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| Pâ•qidꞋ Yi•rᵊmᵊyâhꞋ u |
In the heyday of the Cold War, when the world made grisly sense, strategists touted a rollback policy toward communism. In the event, we rolled back precious little and had to be content with holding the line, at least unti11989. But "rollback" was a strategy decades ahead of its time. Unsuited to the brinksmanship of our Dr. Strangelove days, it is an eminently sensible approach to radical Islam.
Our efforts in the Islamic world have been largely wasted, when not counterproductive. We have spent half a century backing the wrong players. Oil smeared our vision and we concentrated on the self-destructive Arab states and oil-rich Iran, where our policy amounted to a sort of strategic Enron, built upon hollow assets and self-delusion. After Israel, listless Egypt remains the leading recipient of our aid dollars, while we have enmeshed ourselves in Middle Eastern confrontations we do not understand and cannot solve – but which excite venomous hatreds toward us as a reward for our efforts. We insist that Saudi Arabia, a police state that funds Islamic extremism around the world, is our friend. Our president plays host to its de facto king at his ranch. And we are pledged to protect those bazaars of terror, the Gulf states, with our blood.
But the Arab world, rich and poor, is nearly hopeless. With a few, strategically unimportant exceptions, it has given itself over to the narcotic effects of hatred and blame. Arab civilization cannot compete on a single productive front in the 21st century. And there is nothing we can to about it. If the Arab world will not repair itself, no amount of indulgence will make a difference. We have wasted decades on governments and populations who need us as an enemy to justify their profound failures. [emphasis added; ybd]
When well-meaning officials, academics or pop singers assure us that Islam is not the problem, they are utterly wrong. Islam, as promoted by Saudi Arabia and practiced by fanatics elsewhere in the Arab world, is precisely the problem. The Saudi variant attempts to buy off the forces of history at home, while exporting the Middle Ages to countries as diverse as Indonesia, Afghanistan and Turkey. The purpose of Saudi proselytizing seems to be to re-create in every Muslim culture the limited prospects of the Arab world.
At present, there is a mighty struggle underway on Islam's frontiers for that religion's soul. Those frontiers should be the focus of our efforts, to encourage Islam's humane tendencies. As useful as military engagement may be in places such as Georgia and the Philippines – along Islam's geographic frontiers [see geographic positions of Israel, Turkey and India; ybd] – constructive engagement on Islam's social, economic and spiritual frontiers would be even more helpful in the long run. The military addresses today's problems; tomorrow's challenges are already fermenting.
Plenty of hope remains for non-Arab, Muslim-majority states to reward their citizens with progress and tolerance. Instead of wasting further efforts on the Middle East, where the military remains our optimal tool, we should work vigorously on the borders of the Islamic world, in those cultures where the fundamentalists have not yet been able to destroy all hope of a better future, and where Islam is still a developing faith, not merely a tomb for the living.
Thus far, we haven’t even gotten the numbers right. Arab populations are a minority within Islam, but their regressive form of religion has been poisoning one non-Arab state after another with an infusion of petrodollars, dogma and anti-Western vitriol.
Three non-Arab countries, Indonesia, India and Pakistan, contain nearly half the world's Muslims. Add those of Central Asia, Turkey, the Philippines, Malaysia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Azerbaijan and that struggling, vilified democracy, Iran, and the Arab states begin to look as over-valued as they are recalcitrant. Even Nigeria is more promising in the long term than Egypt. If we want to roll back the inhumane variants of Islam and to promote constructive cooperation and the emergence of rule-of-law, market-driven states, then we should turn our energies to the lands of possibility, rather than wasting further efforts on Arab states utterly opposed to reform.
The process will require diligence, as well as a more sophisticated understanding of foreign cultures than we currently possess. The brusque, do-it-or-else American approach will not work. Countries need to be nudged, watched, encouraged, rewarded and trained – and, when they deserve it, punished intelligently, rather than clumsily. In states such as Indonesia, from which I recently returned more hopeful than I was before my journey, the situation demands continuing acupuncture, not a single dose of heroic surgery. Our policy must be comprehensive, yet each state's case must be handled according to its own fears and eccentricities.
Consider, briefly, those three most populous "Muslim" states – India (which has more Muslims than Pakistan), Pakistan and Indonesia. In India, where chronic interfaith violence obscures larger successes, the best thing we can do to defuse radical tendencies is to build a healthier, mutually respectful relationship between the world's two most creative democracies. In Pakistan, where each political party vied with the others to excel in corruption and duplicity, the situation is far more difficult. Only the military has any chance of rescuing Pakistan from the blame-game fundamentalism all previous political leaders encouraged for selfish ends. Frankly, there may be more hope for Afghanistan, which has hit bottom and may climb back up. But even in Pakistan, the price of engagement is small, while the cost of walking away is enormous.
With the exception of Iran, which is struggling to become a progressive, rule-of-law democracy, Indonesia is the least understood Muslim state. While its population of over 200 million is almost 90% Islamic on paper, less than 20% would qualify as good Muslims by Saudi standards. No other country offers so wide a variety of Islamic practices as does Indonesia, where Hinduism and Buddhism prevailed far longer than Islam has yet done. Folk beliefs still haunt the mosques and Muslim schools, and "pure" Muslims struggle, with only marginal success, to persuade the others that the local, Sufi-influenced forms of Islam are all wrong. Jakarta, not Jeddah, is where the future of Islam will be decided. And we are not even seriously engaged, although our extremist enemies have been pouring in money and peddling hatred for decades.
The Islamic world is rich in possibilities and remarkably various. By betting on the Arab states, we have been letting our best prospects slip away – abandoning global Islam to the apostles of terror. In military terms, we have "left the battlefield to our enemies." If we really believe that Islam is a great world religion, we need to treat it as such and engage it where it is still developing – on its vibrant frontiers, not in its arthritic Arab homelands.
Mr. Peters, a retired military officer, is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a ,Changing World, " to be published by Stackpole in July.
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