalation of Islamist secular confrontation so that you know there's an empirical basis to feel that the political system is matured enough such that the notion of sort of calm political response is there and has demonstrated the effect in this so I think that's fairly encouraging but I also think that under the scenario where there is this sort of attack there would be great expectations from the secularists that the police would come down very hard and the security forces on on Salafists and Islamic radical forces and under those conditions you don't have an Islamist you don't have a police force and George and I have worked on this and in Tunisia among other places that really has been trained to deal with this situation in an effective way you don't have a domestic political force that police force that's been reformed and in a comprehensive way it's still basically the same guys that protected the previous regime and if it's those guys who will respond to this and are expected to sort of deal with it and their role is increased and magnified you're going to have a situation in which is going to begin to really tear at the fabric of this kind of political consent so so a key point here and a key recommendation that I would take away from what you just said is prepare for failures you are not going to integrate everybody back it is not going to be a perfect process there will be some people who will cause problems and you need to train police forces and train the political class to know how to respond to those things in a way that doesn't inflame the situation even more right so that's a concrete step which we shouldn't plan for the perfect success of our programs Jocelyn yeah I would like to say that a lot of the intervention have been on what I would call the demand side of the countering extremism you know finding who is attracted how and trying to find a way to dissuade and it's very important to have this approach but it cannot be the only one what is not really addressed is the supply side let's put it a beautiful scenario tomorrow there is beautiful democracies in different parts of the world but there will still be attraction of some group and some people to this global ideology you know Bin Laden before he died and before we find the foreign policy issues thanks for bringing that up again he was issuing fatwas on the global planet the weather issue and he was providing responses for people who were not only Muslims so there is I mean we say we said Al-Qaeda is the second of ancient I don't agree with that Al-Qaeda has still a lot of attraction actually if you look at the Qashy brothers in Paris they were following Al-Qaeda not either so I would not dismiss Al-Qaeda and I would really be careful on not taking into account this global issue so it's very uncomfortable it's what kind of global responses we provide beyond national strategies and it doesn't have to be theological you know we have how did the communists got defeated how did communists got defeated jihadism is like communism how do we distinguish between Islam and jihadism and for this we need not state intervention but also strengthening groups in civil societies at the international level which is the hardest thing to do if not impossible for now although you know the way communism got defeated in in some important respects was it was contained and it was allowed to die of its own natural defects no it was also the attraction of the western way of life and the western products that helped it dissolved from within well yes I mean that was a component of it as well yeah practical so I think de-radicalization comes along with reintegration or perhaps follows a successful reintegration program and the other point I want to make is that your strategy depends of course on the circumstances one strategy applies to the guys coming back who now want to become a part of the society again and another strategy applies to some of these guys who have committed a crime apparently been still enemy of the society being convicted being sentenced and there you could do some de-radicalization work but it must be put together in quite a different way from than the other program I told you about one of the most effective measures that we use is offering a mentorship mentors, Muslim mentors who are very familiar with Islam were able to discuss Islamic issues with these guys and make them understand that you can be a good and faithful Islamist Islam believer without being an extreme Islamist and that has worked in several cases okay you know one of the things just listening to your response and thinking about this little bit that strikes me as another thing that we ought to fold into the mix here is that the proportionality of the response really matters in other words if it's disproportionate it feeds into narratives that is extremely unconstructive in fact there is a there is a component to the spread of violent extremism that borrows a little bit from the Intifada playbook where you go and people strike out small groups of people anticipating a larger response because then the larger response says see we told you so and drives recruitment now of course it's a very different situation I'm not drawing political analogy but between the two necessarily but proportionality is really hard in situations like this the you know proportion and we see it here in other kinds of ways I can only imagine I was just thinking about this and say you know if the foreign fighter comes to the United States and or London or Paris and does something like this the response of the West will be radically different than if it's within the region and huge and we've seen it we've already seen that we've seen that did you want to say something Cal? I was simply saying that I think to reiterate your point is that the importance of maintaining law and order and not having knee jerk legislation to contain the new threat will be really really important I think having legislating in haste as usually leads to bad policy and bad policing as well right anticipate the problems prepare for the problems legislate before the problems because if you do it a day after it will be out of proportion and will create issues yes I'm struck by the fact I think Catherine's last point is very important especially in a Tunisian context we need to build in some resiliency and bandwidth in order for them to both tackle their existing underlying problems of foreign fighters and the root causes of countering violent extremism but going back to the premise that you have to have you have to expand this pie and the pie shrinking and that's creating more tension therefore you're getting this cause and effect of unintended consequences so I'd like to just offer a practical recommendation as we've been talking so the good news is our tech companies have been interested I'll put the Saudi Arabia around to the side but of engaging in Tunisia and as you know I in my capacity as the CEO of this corporation participant in a public-private partnership we need more people at the table and we need more people to invest in Tunisia but to our government colleagues instead of sort of wild-eyed ideas how are you going to incentivize and offset the risk that multi-nationals and U.S. corporations they need some some they need we need to be taken care of and I need to see some skin in the game from the U.S. So what are you proposing they do? I want to see a more robust realistic risk insurance program that will allow me to go in on steroids I'll pick on steroids and accelerate it because right now it is only doing mega projects they do a lot of really really good work but the pipeline is too long so let's shorten the pipeline but let's have a realistic risk insurance that can as I said open this and create some resiliency and bandwidth but we need skin in the game I do think by the way it's a very constructive approach which is you can spend a little bit of money on insurance get a disproportionate return leverage it with private capital produce some of the job creation some of the socially stabilizing elements that you can and it's clear one of the messages from this is you know a lot of the best responses to these security issues are social economic and political issues did you want to say something? You don't okay does anybody else have a specific suggestion in this case with regard to the foreign fighter issue? Jim? It's a technical point to Tony Bestandig the one thing the U.S. government could do the Department of State to show that it cares about American businesses particularly in dangerous