June 12, 2015, "ISIS Is Winning Message War, U.S. Concludes," NY Times,
An internal State Department assessment paints a dismal picture of the efforts by the Obama administration and its foreign allies to combat the Islamic State’s message machine, portraying a fractured coalition that cannot get its own message straight.
The
assessment comes months after the State Department signaled that it was
planning to energize its social media campaign against the militant
group. It concludes, however, that the Islamic State’s violent narrative
— promulgated through thousands of messages each day — has effectively
“trumped” the efforts of some of the world’s richest and most
technologically advanced nations.
It
also casts an unflattering light on internal discussions between
American officials and some of their closest allies in the military
campaign against the militants. A “messaging working group” of officials
from the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates, the memo
says, “has not really come together.”
“The
U.A.E. is reticent, the Brits are overeager, and the working group
structure is confusing,” the memo says. “When we convened meetings with
our counterparts, I am certain we all heard about various initiatives
for the first time.”
The
blunt assessment comes amid broader criticism that the military
campaign against the Islamic State is flagging. The group’s fighters
recently took over the city of Ramadi in western Iraq and have occupied Falluja and Mosul for more than a year.
State
Department officials have repeatedly said that “countermessaging” the
Islamic State is one of the pillars of the strategy to defeat the group.
But Obama administration officials have acknowledged in the past that
the group is far more nimble in spreading its message than the United
States is in blunting it.
The
internal document — composed by Richard A. Stengel, the State
Department’s under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs and
a former managing editor of Time magazine — was written for Secretary
of State John Kerry after a conference of Western and Arab officials in
Paris this month on countering the Islamic State.
A
communiqué issued at the meeting took note of the Islamic State’s gains
and expressed the coalition’s determination to remove the group from
the territory it held in Iraq and Syria.
The document was issued in the
name of Mr. Kerry, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France and Prime
Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq. Mr. Kerry was in Boston recuperating
from a broken leg, but he spoke to the meeting by phone.
Mr.
Stengel noted that the message from the conference — that a disparate
coalition of nations was resolute in destroying the Islamic State — fell
flat, with news media reports highlighting how little of substance
seemed to emerge from the meeting.
“From the outside, it mostly seemed exactly like business as usual,” he wrote. The memo, labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” was given to The New York Times by an Obama administration official.
Mr.
Stengel did not respond to a request for comment. John Kirby, the State
Department spokesman, said that the memo “acknowledges what we’ve made
clear in the past: We must do a better job at discrediting ISIL in the
information space.” Mr. Kirby was using an acronym for an alternate name
for the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. “The
memo is an assessment not of the larger counter-ISIL messaging effort,
but how the small group of coalition members communicates internally and
externally,” Mr. Kirby said, adding that Mr. Kerry would “take into
consideration” Mr. Stengel’s ideas and recommendations.
.....
Spokesmen for the British and Emirati Embassies in Washington declined to comment.
.....
This year, administration officials said they planned to expand
the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism
Communications, a tiny office created in 2011 to combat terrorist
messages on the Internet in real time. The center employs specialists
fluent in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi and Somali to counter terrorist
propaganda and misinformation, offering a competing narrative that seeks
to strike an emotional chord. The analysts also post messages on
English-language websites that jihadists use to recruit, raise money and
promote their cause.
Mr.
Stengel has also sought to work with other coalition members,
particularly Arab ones, to discredit the Islamic State in the hope of
stemming the flow of foreign fighters to the group. Mr. Kerry has said
that the effort to “start drying up this pool” of potential volunteers
may be even more important than military efforts.
.....
When Mr. Kerry traveled to the Middle East
in September to start building a coalition against the Islamic State,
Mr. Stengel went with him to meet with Arab officials and establish what
he called “a communications coalition, a messaging coalition, to
complement what’s going on the ground.”
.....
A
crucial part of the public diplomacy has involved encouraging Arab
religious leaders, Muslim scholars and Arab news media organizations to
denounce the Islamic State as a distortion of Islam. State Department
officials have praised the United Arab Emirates for establishing its own
center to counter the Islamic State’s prodigious propaganda.
But Mr. Stengel’s assessment makes clear that American officials believe that much more needs to be done.
....
In
the memo, he proposes to Mr. Kerry that a “communications hub” be
created somewhere in the Middle East — staffed by representatives from
the various coalition members — that would perform “daily and weekly
messaging around coalition activities” to fight the Islamic State, and
that would have a spokesman in Baghdad. But even this, he said, would face hurdles.
.....
“This
seems like an obvious and simple solution — but I am sure it is not as
easy as it sounds for a hundred different reasons,” he wrote.
.....
Still,
Mr. Stengel did have one piece of good news for Mr. Kerry from the
Paris conference. An event at the Louvre intended to focus on the
Islamic State’s destruction of antiquities in Syria and Iraq, Mr. Stengel said, was a success and could be followed up with an entire conference on the issue.
The
conference, he wrote, could bring together “dealers, auction houses,
collectors, scholars” and others to highlight that trafficking in
antiquities is a “war crime” and a “tool of terrorism,” and is financing
the Islamic State’s “dark game.”"
Page A1 of NY edition, Sat. June 13, 2015
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