Waging an uphill struggle for Muslim hearts and minds, some in the West are wondering if the time has come to dust off their Cold War textbooks in search of tips for winning the war on terrorism.
But those arguing for an information and propaganda campaign that would borrow from the largely successful Cold War battle against communism face critics who argue it could dramatically backfire.
Britain’s prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown raised the issue during a January trip to India, when he declared radical Islamism, like communism, needed to be fought “at all levels.”
“We are beginning to learn some of the lessons we had to learn during the Cold War — that to take on the opposing ideology we had to take on the extremists, but we had also to win over moderate opinion,” said finance minister Brown, expected to succeed Tony Blair this year.
In Washington, President Bush has compared the war on terrorism with the struggles against Nazi Germany and Soviet communism, and said in last month’s State of the Union address that Shiite and Sunni extremists posed a “totalitarian threat.”
Frequent talk of winning hearts and minds reflects Western frustration at the power of what policymakers call the “al-Qaida narrative” — the message that Islam is under attack from the West and needs to fight back by waging “holy war.”
At a recent conference in Oxford, the former head of Britain’s foreign spy service MI6 argued it was time for a propaganda campaign on a “mass of different fronts across the world” to win over young Muslims.
Sir Colin McColl, who ran MI6 while communism was collapsing across Eastern Europe, said the West’s enormous PR and advertising industries should be put to work waging this campaign through celebrities, jokes, cartoons, children’s programs and news.
“They should be harnessed to sell to Muslim communities, through Muslims, the message that whatever their grievances, the worst possible way to solve them is to hand them over to a bunch of thugs,” McColl said, referring to al-Qaida.
False parallel?
But some security analysts see parallels between the Cold War and the war on terrorism as misplaced.
They argue that Islamism is competing on an altogether different premise from communism, which claimed to offer an alternative to capitalist democracy but failed in its promise to deliver a better quality of life than the West.
“Radicalism is not fighting us on that terrain. The sympathy of many ordinary Muslims for al-Qaida cannot be affected simply by showing them that people in the West have a better life, unless we can also help them achieve that life, of course,” said Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation in Washington.
Sebestyen Gorka, a Budapest-based security analyst and the son of Hungarian dissidents, said stations such as Radio Free Europe were preaching to the converted during the Cold War.
“The CIA, the State Department did not have to convince my parents democracy was a good thing," Gorka said. "They wanted to be free, they just didn’t have the political possibility to be free.”
But he said modern equivalents like Alhurra, the U.S.-funded, Arabic-language satellite TV channel, were targeting a Muslim audience that was far more hostile.
“The concept of ‘let’s have an Arab TV station and an Arab radio service in Iraq and that’ll convince the moderates to talk up against the extremists’ is utter balderdash, it doesn’t reflect the reality,” Gorka said.
Lieven said a much more pertinent lesson from the Cold War was the need for massive injections of Western aid, like the U.S. support for East and Southeast Asia from the 1950s to 1970s that laid the foundation for dynamic economies in South Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere.
“The main thing is, you have to give more aid to critical countries,” he said, citing Pakistan as an example.
“It’s no good just preaching at people. You’ve to show them that being our ally actually makes a difference to their lives and to their economies,” Lieven added.
That message should resonate with Britain’s Brown, who has focused strongly on development aid during nearly a decade as chancellor of the exchequer.
Officials are under no illusion about the size of the task.
“It’s a very sophisticated, very potent message we have to counter,” one British official told Reuters. “The sad truth at the moment is that the other side, al-Qaida, are doing it better.”