places is to take the OSAC which is the overseas security initiative that is run by security officers post and put that under the ambassador the ambassador leads that the ambassador meets with these people on a regular basis talks not only about security but all the other issues that are involved and how they're participating in essentially a private public partnership with the U.S. government to help the countries that they're involved in you don't need it in Paris but you certainly need it in the parts of the world we're talking about Can you effectively stop the foreign fighter problem without stopping the conflict in Iraq or Syria? No. So I mean another component of this is that the engine that creates foreign fighters are not just the domestic issues they're the international opportunities that draw them there and if it's not Iraq and Syria it could be Yemen it could be Libya it could be Sinai there are a lot there are a variety it could be Afghanistan yes This was a point I was about to make earlier but I could see we were all hitting for the break It's really hard as we've heard in the course of the day to get down to the super local level as the U.S. government two levels higher we're not even at the nation state we're at the international kind of nagging mummy what you all need to do at the local parish level but one area where we can have an influence A is trying to deal with these conflicts which involves a significant military component as Steve Hadley talked about this morning but also David you talked about it several times and it's come up in various contexts this idea of a tipping point in societies and that's where Tunisia is so important I'm interested not only on why Tunisia sends 3000 people off to Syria and Iraq but also why nonetheless it's such a stable place compared to not just Yemen but possibly and Lebanon but possibly even Jordan and we need more stable places and fewer places like Libya and Yemen and that's where the U.S. government leveraging the business sector leveraging its security role in the region leveraging its 150 account because we can't turn the whole region into Scandinavia but we can use targeted funds to help governments and to help institutions to maintain that tipping point and we can monitor that so that's an area where the U.S. government can A. while trying to deal with the really blatant problem such as Iraq and Syria and that involves military as well as others try to nurture the Tunisias the Moroccos the Jordan's and some of the other countries in the region towards the green side rather than the red side because otherwise more of them may go the direction of Libya and Yemen you know this is a circular point which is extremely important to our discussion the hard to admit we're here in the Institute of Peace this is peace game and you want to focus purely on peaceful means of avoiding future conflict but you can't build I once wrote a book called the price of peace which looked at long long time ago peacekeeping efforts in places like Bosnia and the Middle East and so forth and the conclusion I came to is you can't build a political house you can't build an economic house on a security sinkhole you know unless you stabilize the security situation you don't get to these places and you can't work around that because it's the volatility of those places that is the furnace in which these these fighters get forged and we have to keep that in mind as well yes I mean just on that point I mean I think you know it's as you're kind of alluding to it's not zero sum you know some of these things are happening in parallel if you look at a case like Libya and you look at Yemen the warring factions are not necessarily Daesh or Al Qaeda they're other warring factions and because of their destabilizing effect they create a vacuum for for Daesh to move into so in Libya in the case because you have you know the dawn what was it the I forget the something dawn yeah dawn and dignity and and you have the you know the two governments insert and other areas you get ISIS moving in and so there is an element of peace negotiations diplomacy then creating the conditions for unified military action right so I don't think it's you know one or the other to create the secure environment and and I think when we're talking about Tunis I think it's interesting you know we always look at these issues looking backwards we're looking at it you know as what has happened until now so we're really heavily focused on Iraq and Syria and meanwhile ISIS is extremely good at expanding when nobody's looking that's what they did when they went from Iraq into Syria built up their conditions and then went back into Iraq the same thing is now happening in in Libya in a deep way which is why I think the Tunisians are actually very very concerned about what's happening on the border and the foreign fighters are you know coming back is one issue but also those who are in in Libya and Yemen when we look at what's happening in Saudi Arabia we're not talking about as much but there is another conflict where Hadir Moot the you know eastern side of the country you know the fighting has happened with the Houthis on the western and northern side and it's in Hadir Moot where you've had al-Qaeda and other people come in and now where the attack's happening just north of that up into eastern province so I think you know we we should also be forward looking and anticipating and anticipating also what peace moves we can make to create the framework for military action or interdiction etc when if we're dealing with violent extremism on a broad global basis you know we can recognize the different terrorist groups have different modus operandi and so they're like viruses and al-Qaeda has historically been a virus that has attacked healthy tissue and Daesh is a virus that attacks unhealthy tissue but both are viruses that are bred in unhealthy tissue they are bred in failed and failing states high stress economies high stress environments places where there's a great deal of alienation where there is some kind of pathology you're shaking your head well I was going to Farah up to a point there are 180 Americans who left to go to Syria there are people who are radicalized in places that are very calm and polite and very pretty outside so I get it gets it gets very dangerous when we start to make generalizations about failed states and non-failed states well I but and environments that okay but I was saying and forgive me I'm not being defensive I'm trying to elaborate it may I may be being defensive well we'll leave that for psychotherapy later on but but but what I meant was unhealthy tissue and a lot of those people are coming from places within our society that are not high functioning that are not highly comfortable now I'm you know I know there are exceptions in a lot of these places I mean and I think so it's not the norm most of these people are coming from healthy no wonderful places where they're have great lives I don't think that the the premise is is a correct one you talked about al-Qaeda and and I want to say as as and many people in this room were part of the sort of thinking when our country was attacked on 9-11 I'm speaking as me not in my role here but we had a lot of false promises that people had to be x y or z and everything was debunked the point that Catherine made today about everything that's been talked about in terms of men being radicalized that is because we made a premise we had a belief that women who are Muslim could not be radicalized and if we continue down the cycle of thinking about things in a very contained fashion that makes it comfortable for us to understand it we will miss the boat and this is our moment to take a look globally at what we're seeing and so to say that's why I'm pushing back on you too you don't want to say failed and non-stailed failed actors you don't want to say it's just the middle east or not the middle east you want to talk about the demographic across the world because that's the those are the data points that are being connected around that person and to your point about the host I will agree you have a healthy body that begins to get sick and as that and as that person is getting sick that is with where the bad guys come in and start to pull out so we need to keep the bodies healthy and and all the answers to that are multifaceted but it is not because somebody is in a failed state or not failed state it isn't because there's a democracy or there isn't a democracy otherwise we wouldn't have 180 Americans that have gone 