The Untapped Potential of Arab Security Sectors for Civic Development
In a lecture at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center on June 2, 2021, CPC president Joseph Braude observed that some Arab security sectors aim to promote positive change in their societies, and called on the U.S. government to engage them in the process. The Belfer Center Intelligence Project’s assistant director for research, Calder Walton, moderated the discussion.
Executive Summary
In some Arab countries, the problematic role of security sector involvement in social and informational control has evolved into a qualified opportunity. The U.S. Government could augment the range of its current partnership with Arab governments in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps other countries by expanding security and intelligence cooperation to include engaging the latter’s influence capabilities. These security sectors, already concerned with managing extremist ideological recruitment, could be marshaled to encourage greater tolerance, critical thinking, and a mindset of institution building within and among regional societies.
A first step toward this end could be to convene an off-the-record meeting of retired U.S. intelligence professionals to sketch out the potential for such new engagement. A second step would be for experienced intelligence professionals from Arab countries, and perhaps also from those of select U.S. allies, to join their American counterparts to discuss ways to implement the basic concept. A key product of these discussions would be a white paper that the group would present to relevant experts for critique, amendment, and endorsement en route to being presented to governments for consideration.
Discussion
Throughout the modern post-independence period, the security sectors of most Arab states — including armed forces, intelligence cadres, and some units designated as police — have been responsible for what may be broadly termed cultural influence. This has been the case in all of the region’s republics. It has been true as well, though to a lighter degree and in slightly different ways, in the region’s seven monarchical regimes.
Intelligence sectors, in particular, have been assigned lead roles in directing cultural change. They have experimented continuously with “influence operations,” limited only by their own shortfalls in resources and executive skills.
Over the eight years following the July 1952 coup in Egypt, the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser created what amounted to an identity machine to engage in cultural engineering. Focused minds were marshaled to the task of controlling and deploying all sources of social and moral authority — schools, media, and religious institutions — to mold a revolutionary nationalist mentality that regards the president and a timeless Egypt as the unifier and leader of all Arabs.
The Egyptian model of inculcating the population with novel pan-Arabist and largely anti-traditional attitudes spread after the 1958 revolution in Iraq to much of the rest of the Arab world. In virtually all cases, civic education was understood and operationalized by Arab intelligence sectors as manufacturing legitimacy for the ruling elite and, by association, whatever ideological garment they assumed — whether forms of Arab socialism (Egypt, Algeria, and Baathist Syria and Iraq, for example), religion-inflected traditionalism (Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and several Gulf states, for example), or an “alternative Arabism” that prioritized domestic reform over regional domination (Tunisia).
“Education” in the region’s non-monarchical autocracies amounted to indoctrination via the manufacture and use of suggestive and easily assimilated slogans for the population, many set to music and some in due course aired on television. The monarchies did not ignore political communications and influence strategies, but they have enjoyed a lighter lift for having chosen to leverage traditional values and storylines to serve their purposes.
Of equal importance in all cases, the typical groupthink dynamics of camaraderie in military and para-military organizations furnished political worldviews for rank-and-file post-secondary education cadres, many of whom joined military and intelligence organizations as a means of upward mobility from lower-class rural origins. The fact that such cadres were exposed to more sophisticated technical training than most people — par for the course for those needing to master relevant military and intelligence technologies, reinforced the association between the establishment’s political worldview and their own enhanced social-professional status. To remain in good standing, and to advance in rank in such organizations, required at least public adherence to the official narrative. In most cases, however, the distance between pretense and sincerity was short. These rank-and-file members of military and intelligence organizations have truly been the social vanguards of new national identities in the making.
As the easiest means to build group loyalty is to fixate on a perceived threat, most nationalist narratives associated with Arab government information strategies have involved demonizing putative enemies: Israel, former Western colonial powers, the United States in several cases, and differently inclined Arab neighbors or rival ideologies.
The effort by Arab state elites to deputize their intelligence sectors for the purposes of information control has not been benign. On balance, such efforts have calcified and exacerbated interstate enmity, bred intolerance, and reinforced longstanding educational tendencies toward rote learning, unquestioned deference to authority, and a dearth of creative and critical thinking.
It would be one thing if the high price paid to fuel Arab identity machines at least yielded states able to generate broad economic growth and social justice. But the most radical of the regimes — the ones typically most determined to use their intelligence sectors to control information and opinion — have by and large been the least successful in these regards. Unfortunately, the rise of discontent over the failure to achieve national goals led in many cases to a government using its information control tools to blame conspiring outsiders for its own shortcomings.
This dynamic began to change in some ways after September 11, 2001. Since then, what had long been a problem has slowly evolved into a potential opportunity.
