Entire libraries' worth of books and studies have been published since 9/11 exploring what allows terrorist groups to take root in Muslim communities. Evidently, the Pentagon feels it's no closer to understanding the central strategic problem it's facing. So it's essentially going back to school -- and deputizing college professors to teach the military about the root causes of terrorism.
Remember the Minerva Project? It's a Robert Gates-era initiative to marshal university scholarship for topics of concern to the military. Through the coin of the academic realm -- six-figure research grants -- the Pentagon thought it bridge its cultural divide with higher learning and gain itself some scholastic rigor. Some on campus turned up their noses; others took the cash for studies on Iraqi attitudes on the U.S. waror "Emotion and Intergroup Relations."
But a new round of Minerva solicitations (.pdf), recently announced, asks academics to send the military back to summer school on terrorism.
One area of Minerva research available to academics sets for itself the admirably ambitious goal of understanding "the implications of trends in religious and cultural life in the Islamic world." That means unraveling the "relationships amongst social, cultural, political, religious and economic factors that interact to foster political violence, terrorism or insurgent behavior." Be sure to look at "the relationship between religious ideologies and the behavior of sub or trans-state actors bound by ethnic, tribal, and regional identities.
Not a bad topic of study, if broad. It sounds a bit like the Human Terrain System, an Army effort to marshal social science to understand the Iraqi and Afghan peoples, though the Minerva project wouldn't really involve fieldwork. Still, not exactly a vote of confidence in the troubled system's product. And in any event, the military is lousy with papers, studies, analyses and PowerPoints about the roots of terrorism. They just don't seem to have been worth all that much.
But maybe that shouldn't be surprising. During the early post-9/11 years, the military was completely complacent with its inability to understand Arabic. A one-line "snowflake" memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to his top deputies in July 2003 mused, "I think we have to get more retired American military who speak Arabic into Iraq, helping our people." (.pdf) Robert Kaplan calculates that it took Rumsfeld four years to add 1,400 Arabic speakers to the military -- for a total of merely 5,700.
Even more facepalm-worthy is a desired study of "Terrorism and Terrorist Ideologies." Help the Pentagon understand how terrorist groups glom on to existing social, political or economic unrest and massage their ideologies to seem in harmony with those material grievances. Make sure to study "the role of both traditional communication mechanisms and new media technologies, including social media, in terrorist recruitment, radicalization, and de-radicalization, including radicalization of domestic populations." To paraphrase Adam Sandler: once again, things that could have been brought to the Pentagon's attention yesterday.
That's not to say Minerva isn't soliciting some useful studies. One Minerva offering would comb through Chinese publications to understand Beijing's newest investments in science and technology. Another wants to understand why some dictators (read: Arab autocrats) are susceptible to popular uprisings and others aren't. That's particularly salient given the failures of expensive Pentagon prediction models and U.S. intelligence to anticipate the Arab Spring.
On the other hand, hasn't the military ever read an academic paper? Does the proliferation of useless jargon and fashionable academic rejection of clear courses of action not serve as a deterrent to Minerva? Here, I'll give the Department a preview, free of charge, of what every academic paper Minerva solicits will say: it's complicated.
But still. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has all but closed the door on the age of terrorism. Is it going to take until al-Qaida is a dated relic before the Pentagon begins to understand what (briefly) made it a potent force?
Photo: U.S. Southern Command
See Also:- Pentagon’s Project Minerva Sparks New Anthro Concerns