2,000 Brits and so on okay I think we have more agreement than disagreement on this we're coming to the last minute or two here of this particular session very briefly I just wanted to point out there have been a couple of times when we have made these generalizations about the motivations of the foreign fighters and foreign fighters coming back but then when we did the polls there were two questions about what motivates the foreign fighters let me backtrack for a second we're talking about needing to solve entirely the issue the conflicts in Iraq and Syria before we can address the foreign fighter situation completely to a certain extent that may be true but in our polling the role of the Syria factor was actually very small in motivating the foreign fighters either coming from the west or from elsewhere okay the end like Farah I'm gonna speak for myself very quickly I think what might be useful in the constructive solutions is the concept of civilian protection as being an organizing thought principle for us to think about and it goes to your point about why in the U.S. or in France or in London an attack has a very different character than it does in other parts of the world and that's because I think one of the theories is the social contract between governments and citizens on civilian protection is much stronger in those places and so for the places where the social contract of civilian protection can be strengthened and we can be thinking about building forces whether they be police intelligence or military forces that have a surrounding principle of protecting their civilians not just killing terrorists I think we will start to see you know an ability for a generation to provide something that looks like a safer and more prosperous future as opposed to one that just has less extremism and so I do think the concept of civilian protection can be really useful in constructive solutions going forward it's a very helpful idea Nancy we're here at the end of this particular session we've got a break I know we've carefully are there snacks in the break there's snacks there's snacks that are carefully calibrated to ensure your blood sugar rises high enough that you can maintain your intellectual engagement through the last session which is going to be quite interesting but to wrap this up as you've been listening to this discussion what have been your big sort of takeaways from all? Well I think this was a very useful conversation about how we understand the relationships between where various strains of extremism come from and where they have impact the one issue that I didn't really hear as much about as I would have wished is the reaction in Tunisia to both the riots and the bombing I think is not only important the reaction is not only important in terms of how they address the foreign fighters and I know that was the narrowly framed question but how they don't backtrack on what has been a more inclusive approach post the Jasmine Revolution and so how does the international community that wants Tunisia to succeed help Tunisia to maintain that more inclusive approach and I do think that's where some of the business opportunities economic development approaches but as well as some of the earlier conversation around policing approaches are very important and I note you know the second move there was a political component to the riots that were underway and so it's definitely all parts of the Tunisian society that needs to have assistance in staying in focus and balance on this sort of treacherous course forward on inclusivity okay really important point now here are your marching orders we have this good panel it's coming up it's going to be a good discussion we're going to talk a little bit about some of our cross-cutting conclusions and then look forward strategically and talk with Greg Creverton who I see is here and we are going to talk strategically looking forward at you know what we think the best big ideas that we can embrace are and what that we can recommend are now you have all come to this from your own personal experiences where you have been focusing on ideas on how to address this this problem and how do we counter violent extremism and you may not have heard the idea that you think is most important articulated here the next hour is the time to articulate that the next hour we are out of the scenarios we are into trying to sum up trying to underscore the points we think are most important I'd like to avoid generalizations I'd like to avoid you know the sort of atmospherics of this we've established some of those things and focus on specific policy recommendations that could work for a country the United States or European country or a country in the region could work for the international community could work for an NGO could work for the private sector working with the public sector but what we really want are specific policy solutions that might be of some value that might not have been framed during the course of the day or that may have been framed during the course of the day that you just want to underscore because it's most important we're going to have to keep it crisp because we've got some great speakers and we've got a lot of ground to cover but I encourage you while you are snacking and replenishing your blood sugar to think this through so you come in here able to sum this up and to really enable us to underline the key points of the discussion thanks for this session please go enjoy yourself and we'll see you in 15 minutes all right ladies and gentlemen if you would take your seats we will begin you're going to sleep in no time at all all right so we've been going at this a while we had a good night last night we've had a very good day today several people who have been to a number of these have walked up to me and said this is the best group this group has been the most diverse the most interesting the most engaged the most committed to their roles I think that's true I think it's been a really good day but none of these processes are actually better than their conclusions none of them are better than you know what are the big ideas are there new ideas are we coming up with something new and fresh in the context of this discussion and so for this session we'll leave the roles behind we want to be ourselves we want each of you to be leading experts in this area just as you are all leading experts and because we've done this before and we felt that it was always very important to bring in some outside perspectives we're very fortunate to have here with us Greg Treverton who's the chairman of the national intelligence council which is a really important part of the director of national intelligence that looks forward and Greg is a leading thinker on intelligence and on how intelligence can be used and how it should evolve to face the challenges of the world that we are living in and likely to live in in the future and then at the end of the table here is Graham Allison who is well known to all of you from Harvard's Kennedy School one of the leading thinkers on foreign policy for a long long time in fact and he asserts this was his grandfather but in fact up in our office at foreign policy is copy number one of foreign policy which came out in the winter of 7071 and one of the most important articles in it was by Graham Allison and so every event we do we bring him no I'm but Graham has been part of this dialogue for a long time and is one of the smartest strategic thinkers that we know and so here's how this is going to work Nancy's going to offer some seem thematic conclusions from the day I'll fill in one or two if I've got any and then I'm going to pose a question to Greg and oppose a question to Graham about how this might fit into the longer term way we manage these kind of issues pertaining to violent extremism I mean our focus here is combating violent extremism so what are what are some longer term ideas about it and then after literally just one round of this what I want to do is open it up to the audience so that you've got some of your best ideas if you have no ideas don't say anything that's my suggestion you know but if you've got an idea a suggestion on the policy front offer that up and then periodically I will turn to this group and say well what's your reaction to that and we will try to make the next 45 minutes lively and fast paced you know what that means so Nancy great thank you I just want to offer a few thematics that really emerged from the day and the first is that you know this is this is definitely a problem that