An anti-poverty aid program that’s been implemented in the Philippines for nearly a decade is gaining attention for the progress it has made in not only helping the poor, but also for its role in decreasing political violence and insurgency.

Joe Felter, senior research scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, presented the results of his joint research on the program before senior political figures at a conference in the Philippine capital of Manila in January.

CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter (left) joins Philippine President Benigno Aquino (right) and the Secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development Corazon “Dinky” Soliman (center) onstage at a conference on sustaining the gains of the conditional cash transfer program held in Manila in January, 2016.

“We worked for several years on this study and it was a privilege to provide these findings and results to senior officials in the Philippine government who are in a position to act on them,” said Felter. “It’s really gratifying to know that academic research can contribute to actual improvements in the conditions, livelihood and safety of those in need.”

The focus of the conference was on the conditional cash-transfer (CCT) anti-poverty aid program called Pantawid Pamilya. Administered by Soliman’s Department of Social Welfare and Development, the Philippines began deploying the program in 2007. It is similar to other CCT programs used in Brazil, Columbia, India, Indonesia and Mexico where households must meet certain income thresholds and basic health and education requirements to qualify for its benefits. CCT programs distribute cash payments to targeted poor households and are proving to be an increasingly popular tool for reducing poverty and improving livelihoods in poverty-affected areas.

The effect of aid on conflict

Felter and his colleagues conducted an analysis of the impact of aid on civil conflict that takes advantage of a randomized control trial (RCT) initiated in the Philippines by the World Bank in 2009 as part of an impact evaluation of the Pantawid Pamilya CCT program. Impact evaluations of CCT programs to date limit their findings to those areas the program was intended to address such as health, education, and employment. Published in the January 2016 Journal of Development Economics, the study estimates the effect of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs on two other critical outcomes- civil conflict and insurgent influence.

CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter shakes hands with Philippine President Benigno Aquino onstage at a conference in the Philippine capital of Manila.

“Considering the types of conflicts taking place around the globe, it is both timely and important to study how aid can be delivered in a manner that reduces poverty without exacerbating conflict,” said Felter. “Development aid can sometimes have the unintended effect of increasing conflict in civil wars when insurgents believe the successful implementation of government-sponsored development projects will boost support for the government and undermine their position.” 

Felter himself is no stranger to international conflict. He retired from the U.S. Army as a colonel in 2012 following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer that took him on missions to Central America, Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  Now in academia, he uses data and rigorous quantitative methods to help those in the field better understand and more effectively and efficiently approach the challenges of stabilizing conflict areas through development aid and economic assistance. 

Despite the growing popularity of CCTs, and assessments of their effectiveness at reducing poverty and improving livelihood, there is limited evidence on how the payment programs affect the civil conflict often present in these poverty stricken areas. Felter, along with his coauthors Benjamin Crost of the University of Illinois, and Patrick Johnston of RAND Corporation, took advantage of the World Bank’s randomized experiment to identify the effect CCT programs had on conflict-related incidents and the influence of insurgent groups, even though the experiment was not originally designed to study the effect of Pantawid Pamilya on these outcomes. Their research compared these aspects of the CCT program’s impact in treatment villages to control villages in the Philippines from 2009-2011.

The Philippines is home to some of the world’s most protracted civil conflicts, including a separatist insurgency in Mindanao island with roots dating back to Spanish colonial times, and a decades long communist insurgency affecting nearly all of the country’s provinces across this archipelago.

“Studying the impact of conditional cash transfers on political violence and insurgent influence in the Philippines is especially instructive and generalizable because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government sponsored aid programs implemented in these areas over time,” said Felter.

Two key findings resulted from the team’s analysis. First, the CCT program caused a substantial reduction in the number of conflict-related incidents in the villages where it was administered. Second, the program was effective at reducing insurgent influence in the treated villages. Significantly, their findings provide evidence that the effects of CCTs can differ from other types of aid interventions based on the type of aid provided and how it is implemented.

“That Pantawid Pamilya helped reduce the presence of rebel groups in the targeted villages is especially consequential.” Felter said. “A program that reduces violence by weakening insurgent influence is likely to have more beneficial long-term effects since insurgent influence can still undermine the rule of law and oppress citizens even without violence.”

Not all aid programs created equal

An effective aid program such as this can result in more than an economic boost for a village or community and a reduction in violence. It can also provide a psychological victory that enables the government to gain increased support from the local population – effectively “winning hearts and minds” – thus potentially enabling the government to gain better security through increased cooperation and information sharing about insurgents from the population. This is a win-win result, especially in regions where insurgents often gain support by exposing weaknesses of the government, not just through fear and coercion. Insurgents win when they are able to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a local population whose own government is unable to provide for their basic needs.

