When in doubt, put a czar in charge of it

Kristofer Harrison and a colleague of his write that the U.S. needs a political warfare czar who answers directly to the President. I like Tofer a lot, and he’s probably the smartest guy who thinks this. Nonetheless, it’s a formula for pissing off potential allies and accomplishing little. We already have a drug czar, and look how that’s working out. If you’re gonna have a czar, there should presumably be some measures for how well he’s doing his job, and he should be commended or canned accordingly.

For one thing, public recognition from the United States gives terrorist groups enormous cachet, which helps them recruit, so in general, shut up already.* More fundamentally, it confuses the task of defeating jihadist ideology with bringing about democratic reform under autocratic regimes — hardly the same thing, and in this case, closer to the opposite, since we need a lot of autocracies to help us fight terrorism. It also essentially attributes global ambitions to groups that don’t have them; Lashkar-e-Taiba is a regional group, trained, armed and sponsored by the ISI.

A professor of mine once said the world was divided into lumpers and splitters. (Aristotle being the ultimate splitter: “a complex plot is a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is that part which precedes all the other parts…”) This policy is all about lumping. Good foreign policy is all about splitting.

Defeating terrorist ideologies is something we do poorly, but if we’re looking for places to start, how about with the actual detainees we’re preparing to repatriate from Guantanamo to Yemen? We could learn a thing or two from the Saudis, who employ respected imams and scholars, figures like Abdel Mohsen al-Obeikan and Salman al-Auda, to challenge terrorists’ conception of the world. And the bottom line is that we’ll continue to need more than a little help here from undemocratic regimes, which suggests we be more judicious about how and when we undermine their governments in public.

*Sort of like the threat levels you hear repeated over the PAs in airports. What’s the point? Be scared? Don’t fly? Don’t blame your government if you find yourself being flown into a building on a day the threat level was orange?