U.S. General Can’t Understand What Motivates ISIS

ostrich

via In Battle to Defang ISIS, U.S. Targets Its Psychology – NYTimes.com.

WASHINGTON — Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, sought help this summer in solving an urgent problem for the American military: What makes the Islamic State so dangerous?

Trying to decipher this complex enemy — a hybrid terrorist organization and a conventional army — is such a conundrum that General Nagata assembled an unofficial brain trust outside the traditional realms of expertise within the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies, in search of fresh ideas and inspiration. Business professors, for example, are examining the Islamic State’s marketing and branding strategies.

We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it,” he said, according to the confidential minutes of a conference call he held with the experts. “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”

Four months after his initial session with the outside advisers, General Nagata, one of the military’s rising stars and the man Mr. Obama has tapped to train a Pentagon-backed army of Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, is still searching for answers.

“Those questions and observations are my way of probing and questioning,” General Nagata said in a brief email this month, declining on orders from his superiors to say any more.

The minutes of internal conference calls between General Nagata and more than three dozen experts he convened through Pentagon channels in August and October offer an unusual insight into the struggle to understand the Islamic State as a movement, and where the American military’s top leaders are most focused.

Did these so-called experts include terror-linked Muslim groups in the U.S.? Jihad-preaching imams in the U.S.?

One of the panel’s initial observations that has intrigued General Nagata is the Islamic State’s “capacity to control” a population, according to the minutes.

It is not so much the number of troops or types of weapons the militants use, the experts said. Rather, it is the intangible means by which the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, wrests and maintains control over territory and its people.

This ability, they discussed, centers on “psychological tactics such as terrorizing populations, religious and sectarian narratives, economic controls.”

The minutes, which are confidential but not classified, reveal disagreements among the experts over whether ISIS’ main objective is ideological or territorial — General Nagata encourages competing views, urging the group to have “one hell of a debate” over his questions.

Why are they guessing? ISIS plainly states its objective: An Islamic caliphate ruled by sharia. First in al Sham, eventually the world.

“The fact that someone as experienced in counterterrorism as Mike Nagata is asking these kind of questions shows what a really tough problem this is,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired three-star Army general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who has publicly raised similar concerns.

A final report by the group, which draws from industry, academia and policy research organizations, is due next month.

When General Nagata first convened the specialists on a conference call on Aug. 20, he described his priorities and the challenges that ISIS posed.

“What makes I.S. so magnetic, inspirational?” he said. He expressed specific concern that the militant organization is “deeply resonant with a specific but large portion of the Islamic population, particularly young men looking for a banner to flock to.”

Six weeks later, in a second conference call on Oct. 3, General Nagata praised the group’s initial efforts, but again noted, “I do not understand the intangible power of ISIL.”


It seems Nagata, like many before him, does not want to understand ISIS. He wants to overlook the obvious. It’s about Islam. And sharia. And spreading it through jihad. One wonders if Nagata asked the man fired by the DoD for speaking the truth about Islamic ideology for his input. From the 2008 warning that got him fired, To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring what Extremists say about Jihad:

…the thesis concludes that Islamic law forms the doctrinal basis of the jihadithreat that can only be understood through an unconstrained review of the Islamic law of jihad.  The failure to undertake a doctrine-based assessment of the enemy reflects a decision not to do so.  Accepting assurances from moderate Muslims that Islam had nothing to do with the events of 11 September 2001, President Bush made policy statements holding Islam harmless for the actions done by “extremists” in Islam’s name.  To accommodate, threat analysis was replaced by an analytical process that focuses almost exclusively on the war’s imputed underlying causes.  For those questions relating to Islam, the approach has been to defer to moderates and cultural experts for the answers we rely on to make WOT (War on Terror) related decisions.  Because only the war’s underlying causes are the ones deemed relevant, the enemy’s stated doctrine is dismissed as irrelevant.  In the WOT, however, the enemy unambiguously states that he fights jihad in furtherance of Islamic causes.   Denial of an Islamic basis to a war that the enemy says is grounded in Islamic doctrines of jihad reflects the acceptance of enormous risk.

Because our inability to understand the enemy stems from a decision not to know him, this thesis recommends the return to a threat analysis process as the methodology to analyze the enemy’s stated doctrine.  Because the enemy in the WOT states Islam as its doctrine, this means an unconstrained analysis of the Islamic law of jihad as found in the authoritative writings of recognized Islamic authorities.  When this is done, we will quickly realize what we have ignored “to our great detriment.”

Again, that was written seven years ago. In the video below, Stephen Coughlin discusses ISIS:

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of Command Center to add comments!

Join Command Center