relates to the highly interconnected world that we live in not just from the issues around recruiting that we discussed but also the way knowledge spreads and so policies that are practiced these these kinds of approaches affect how extremism is understood in any given locale so the interconnected interrelated nature of the world makes it very difficult and the second piece of that is it also limits the ability of states to be principal movers of solutions and that emerged very strongly in terms of what we experienced this morning where we really weren't able to use the usual state levers to come up with different solutions or effective solutions and the importance of the private sector the civil society of faith leaders and of understanding what exactly is is motivating and moving millennials so that leads to one of the conclusions that emerged both with Tom Donilon and Steve Hadley and in various comments the importance of really considering more integrated strategies that we need to have a number of these voices at the table in order to understand how the relationship of what we do matters both in the short term in the long term and from the hard side and the soft side and I liked very much Jorn's comments that sometimes the soft side is the hard side because it's more difficult to really understand what will work or what won't work especially with longer-term time horizons and sometimes political pressures which is the next point and that is there is still a very weak evidence basis for understanding what some of these interactions and what some of these interventions will actually do and what they will do in a particular context Finally is the importance of a local focus that we spent the morning talking about some of these larger frames lot of it happening more at the U.N. and state level when we got down to particular places and more specific pieces of the problem we started coming up with more specific possible solutions that looked at the role of local police the role of communities the role of understanding what is moving a particular young person into or out of extremism and thinking a bit more granularly about how to address that in a particular community looking at what Tom called the conducive conditions that can and must be addressed locally there was a very important discussion Georgia and a couple others mentioned this about Steve Hadley also about not just the counter narrative but also understanding what is the positive vision what is the alternative identity and how do you understand that and how do you support it and who articulates it and how do you support that Finally I think we just need to note the very forward and often audacious proposals by our tech industry colleagues and it underscores that tech is clearly an actor both in how some of the particulars of this issue that we're discussing today are spread and if we can harness some of that creative energy for solutions that gives us a pathway to keep focused on into the future so those are a few thematics Okay thank you let me let me offer a couple of others that that that I picked up in the way and this you know I'm gonna turn to Greg and then I'm gonna turn to Graham and sort of say based on what you've just heard and based on what you know you know what kind of priorities would you set in terms of dealing with these issues I was struck at the beginning by you know the the discussion that Catherine kicked off of sort of five W's and an H you know this is the who what where when why you know and how we go and tackle it and one of the reasons I am is because there is clearly a spectrum of responses here you know from dealing with this from the supply side to the demand side dealing with this from identifying the people who are most likely to end up being drawn to violent extremism and dealing with you know trying to create off ramps so that they don't go there to interdicting them as they are on the way there to getting them off that path after they have been there and that each of these things involves a whole range of tools and I noticed as I was looking at the Twitter that somebody said that I denigrated soft solutions and soft power and sort of the psychotherapeutic side of this thing that's wrong that's I do not that I feel those things are vitally important to all of this and what I think I was trying to say was that you know Nancy mentioned that sometimes doing what soft is hard but you know we talked about going from the social to the science from the interpretive qualitative to the quantitative from dealing with the social origins of this to dealing with the battlefield consequences of this and there are no solutions that deal with just one element of it or another and that there are some elements of this that are more distasteful than other elements of this and that we you know can't do all of it and so we have to prioritize and so another key point that was made in a number of cases Shlomo made the point and others made the point is we have to identify we can't you know stop the flow of violent extremists everywhere we have to identify choke points we sort of have to look at the cardiovascular system of violent extremism and identify the points where we can place pressure and reduce the effectiveness of the system at the beginning along the way and at the end as we do so another of the points that came up is that we have to be very careful of unintended consequences so you know if we act we must act proportionally because to me if there is one you know big takeaway from this it's and this goes back to the soft hard dichotomy it's that narrative is action and action is narrative you cannot say we are going to create a counter narrative and behave in a way that undermines your counter narrative you have to behave in a way that actually supports and embodies your narrative because words alone won't do the trick and if you give one area which you know if you take one action it's going to be seized upon by an adversary and used and so this narrative equals action thing is extremely important I too like Nancy was struck by the need to gather more evidence and move more towards the use of big data as we can in finding these kind of solutions identifying the individual movements at the local level quantifying them translating that information in real time to actors who can take advantage of it identifying trends very early rather than requiring them to accumulate over time so that things can be nipped in the bud and also using that kind of data analysis to actually understand what is driving actions which gets us to you know one other question which we haven't gotten into here but I think we ought to over some time and that is what about countering violent extremism is unique to the 21st century environment there have always been violent extremists there has always been terrorism there have always been violent outbursts against governments and individuals who were unpopular but do we live in an era in which the ability to connect small alienated groups into larger groups change the character of threats going forward the ability to respond quickly to information for there to be a very rapid spread of a viewpoint for a narrative to take life and go viral changes the nature and the character of threats you know do we live in a point where today we're talking about violent extremism as it's manifested in the political problems of the Middle East but we could just as easily face these kinds of issues this metastasization of social dysfunction in domestic problems in the United States or in Europe or in Russia or in other places that will mimic many of these things because we are living with a new kind of social construct that is that is empowered by new technologies I'm not sure but I think we need to think about that and I think we run a risk if we look at the problem in terms of the proximate threat whether it was Core Al Qaeda or it's Daesh today or it's militant Islamic threats across the world or it's something else I think too narrow of you is problematic so with that in mind you've heard now from Nancy and I sort of where this is you're clearly at a disadvantage of not having heard the whole day but perhaps there are two or three things that resonate with your view on how to deal with these things that we can turn to Greg and then Graham I missed the session I just got back from Asia late last night so I had to put an appearance at the office at least let me just say a couple things and then hope others will react pick up David's last one I think this is we are seeing in technology in other