Several Arab states, including those that had encouraged and supported Islamist groups in their intra-regional campaign against so-called progressive nationalist regimes, found to their dismay that these groups had more than outgrown their usefulness. Indeed, terrorist outrages perpetrated by homegrown Islamists in Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere led governments to adapt their information-control assets to deal with this new and unexpected threat. This was precisely logical in a way, for many of the Islamist groups had directly borrowed words and music both from old Arab nationalist propaganda to indoctrinate young people into seeing their own governments as “the near enemy” and to joining their jihadist campaigns.
Interestingly, the governments’ efforts to weaken Islamist challenges led some to even allow space for the encouragement of critical thinking. The basic proposition was to arm young people with the means to recognize distortions and political hijackings of religion, and to identify and face down conspiracy theories based thereon. That tack has led over time to a debate within Arab societies about the nature of public discourse and education. At its heart lies the recognition that critical thinking spites the very lifeblood of autocracy, so determined autocrats know they are playing with a new kind of fire when they encourage it. The debate is ongoing, but the general tendency, visible in some of the positive emanations of the 2011-’12 Arab Spring, has been a positive one.
For the most part, Arab governments began to shift the use of their intelligence-sector information control assets without encouragement or help from outsiders. Recent efforts have been homegrown by way of initiative and development. Some governments have also enlisted help from others, however. The UAE interior ministry, for example, has solicited counsel from American experts on the practice of rule of law promotion through the security sector, media, and schools. The Moroccan government has sought assistance from French experts on aspects of social messaging through media, in the service of an effort to carefully de-platform institutionally ensconced Islamists. These and other examples illustrate the potential for cooperation among security sector professionals in pursuit of objectives that benefit both sides.
In light of this potential, the U.S. Government is well advised to consider expanding the range of institutionalized cooperation with Arab partner states. Through a range of bilateral programs, it is active in several Arab countries teaching kinetic skills of various descriptions to Arab military and intelligence professionals. But a glaring asymmetry exists between what the Arab sectors have evolved to do and what their American counterparts do. In 1949-’50, the CIA helped initiate the Congress for Cultural Freedom— an intellectual bulwark against Soviet expansionism in Europe and beyond — because American civil mores did not allow for an open government role in such affairs. Despite the controversies that followed the project’s exposure, none other than George Kennan later remarked, “This country has no Ministry of Culture, and the CIA was obliged to do what it could to try to fill the gap. It should be praised for having done so.”
Alternative, civil structures which subsequently formed to project American ideals abroad, notably the United States Information Agency, have also closed their doors. Should the U.S. Government seek to partner with Arab security sectors to promote positive social reform in the region, its own security sector may need to develop new standing or adjunct capabilities. At a minimum, it would need to bring more linguists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, media and education specialists, and historians into its mix of personnel (1).
To examine this and a range of other factors implied by an expansion of U.S.-Arab state military and intelligence-sector cooperation, it may be useful to convene an off-the-record meeting of retired U.S. intelligence professionals to sketch out the potential for and limits of such new engagement, and to limn the modalities most likely to produce best results. A second step would be for experienced intelligence professionals from Arab countries, including currently serving ones, together with those of other select U.S. allies, to join their American counterparts to discuss ways to implement the basic concept.
A key product of these joint discussions would be a white paper that the group would present to relevant experts for critique, amendment, and endorsement en route to being presented to governments for consideration.
The a priori objection to such a project is easy to anticipate. A determined bias endures against cultural influence endeavors that smack of the clandestine or limit transparency, even in domains where too much transparency is manifestly harmful. But this objection does not stand the test of a realistic assessment of benefits and liabilities. The U.S. Government engages with a range of non-democratic states in the Middle East and beyond, for it must deal with the world as it is, not as its leaders would like it to be. It has done so justifiably for many years and will need to do so for years more. Its engagement has not always been sufficiently careful or wise, but government work is neither science nor art, but rather craft. Success must be ranked by percentages, not perfections.
Much of the Arab region today is burning. Conflagrations, complete with the most heinous crimes against humanity in our time, as in Syria, are ongoing. Aside from civil wars in Yemen and Libya, and still brewing sectarian violence in Iraq, social upheaval manifests in Sudan, Algeria, and Lebanon. At the same time, attitudes in the palaces and public sphere alike are changing, as the Abraham Accords and the new wave of people-to-people engagement they unleashed have shown.
In such circumstances, reticence to the point of de facto passivity in terms of fashioning U.S. policy modalities seems particularly ill advised. A set of institutional assets in Arab countries, robustly active in the burgeoning soft power competition now afoot in and beyond the region, stands waiting to be engaged. Why not examine how it might be usefully engaged?
The USG has experience, some of it recent but also controversial, in this regard. A great deal has been written about the Human Terrain System (HTS) experiment as an adjunct of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a film even exists about it. The best place to start studying the HTS legacy is the 2015 book Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan, edited by Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence.