Build Them (Apartments) And They Will Come
The two leading US dailies, the New York Times and the Washington Post, today have compelling and competing views of how to explain and counter the rise of Islamic extremism. I would suggest beginning with the NYT. The six minute video segment "Marriage Beyond Reach: Generation Faithful: Stalled Lives" by Craig Duff and Michael Slackman says it all:
With the cost of building a life beyond their grasp, many in the Arab Middle East are delaying marriage, losing hope and often turning to religion for solace.
The NYT video report starts with a Cairo wedding, the kind the wealthy can enjoy. We lived in Egypt (Alexandria, its metropolis on the Mediterranean) in the '80s, and were at a couple of weddings. Great fun. In the '90s, we lived in Algeria, before the serious fighting got started. Along with a few other postings in the Arab world, these glimpses into two countries that gave birth to powerful Islamist movements (the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Islamic Salvation Front or "FIS" in Algeria) provide the background to my view of the pull of Islamic extremism: that it is born out of despair.
As in the NYT video, we knew lots of young Algerians or Egyptians who couldn't get married. Simply because they couldn't afford housing, or no housing was available. The young Egyptian in the video is a shop manager, and makes what is considered in Cairo a "decent" income. But it's not enough to get his own place, which means he lives with his parents - probably squeezed between younger siblings. He'd like to get married, just like the idle young men lining Algiers' streets. They even have a name for them, "hittistes," a combination of French and Arabic meaning roughly "holding up a wall." Unskilled. Unemployed. Unmarried. Under the influence of... radical preachers.
In 2004, I returned to Algiers after an absence of 12 years. The first thing that struck me was the ubiquitous construction - in a country where, in 1990, not one new building had gone up in Constantine, the third largest city, since the French departure in the early sixties. In 2004 there were cranes everywhere, and working day and night on building sites - Chinese laborers, in a country with sky high unemployment. But President Bouteflika had made a strategic decision, after a decade of violence: it was more important to build housing units fast (therefore with imported Chinese labor) than to build them with unskilled Algerian labor. Such was the urgent need to give young people some hope. In the NYT video, you'll see Dr. Hamdi Taha, whose charity tries to provide such hope to young Egyptian couples, with furniture and appliances.
In the early '90s in Algeria, just like current day Lebanon (where Hizbullah provided housing grants after the Israeli air war of 2006), it was the Islamist party that was seen as responsive to the basic needs of society. That's why (like Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary elections) the Islamist FIS won every freely contested election in Algeria in 1990 and 1991, before it was banned in an Army coup in early 1992. After more than 100,000 deaths, the Algerian government saw the need to combat the lure of radical Islam with concrete (literally) measures: housing for young couples.
What The Muslim World Does Not Need: American "Ideological Infrastructure"
Contrast the bricks-and-mortar approach outlined above with the latest great idea coming from the banks of the Potomac: more propaganda. Walter Pincus, in "Taking A Page From The Cold War," tells us that they're at it again:
"I think over time we're going to need to build that kind of infrastructure," [CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence John A.] Kringen told the House [Armed Services Committee] panel, "because many times, it's not going to be what the U.S. government per se says, but the kind of interactions that they have through other people." [Acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in a speech Wednesday at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Michael] Leiter described the "global ideological engagement, referred to by some as the 'war of ideas,' " as "a key center of gravity in the battle against al-Qaeda, its associates and those that take inspiration from the group."
Kringen's "infrastructure" is not housing for young Arabs hoping to get married and raise kids: he's talking about aiding "non-government organizations, including intellectual publications, labor unions and student groups, sometimes providing secret financial support," as paraphrased by Pincus.
Bureaucrats with seemingly unlimited resources at their disposal can and do dream up all kinds of things to "highlight the poverty of extremist thought," as Leiter put it. But how about this: scrap all the Pentagon's new "Strategic Communication" websites that target the Muslim world, transfer an equivalent amount to "Habitat For Humanity" and similar organizations that actually help people house themselves, and let - to use a good conservative approach - the "market take care of the rest." Nothing is as simple as that, of course, but I would wager that dollars well spent in housing people would go much farther than yet more ill-conceived programs in the "war of ideas."