ways a new this is different that the combination of people being able to live in their own echo chamber to communicate quickly it does mean to self-radicalize themselves on the net that's I think quite different and that does seem to me to be characteristic of the future we face it's obviously very difficult for folks like me who work in intelligence because that means individual groups may be atomized and therefore hard to find radicalized quickly and sometimes act fairly quickly after they radicalize though we do know that the vast majority of people that radicalize then don't go on to commit violence and maybe there isn't that atomization some advantage in the sense that the kind of semi-loan wolves very hard to predict attacks we've seen are almost certain to continue but happily they have been while tragic less damaging than the major attacks we've feared since 9-11 so there is by that atomization I think makes both for less capability on their part but still lethal and maybe the silver lining is it makes less harm to us when an attack happens though politically as you know it's very hard to say that out loud the other point I guess I would make strongly is Nancy's point that this really is difficult area for governments to act almost anything we did to try and create a counter narrative would be suspect from the get-go as she says we also then have to act primarily through intergovernmental organizations what we where I said in the intelligence world try to do and this is difficult enough is to remind our colleagues that other people view the world very differently than we do and not everybody it turns out really aspires to be a middle-class American they're moved by many other things as well and by the way by their own testimony many of the would-be terrorists almost all the would-be terrorists mention U.S. and other western policies as part of why they radicalized so that's a tough message to get across but it does mean it seems to me that the counter counter narrative needs to be done by communities all the emphases you've had can't be done across a region different it's a local set of issues very hard for as we know often when we talk to the parents of radicalized people they say gosh I had no idea so even communities can fail but it's got to be there that the task is most impressive and even for the government to help communities is difficult because last thing we want to do is kill someone by our embrace so I think this does have to be primarily the work of the private sector of police local police local communities local NGOs I think that seems to be a strong conclusion it makes it hard to implement because that means the implementation is atomized as well but I think it's a powerful insight let me stop there David now you know that's a really really important point and I think it's a kind of a key takeaway here which hasn't come up and I would characterize it as mirroring just as a group like Daesh can grow decentralized open source across many borders take many forms embrace lots of local issues and use them to their benefit people alienated for lots of reasons that the response also has to be decentralized localized open source using the tools that are available not top down not one size fits all and that that requires you know that's sort of how companies think today and it's not how governments think they tend to say well let's get a bunch of governments together we'll hand down a set of rules and they will be implemented and I think we need to think a little bit about how that mirroring can be used as a tool Graham so thanks very much I'm sorry that I missed most of the conversation but I've had several pairs of eyes and ears here and they've given me some benefit of their takeaways I make two big points first an academic moment so I'll go back to 1793 back a long time ago 1793 just to remind you the 1776 was the question of independence 83 the war with Britain was over 89 the constitution 1789 was also a big event in France the revolution so 1793 two big things happened at least in the European American space on the European space you got to the reign of terror so the guillotine at the plastic concord started chopping people 3 000 that year in Paris and 30 000 across the rest of France but in Philadelphia which was then the capital of the US people started dying from what was called yellow fever and yellow fever was an identified illness people caught it they turned a little yellowish many of them and a large number of them died so over the course of the summer of 1793 more than 10 percent of the population of Philadelphia died John Adams was the vice president Abigail Adams his wife a very thoughtful outspoken person who knew many many things explained to her sister what was going on in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793 she said in the summer it became hotter the rivers became uh turmoil there was more more turmoil in the river this gave off putrid air and the putrid air caused the disease so she said to John let's get the hell out of there and they left and were gone for five months the vice president he went back to Braintree, Massachusetts and in the fall and the end of November when it became colder the putrid air went away and they returned the vice president to the Capitol now why might that be relevant for this conversation I'm wondering I would say the conversation that's been held about this in Washington in general in the policy community is way way way more like the conversation in 1793 about whatever was happening then most people are prepared to recognize that is if you think about something you said earlier in one of the sessions David about the viral analogy so actually think about this if you were a medical person just think of it from the medical perspective so medicine has actually progressed since 1793 many other areas of policy I'm less comfortable or confident about and certainly in this space but in any case medicine asks four questions first what the cause is this a virus or is it a bacteria do we know the genetic code in the case of whatever we call it violent extremism or whatever we have a good sense of the cause I don't think so okay secondly how is it transmitted so in the case of Ebola to take an analogy that we've thought about lately unless there's a transfer of bodily fluid from one to the other there's no transfer in the case of yellow fever it takes a mosquito not just a mosquito a female mosquito who bites one gets the fluid transmits to another in the case of ISIS or Daesh or violent extremism well let me count the wings I'm not sure we understand next who's susceptible so in the case of Ebola you look at populations in the case of violent extremism here I think there's a little bit of help so these are mostly males they're mostly testosterone driven they're mostly 16 or 18 to 35 they top out there's a few females and there's a few others but if for whatever reason the population of males from 16 to 35 went into a deep freeze for that period would this problem be different? it might be so just to be controversial finally do we know what to do about it so in the case of yellow fever the answer was to purge people so you gave them a mercurial purge and they vomited and this was thought to make them better or you bled them let's let down their blood pressure I would say many of the treatments we're administering look look about as good so I would like my takeaway from the analogy is to simply say I think about this phenomena we can talk we can use a lot of categories we can make some analogies but I think it's about as well understood as yellow fever in 1793 I think it's a great analogy from Dr. Allison it also calls to mind by the way discussion that I had not too long ago with a group of people in Washington addressing cyber threats and new technological threats and people were going around the room and the military people were coming up with a military response we need a cyber command and the intelligence people were coming up with an intelligence response we need to gather information from the internet and deal with that and you know in this particular case we have economic people saying the solution is jobs and political people saying the solution is a political solution and there you start thinking when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail you know you start thinking people sort of stay in their lanes but during that discussion just to take your metaphor in a direction I don't think you thought it was gonna go a guy came up who happened to be the head of one of the