However, a “winning hearts and minds” strategy for disbursing government aid can sometimes backfire depending on how these programs are carried out. For example, KALAHI-CIDSS, a large-scale community-driven development (CDD) infrastructure program took place in similar regions in the Philippines during the same time period as the Pantawid Pamilya experiment period. This aid program was also implemented by the DSWD, but in some cases led to different and unintended results. The CDD program was designed to empower the poorest Filipino municipalities through enhanced participation in community projects and training, but the way in which the projects were determined and the mechanisms they were delivered created incentives and opportunities for insurgents to attack the projects, resulting in increased local conflict in some cases where the program was implemented. CDD programs involve a series of public meetings and result in the implementation of widely publicized and often highly visible infrastructure projects. As a result, insurgents often attack these government “hearts and minds” initiatives that, if successful, threaten to shift popular support away from their rebel groups and towards the government.

In contrast to CDD programs, CCT programs disburse aid directly to its beneficiaries’ bank accounts, making it difficult for insurgents to anticipate when and where the transfers are occurring and inhibiting their capacity to disrupt and dismantle the program. The findings in Felter’s study provide preliminary evidence that the type of aid and mechanism in which it is delivered can be a major factor in determining its impact on civil conflict.

“The stakes are high in human and economic terms when it comes to stabilizing conflict areas and preventing a return of the deadly violence associated with civil wars and insurgency,” said Felter.

The results of this study provide rare empirical evidence that some forms of aid, and how it is implemented can reduce the intensity of civil conflict and the influence of the groups responsible for it. This evidence can help governments determine what type of aid to invest in to achieve their desired results.

“Distributing aid effectively and achieving maximum benefits from these investments is definitely a challenge and an area where more research is needed to better appreciate the many nuances and complexities of these efforts,” said Felter.

During the two-day conference in Manila, President Aquino noted how his administration had increased the CCT budget to cover close to 4.4 million poor households, up from 786,000 five years ago.

You can read Felter’s full paper in the January issue of the Journal of Development Economics.

U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James speaks at a roundtable on cyber policy at Stanford University on January 6, 2016.

The U.S. military needs to train and recruit more “cyber warriors,” and improve its offensive and defensive capabilities in cyberspace, Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James said during a visit to Stanford University last week.

“Today we’re not sufficiently strategizing, organizing, training or equipping to be cyber warriors,” James said at a roundtable discussion on cyber policy. “We’ve made progress over the last year or two, but it’s not good enough. We need to do more, to be open to different ways of bringing people on and retaining people so we can bring the best and brightest into our ranks.”

She called on Silicon Valley to “move past the debate over Edward Snowden and the debate over encryption” and help the military combat cyber threats to U.S. national security. “Particularly here in Silicon Valley, how can we get better access…and work better with some of the great innovations here in Silicon Valley?” she asked.

U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James (left) meets with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry (second from right) and former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and George P. Shultz (far right) during a visit to Stanford University on January 6, 2016.

Stanford University was just one of the stops on James’ schedule, which also included meetings at Google, Facebook, FireEye and In-Q-Tel (the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community).

James said she’d come to Silicon Valley to “listen and learn” and search for “the next big thing” – from drones to big data.

“We’re actively on the hunt for what will be our next advantage as the military,” she said.

She said the military was working to streamline its procurement process so it could move more quickly fund new technological development using what she called “rapid acquisition.”

“You can’t build the next fighter aircraft under this, but you can build smaller types of technological products and get something under contract within 30 days,” she said.

Protecting networked weapons systems and critical infrastructure at military bases were two top priorities for the Air Force, James said.

It is also working to develop better defensive capabilities to protect satellites and other assets in space, and prevent adversaries from disabling critical missile warning and global positions systems, James said.

“Space had been a fairly tranquil, uncontested area,” she said.

“Nowadays, space is much more contested and congested. There are many more companies and countries up there.

“If a conflict on earth bleeds into space in some way, how do we defend our constellation?”

Military operations centers will need to integrate more cyber capabilities in order to create more options for defense and offense, James said.

“What we need in future is a multi-domain operations center where we’re fully plugged in terms of cyber and space...so that a commander at every turn has military options that go beyond bombing a target,” she said.

“The President, the Secretary of Defense, everybody is pressing, ‘We want more options. We want more targets.’.”

But James acknowledged that even digital conflict could cause collateral damage in the physical world.

“Let’s say we take out a power grid to shut down a particular part of a country to stop a military action,” she said.  “Maybe you’d shut off power to a hospital and people would die.”

That’s why cyber operations would continue to be governed by the law of armed conflict.

“Before a cyber target would be hit, there would be a legal decision with other parts of the government,” James said. “It’s not solely [up to] a commander on the scene.”

In an indication of the growing importance of cyber operations, political and military leadership in Washington are considering elevating U.S. Cyber Command from under U.S. Strategic Command to become its own unified command, James said.

The Air Force currently has around 1,700 personnel working directly on cyber offense and defense, spread among the National Guard, Reserves and active duty. And it recently established a new Cyber College at Air University on Maxwell Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama to train more internal talent.

But military leaders are also looking for other ways to scale up their cyber forces, James said.

“Maybe leveraging the private sector and leveraging Silicon Valley can help us,” she said.

