Interview with Michael Kugelman, a senior program associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he is responsible for research, programming, and publications on South and Southeast Asia.
- Do you think that the latest strikes in Syria against ISIS can resolve the problem and lead eventually to a lasting peace in the Middle East or are they counterproductive?
- Unfortunately, I fear that these military strikes will not be successful ultimately. They will certainly have a short-term benefit, and they will likely kill, wound, degrade a number of Islamic State fighters, but, unfortunately, groups like these thrive on the perception that the United States is out to get them, it wants to kill them and harm Muslims. So the idea of the United States launching military force on this group may just radicalize this group even more. In fact, it may lead the group to decide it should take its fight out of the Middle East and to the United States. I am very concerned about this military campaign.
- What can be done, then? How can such terrorist groups whether they are in the Middle East or in Africa or in Afghanistan be dealt with? What is the best way?
- [That all takes] a strategy and it really depends on each individual group, each individual region or a country in particular in which they operate. If I were to distinguish between the military groups, some of them, I would argue, are much more reconcilable than others. Groups like the Afghan Taliban, for example, I see as an anti-occupation insurgent group. I think that it really wants foreigners out of Afghanistan and really not that much beyond that. I do not think that it has these expansionist, radical, jihadist views that more hardline groups such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have. And with groups like those, I guess, like the Taliban [through] negotiations, reconciliation, if they seem ready for it and willing to do it, if they demonstrate willingness to lay down arms and abide by a national constitution and that type of thing, then I think these types of more moderate groups can be weaned from the battlefield. The problem, though, is a more difficult case with these hardline groups: the “Al Qaedas”, the “Islamic States” of the world. There you need to focus on where they are getting their resources from, the money, the arms. For example, a lot of these Pakistani military groups, like the Pakistani Taliban and many others, they get arms from various places. There is apparently a great possibility that Gulf countries and [putting] Saudi Arabia somehow involved with providing support to those groups, you need to cut off support to those financial and arms channels. That is where you need to start. A lot of these groups are funded by drugs, you need to try to deal with that as well. And ultimately the much harder thing to do is to figure out how these groups become radicalized, where the ideology is coming from that drives these groups. You need to go after that. That is the single most important factor. Just killing fighters on the battlefield will not end the problem. You need to go to the deep, deep roots in figuring out what is really radicalizing these people on an ideological level.
- In your recent article in the “Wall Street Journal” you mentioned four major threats (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistani Taliban (TPP), Cyber attackers) to world security that are more dangerous than ISIS or ISIL. Among those, which do you think poses the biggest threat to the world right now?
- Those four groups that I identified [in the article] I thought them more as a threat to the United States. I do agree that ISIL is a very big threat. I would say that the fourth threat is very different from the other three. The first three are actual militant groups from Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula to the Pakistani Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which all tried to or threatened attacks on the United States. The fourth one I mentioned, I think, is the most dangerous, because it really does threaten all the world, and that is cyber-attackers. Of course, cyber-attacks do not necessarily blow things up or kill people, but they cause a lot of vulnerabilities. And given the likelihood and strong possibility that cyber-attacks in the near future could start targeting nuclear power plants and air-traffic control centers means that these cyber-attacks really could start leading to deaths and catastrophes. And the fact is, this is already happening, cyber-attacks are frequent, they happen all the time. Beyond that in terms of the biggest militant, terrorist group threat to the world. I think, that is really hard to say, because they are all very different. Most of them these days tend to be relatively localized, with the exception of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which really is the only group pushing for internationally-focused attacks on the United States and elsewhere. I think that ISIL/ISIS could become the biggest global terrorist threat if it continues to evolve, if a lot of these fighters from Europe and the United States decide to leave the Middle East and go back to their countries and launch attacks. Then there is a big, big problem. At this point I do not see any indication of that being a threat.