advanced research projects agencies that we have in the US government whose training was as a public health official and he said maybe the way to deal with cyber and it just echoes with this discussion is actually the public health model I mean and I think it may pertain to this at the origin stage the public health model says ask the questions that Graham asked and then try to come up with some best practices and some education and the kind of things that reduce the likelihood of the contagion that reduce you know make people aware of the potential threats that involve a sharing of information as more is known and that helps to contain the threat there is no one-size-fits-all threat we've talked about this but at least in terms of the very very very beginning of this supply chain of violent extremists it may be that the public health model that says here here is the vulnerable community here are the conditions that produce the threat here is the best way that we know of to reduce it and so is actually going to reduce the number of people that go to the next stage so I do think in addition to trying to gather the kind of information that we don't have that Graham's analogy speaks to we may also want to try other models we've got 15 or 20 minutes we've got a bunch of good ideas around the table I am sure of it these guys will also have some responses to it so I want to go back to the kind of the discipline that we had at the beginning if people want to intervene and offer up an idea and they could keep it to 30 seconds or a minute so we can get some back and forth that would be the best way the kind of lightning round of big conclusions who wants to go first all right I'm going to is there a microphone someplace all right I'm we're going to take I'm going to take one of the first comments here from the audience but it's got to be 30 seconds the microphone the floor will give way beneath you at the end of 30 seconds so you'll disappear thank you so much I'm Akbar Khwaja former World Bank official and thank you USIP for organizing this peace game I believe that peace effort in the world will not be complete unless there is peace in religions and the peace in religion will not be complete unless there is dialogue and dialogue is not complete unless there is knowledge so I personally believe that sharing knowledge and learning about other religions is very important I think consortium of rabbis imams the pastors somebody mentioned is a good useful tool and as president Obama mentioned religion is not radical these are the people who are radical so Al Qaeda and Daesh they are terrorists Islam is not terrorists thank you thank you specific suggestions for policy actions Farah so I just wanted to echo a couple of themes that had come forward and push back a little bit on the panel I think for many people CVE is sort of the latest and newest and greatest thing that everybody's talking about because we have this great threat with ISIS on the table right now but in fact we've had 13 and a half years worth of discussion within communities that are on the ground to understand the ideological threat and there's a lot of value in what we have learned so I would say that while we haven't talked about it in the mainstream the way we are doing in the summer of 2015 believe you me there are people who from September 12th all the way since our country was attacked have developed the kind of understanding around why it is that people get sick so what is my point when you asked for a very specific policy recommendation I think one of the biggest failures has been and we are here in Washington is the partisan nature of this actual beast because the teams that are looking at this have not indeed looked back at what had happened and what we've learned to build off of it and we spent a lot of time in the first part of this administration waiting and watching and thinking that things were different as opposed to moving the ball down the field so policy recommendation as we transition into a new administration and I am a bipartisan person I am simply suggesting as a former policy maker that we indeed take the lessons from policy makers in terms of what has been seated what we have understood what the indicators are on the ground at the very local level and the money the hundreds of thousands of dollars indeed millions of dollars that our government has spent on developing programs on the ground and scaling them up so you're not building on a new front and then I have one other point that I did not raise today but I will raise because it's provocative and people are going to throw tomatoes at me we talked about Does anybody have tomatoes? They might I think you're okay We talked about the ecosystem in which some of this stuff thrives and the chapters have been 9-11 onward but actually the ecosystem has been building for 25 or 30 years in terms of the mindset on the ground what specifically am I speaking about there was some reference down at that side of the table to Gulf ideologies that are spreading in a wide variety of ways so here's the policy question I have to the panel Do you think our country will ever get to a place where we are able to reconfigure and reimagine what it would be like to speak openly and clearly about the impact of Gulf ideologies around the world both in textbooks that are being sent to children to learn in hatred that is being learned to spread and in mosques that are being built the diversity of Islam is one of the most important central pieces to building a new generation of young Muslims that understand how to push back and when we allow one monolith to control everything we are building that ecosystem so that's my question for the panel Go ahead, Greg I don't mean to duck but I think I will keep my job for the time being that is a very difficult conversation for us to have and in some sense while we should be able to have it it's more important that people in the region actually have it because there are the people who can do something about it and as I said earlier are anything we did particularly as a government is so suspect that even if we said something true it probably wouldn't have much effect Well you have tenure right? So you can see I say outrageous things every day every day but Farah what outrageous thing would you have us say? You know I'm not in government anymore and when I was in government I was very limited in terms of how I could speak about Saudi Arabia for example right so what I will say is in the demolishing of local cultures and heritage around the world we have seen and we do have evidence that Saudi Arabia has been responsible for doing that around the world we don't talk about it that makes a difference to how a young person grows up because when they the only thing that they see is the newest version of what it means to be Muslim it means that that young kid who has 800 years of history behind him or her doesn't look at that as important so what would I want the United States government to do? I want us to be clear with Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Gulf that are promoting a monolithic kind of Islam and decimating historic heritages and diversity of Islam first secondly we need to absolutely be clear about where foreign books and textbooks are being written and published that are spreading a particular kind of ideology we aren't speaking about that publicly and I think that that's very dangerous I'm not cutting you off for the substance but just for the for the time do you want to say anything else on that or was I agree so see no tomatoes here I'll come to you in one second no no go go ahead but briefly really in minute increments I will do my best to make it in a minute thank you David and Farah finally you nailed it on the point that we know where the source of this ideology is from and it's spread but beyond that I want to be more constructive and just give my final statement in terms of a vision for the new Middle East as I mentioned what drives Daesh is the ability to give these disillusioned youth a vision of what the future looks like it gives them dignity gives them respect it brings back Islam into forefront of what it was the Khalifat the heyday the golden age of Islam so we need to redefine that but also provide it so what I would like to just make I do my best in one minute you've just but you've just used your man 29 seconds I was 29 seconds I'll go to my final 30 so the vision for a new Middle East addressing the legitimate demands socioeconomic and political aspirations of young educated and connected population bringing dignity opportunity future to those populace what is our goal in a regional perspective stability and security in the region political settlement for multiple military theaters a proactive inter-religious dialogue to shift Islamic thought to the center from the far right Iran as a sheer leader and Saudi Arabia as the Sunni leader should play a major part in this inter-religious dialogue we require institution building and weaving conflict resolution mediation peace building into our academia into our institutions and our governance real location of resources GCC stop spending money on buying weapons instead pump it into more socioeconomic development in the region and within your own populace and countries we need regional cooperation disaster management humanitarian aid economic opportunities early warning systems and preventive measures and confidence building measures because there's no trust among these regional countries and finally in terms of the activities that international community can do this is the first and foremost US and the western powers have to acknowledge their failures in their foreign policy in the Middle East that's important that's the first that they should do number two they have to reorient their foreign policy towards a wave from these kingdoms and monarchy and dictatorships towards more the aspirations of the populations you know you advocate democracy but you play a different policy in the Middle East okay I've got to cut you I've got to look you've literally what you've done here is covered every single point about every single problem in the region no it's it's it's important to because I tell you why because this is the region that is burning and I want to just finally just give you I'm going to give you 30 seconds and then I'm going to unplug the microphone no problem what I'm trying to say is that you know the British the French and the Germans massacred each other's two times in two world wars holy macro we're going backwards again time no no no no because I'm trying to give you the Daesh problem today is a snapshot in the history of of what we're looking at in the future you know EU would never have been envisioned following the Second World War or the First World War we need to think outside the box do not be in the mud of today think of what will be the bud and the future that will be created in the region of the Middle East and that requires visionary thinking that requires to understand that this is just a snapshot and to get out of it we need to provide this new vision and that's what I'm hoping that we can collectively do in the near future thank you Andrea yes Andrea Koppel with the Global Humanitarian and Development Organization Mercy Corps we're working in most of these fragile states so my policy recommendation would be to change the framing instead of calling it countering violent extremism we need to frame it as preventing violent extremism it sends a very different message it sends a message both internationally but also to Congress it's going to take a lot of hard work by this administration and by experts to educate Congress that the money doesn't need to go simply to F-15s but it needs to go into the conflict mitigation programming into the reconciliation into addressing the root causes of what drives these youth predominantly into these extremist groups thank you very much I only got five minutes here okay so I'll try to be quick and by five minutes it's not five minutes no I mean five minutes yeah no yeah there's there were a lot of inshallah ideas there but they were good by Iman I believe that was very well intentioned it's the inshallah and it did cover yeah no it covered a lot of ground because of time I wanted to stop I think you know first of all there's a lot of capacity constraints for people in this room we are we propose things we want to be the masters of it but as always it's you know who actually has the power to do any of this so creating jobs for all the youth in the Middle East well you had an Arab spring awakening uprising et cetera and everybody in the room me, you all the governments failed miserably nothing succeeded nobody created any jobs it's still the number one issue in the Middle East private sector wasn't there and now there's not even any attention to that so I think we really have to take a sober look at ourselves now one of the big things we keep talking about in all the peace games it's the issue that keeps recurring and we say we can't change that and it ends up being a defining component of the context and that's the situation between Saudi Arabia and Iran and we take it for a given that Saudi Arabia and Iran cannot reconcile cannot be working together et cetera I would pause it that the circumstances are such in the Middle East across the board locally nationally regionally that they cannot be fundamentally changed today and that relates very significantly to this problem of the extremism problem that's being fueled there are things that can be done and we heard great examples but fundamentally cannot be changed unless there is a broader reconciliation or a daytime between Saudi Arabia and Iran where they can act in some type of concert and it's unrealistic as that sounds I think the U.S. fundamentally underestimates and the policy community underestimates its ability to convene those two actors in a room and talk with them and I think it's high time that happens and I don't think we should doubt that it's possible it very much is possible and we should be working towards that and I think that's a very tangible even though it's ethereal objective for us okay tangible but ethereal but look I mean it clearly your critical point which is if you take things as they are on the ground right now you could give up or you could say what is it in this that will take us to some place we've never been before and I think that point is a very constructive point because frankly otherwise you just get you know you would throw up your hands and walk away so briefly I just want to actually pick up on the World War II piece which I was very interesting you know World War II obviously had the largest now the largest displacement in the world since World War II what arose out of World War II was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a lot of the Arab Spring was obviously it was an assertion of my rights you know I have rights and that's how it started a lot of it so I would just want us to see this as a rights based whatever happens it should be rights based it should be human rights based shouldn't be based on generalizations about an entire community of people between the ages of you know 16 and 30 I think we need to be much more specific than that I think we need to respect that there are differences in all communities including of course the Muslim community around the world and that people are vulnerable for different reasons but that whatever approach is taken it should start locally and it should be it should be rights based thank you very much Jocelyn very briefly very short I think that the idea would be talking about vision is the more we have been discussing we are still in a cold war vision with the center state the state being the major actor and looking for superpower that in this current situation would be the US and I think it doesn't reflect what are the dynamic at the ground which is people who distrust politics people who want to be empowered on a daily basis so what does this mean it means that we have to give up the idea that the US can solve and should solve the question of violent extremism it has to be a multilateral approach including also the Muslim countries and not only looking at Muslim states but independent thinking outside the Muslim state that's why when I hear all the time around versus Saudi Arabia I'm not sure that it reflects the capacity of innovation that exists in different civil societies and that can be tapped into but not through the state channel we have to forget about the state not to forget about it completely but not to bank on the state only to resolve these kind of global issues thank you very much I want to turn back to you guys based on what you've heard do you have anything else you would like to add to this conversation I just wanted to pick up the Inshallah agenda which seemed to be exactly right and a wonderful vision but I guess as I look back over the last 15 years if we'd taken a snapshot of how we thought about the terrorism problem at three-year interview intervals it would have been quite different one from the