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The State Department is revamping its floundering efforts to curb recruiting by the Islamic State and other terrorist groups, senior U.S. officials tell Foreign Policy, in response to growing dissatisfaction in the White House and Congress at existing attempts to stop the spread of the extremists’ ideology.
The changes ordered by Secretary of State John Kerry, which have not previously been reported, shift significant power to a single bureau at the State Department tasked with coordinating all counter-extremism efforts. The bureau’s countering violent extremism staff will roughly triple in size and gain control of tens of millions of dollars in newly-appropriated funds from Congress. Combined with its current responsibilities, the bureau will become a hub for terror prevention efforts on everything from counter-propaganda, terrorist rehabilitation programs, aviation security, terrorist financing, and detention and judicial reforms.
The office, currently known as the Bureau of Counterterrorism, will become the Bureau of Counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism. The name change seeks to play up the importance of non-military programs aimed at eliminating the root causes of terrorism — programs referred to in government-speak as CVE.
The new overhaul, which was presented Friday to a select group of lawmakers, brings some clarity to a Jan. 8 White House announcement to reform U.S. efforts to deny the Islamic State “fertile recruitment ground” following the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
The initial White House rollout was criticized for appearing to promise a bureaucratic reorganization rather than a substantial increase in resources or a new strategy to improve earlier efforts.
“It’s not just a bureaucratic effort, although that is an important part,” said a senior State Department official who was authorized to discuss the new plans on condition of anonymity.
He said the estimated $219 million that the bureau manages in foreign assistance is expected to almost double for the next fiscal year, boosted by an additional $175 million that Congress approved in a December spending bill.
Some of that money will go toward traditional counterterror efforts, such as preventing Western fighters from linking up with Islamic State in Iraq or Syria. Another slice of the funding will help build foreign governments’ capacity to bolster law enforcement and corrections programs to deradicalize and reintegrate captured foreign fighters.
The State official refused to say which countries would be helped by the expanded CVE efforts — foreign governments often do not want to publicize that they receive U.S. assistance to combat Islamic extremism — but singled out as “high priorities” the “Sahel,” a region of North Africa south of the Sahara, the “Levant,” the eastern part of the Mediterranean, and southern and Southeast Asia. That would likely include countries such as Mali, Niger, Pakistan, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, and Turkey, among others.
Read more:Growth of Islamic State Forces State Department Overhaul
Source: FP