The U.S. government’s plans to strengthen and coordinate its counterterrorism communications is a ray of good news.
Last week, Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Rick Stengel announced that the State Department will increase the staff and funding of its Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication, the spearhead of the U.S. government against the propaganda offensive conducted on the Internet by Middle East terrorist groups, chief among them ISIS.
The center was created in 2011, with a budget of just $5 million and a staff of experts in Internet communication and Middle Eastern languages. Its digital outreach team seeks out radical websites and duels with terrorist propagandists online. Director Ambassador Alberto Fernandez has built it into a capability that is indispensable at this point in time.
Fernandez, however, will be retiring in April, to be replaced by Rashad Hussain, a Muslim American who has close ties to the White House and was in 2010, to much fanfare, appointed by President Obama to the post of special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
Hussain’s views on countering extremism can be found in a 2008 Brookings white paper he co-authored, “Reformulating the Battle of Ideas: Understanding the Role of Islam in Counterterrorism.” It is in sync with White House strategy to avoid characterizing ISIS as Islamic or Islamist and encourages Muslim leaders to take the lead in defining their religion and thus challenge the terrorists. How that may affect the work of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication remains to be watched.
Current strategy is for center staff to create counter narratives to that of ISIS and other groups through Twitter and Facebook by showing the reality of life under ISIS and al-Qaeda, and the brutality, inhumanity and repression experienced by those that get involved.
That reality is diametrically opposed to the terrorists’ slick propaganda. Sometimes the center’s campaigns receive criticism for being too graphic, sometimes for being too unpersuasive. The terrorists do take notice, however, and react online.
According to Stengel’s comments to The New York Times, ISIS supporters and propagandists send out an average of 90,000 electronic transmissions every day on social media and websites. Stengel hopes to expand the center’s work and to add within its structure a new entity called the Information Coordination Cell, with a staff of 30 intelligence experts and analysts, in addition to the 50 communications experts in the center.
It has been clear for more than a decade that the federal government needs a coordinating structure for the increasing number of messaging functions of its different departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security, State and others. In 2008, then-Sen. Sam Brownback, R.-Ky., introduced a bill to establish a “National Center for Strategic Communication,” which failed to pass Congress. The need remains.
Fighting an online propaganda war is not an easy job. But pooling the resources, technological capabilities and talents within the U.S. government—and its allies—is a strategy that makes sense in the undoubtedly long war ahead.