other we know that ISIL will go away at some point but it'll morph into something else we tend to get focused on the flavor of the month and I think the underlying conversation is the one you're trying to have about how do we think about causes is hard how do we think about key points of intervention it's going to be a long task because the kinds of demographics economics, sectarian, identity politics that are going on in the Middle East are all going in the wrong direction so it isn't going to go away quickly and that I think makes the task of trying to see if we can understand it better get beyond our putrid air diagnosis of the problem all the more important it's very hard I think but it's also very necessary where it seems to me in a funny way as several people said really at the beginning of thinking about this problem after we've been working on it for 15 years it's sort of the typical American ready fire aim approach and it seems to me this is a time for stepping back and trying to say yes we know there's going to be continuing manifestations of this violent extremism can we move back a step and really have some sense that there are things that we but more important others might do to do something about it Graham so if I stay with the theme here I mean I think that we will look back on this after a decade or two and still be amazed how different our views are then than they are now in the way that one sees in the public health or medical analogy and in the public health space if we take Ebola there we have a good good idea what the cause what's the transmission what's the fix and look at what's happened so it's pretty amazing if we look at yellow fever actually there's no yellow fever in developed countries now but 30,000 people died from yellow fever last year just not in the countries that we think about most of the time so it has not been eradicated but if we want to take influenza and flu every year there comes flu remember in 1918 50 million people died from flu in this huge influenza epidemic more than in World War I so I suspect a posture of humility about what we're doing and exploration is the place where I take away yes I think humility does play a huge role in this and and I think it's essential even as we need to embrace visions that are bolder than that and I think the humility takes many forms one form of which is to recognize this is not of this moment something a lot of people have been working on for a long time in the US but of course it's something that people in the region have been working on for centuries in many cases there are issues that have existed for centuries that we need to recognize as having historical roots but there are also phenomenon which are new that we have to recognize are different and where old solutions will not apply and where we need to be creative and understand what's new about them and that also requires a degree of humility in a purely practical sense we also have humility about peace game we can't bring together a group of people even a brilliant group of people like you for a day or day and a half and solve the most intractable problems in the world I'm reminded a little bit of a story that was told last night by one of my colleagues Claire Casey who I think is no longer here but who has been very helpful in putting this program together and I'll return to that thought in a moment but she described growing up as the daughter of a foreign service officer in Cairo and during the day some local workers would come periodically to the house and grab the mango tree and shake the mango tree and a few ripe mangoes would fall out of the tree which they would then pick up and eat those mangoes and that's kind of what we do at the peace game is we get a bunch of people together and we shake the tree a little bit and hopefully a few ripe mangoes fall out of the tree that can be useful in shaping the policy discussion and moving it forward we don't have the aspiration that we are going to solve the problems that have been insoluble we are just going to move closer fortunately for us this is an ongoing process again thanks to the support that we've had from our sponsors at the UAE embassy but the cooperation between USIP and foreign policy and all of you and this is a growing process you know we started out with one a year in Washington and in Abu Dhabi this year we're adding a discussion in September at the beginning of September which is going to be in Brussels our will then have our Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi meeting and I think what did we say the 9th and 10th of December and we will have a number of outreach meetings with government leaders here to try to bring these messages forward we have at foreign policy the peace channel where articles appear based on this and the preparatory articles that you know that lead up to these meetings the concluding articles that we draw and we encourage all of you if you have ideas on these things to send the articles to us and we'll post them on the peace channel we have 6 million people who read different parts of foreign policy each month and so it's a great platform to get those ideas out there so the dialogue also continues via that platform and we'll look for other platforms as we go so from my perspective this has been extremely worthwhile discussion because there have been quite a number of right mangoes that have fallen from the tree and before I turn it over to Nancy I do want to say in conclusion a special thanks to the wonderful people at USIP who've made this fantastic setting and this fantastic meeting possible to my wonderful team from foreign policy Grace Rooney and Stephanie and the others who are back there Maria who have made this possible it takes a lot of work and you don't see all the work we use the model of the duck gliding on the surface while it's paddling furiously beneath the surface a lot of work is going into it and so before I hand it over to Nancy I just ask you to all join me in thanking the USIP and FP staffs who put this together Nancy is our is our host and so I will turn to her for the concluding comments great thank you David and thank you for your energetic emceeing through the day and moving us all through a very complicated dialogue I think that Graham's historical frame bringing us back several hundred years was helpful thank you for bringing that at the end of the day Graham and thank you also Greg for bringing in the framing that I think underscores some of the difficulty with our own internal politics here in the United States both of which are very helpful and if we remember back to last night when Tom Donilon talked about a region that has really lost its state structures in at least four countries at this point and also at the beginning of the Arab Spring there was an effort by the Obama administration to do as it was termed in the Cairo speech align our interest with our values and I raised that apropos of the inshallah agenda and how it then quickly ran aground as the inability to balance the disintegration and insecurity with an effort to hold that frame and it seems that if we think about the historical framing on this and a number of you talked about the long time frame versus short actions that we need to have that's an important thing to walk out of holding all of those multiple dimensions in focus at the same time the second really important point that I wanted to hit is that from a policy perspective it is how to balance the heart and the soft and that was raised in a number of ways last night and today and being able to have a better evidence basis on our public health set of questions we need that so that we can bring that to the table to balance the heart and soft to rebalance some of the budgetary considerations and understand the inner relationships so I thank all of you for the very lively both in-role and out-of-role approaches that you brought to the conversation today it was a long day as people really stayed with it and I think surfaced a lot of good ideas and as David indicated we will seek to bring those forward in mango form or otherwise to fruition thank you and to bring to bear on further conversations together and on the policy conversation as we look at the challenges ahead I want to echo the thanks to both the foreign policy and the USIP team especially to those who worked through the night Lisa, Jamie, Juslin and masterful leadership with George Lopez and Bill Taylor working with Grace and the foreign policy team thank you thank you very much and thank you for being here with us today