Stanford nuclear experts said they were skeptical of North Korea’s claim that it had detonated a hydrogen bomb this week.

However, they said the test was an important step forward for North Korea’s nuclear program and would have a destabilizing effect on the entire region.

“I don’t believe it was a real hydrogen bomb, but my greatest concern is not so much whether or not they actually tested a hydrogen bomb, but rather that they tested at all,” said Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has “a track record of exaggerated statements, hyperbole and outright lies,” according to Scott Sagan, Caroline S.G. Munro professor of Political Science.

“The propaganda machine in North Korea has made all sorts of claims about Kim Jong-un’s personal prowess and his history, and it is totally unsurprising that he might make exaggerated claims about North Korea’s military prowess,” Sagan said.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said he also doubted that North Korea had detonated a two-stage hydrogen bomb.

“Whether it’s a hydrogen bomb or not, it’s very dangerous, destabilizing development,” said Perry.

“It’s obvious they’re working to increase the capability and size of their nuclear arsenal and that represents a huge danger to the region and creates major instability and major concerns on the part of South Korea and Japan.”

Many North Korea watchers had been anticipating another nuclear test.

“We’ve thought that the North Koreans could test at any time – that the tunnels were ready, that they could do this at any time – so it would be a political decision, not a technical decision,” said Thomas Fingar, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Hecker said North Korea’s latest nuclear test would move the country closer to being able to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and mount it on a missile, extending the reach of their nuclear weapons.

“They will have achieved greater sophistication in their bomb design – that is the most worrisome aspect,” Hecker said.

“At this point, what makes their nuclear arsenal more dangerous is not so much explosive power of the bomb, but its size, weight and the ability to deliver it with missiles.”

On the diplomatic agenda, the U.S. and its allies will likely push for stronger sanctions in the wake of the tests, according to Kathleen Stephens, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea and William J. Perry fellow at Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC).

“In the UN the U.S., Japan and South Korea will likely look for another, and stronger, UN Security Council resolution, presumably with some efforts to attach to it some teeth and strengthen sanctions,” Stephens said.

The U.S. Congress is currently considering financial sanctions that would cut of all access to U.S. banks for any banks dealing with the North Koreans.

But financial sanctions would likely be less effective in dealing with North Korea than they had been with Iran, according to Fingar.

“It’s like hitting a masochist,” said Fingar.

“North Korea is relatively insulated from the external economy, where Iran wasn’t. Iran had a middle class, you could make sanctions hurt, they could have a real effect. You could make it hard for the North Koreans to buy luxury goods, but at the end of the day, is that going to bring down the regime?”

Financial sanctions against North Korea could have the unintended consequence of also hurting China, said David Straub, associate director of the Korea program at APARC.

“This could be problematic for China because many of the transactions that North Korea conducts would be going thorough Chinese banks, and the Chinese, understandably might not be happy about the US financial sanctions on them, in effect,” Straub said.

Perry recommended that the U.S. reinvigorate diplomatic talks with North Korea in collaboration with China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

“I would not give up on negotiations with North Korea yet,” Perry said.

“What could have been done many years ago was following through on negotiations with North Korea at the turn of the Century, which were proceeding robustly in the last years of Clinton’s second term, but were abandoned by the Bush Administration...That was a geo-strategic error.”

But Hecker said those negotiations would be harder now.

“I have previously argued that we should focus on three “No’s” for three “Yes’s” – that is no more bombs, no better bombs (meaning no testing) and no export – in return for addressing the North’s security concerns, its energy shortage and its economic woes,” said Hecker.

“This could have worked when I first proposed it 2008 after one of my seven visits to North Korea. It will be more difficult now."

Former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker assesses North Korea’s claim to have detonated a hydrogen bomb in an underground nuclear test this week. Hecker is one of the world’s top experts on the North Korean nuclear program. He has visited North Korea seven times since 2004, and is the only Western scientist known to have ever been inside a North Korean uranium enrichment facility. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a research professor of Management Science and Engineering.

Do you believe that North Korea actually detonated a hydrogen bomb in its latest nuclear test?

I don’t believe it was a real hydrogen bomb, but my greatest concern is not so much whether or not they actually tested a hydrogen bomb, but rather that they tested at all. Since this test worked, they will have achieved greater sophistication in their bomb design – that is the most worrisome aspect. This is their fourth test – with each test they can learn a lot.

What makes a hydrogen bomb a more threatening weapon than a conventional atomic bomb?

A hydrogen bomb can be a hundred or a thousand-fold more powerful than a fission bomb. Certainly a blast of a megaton will be much more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb, but the more important part is the ability to deliver at long range and to do it accurately. That is what would threaten the United States and its allies most; even with the size of nuclear blasts they have already demonstrated.

White House officials say that initial data from nearby monitoring stations are not consistent with a hydrogen bomb test. How will we know for sure whether it was a hydrogen bomb or not?

The short answer is that we may never know. The telltale signs of a hydrogen bomb are very difficult to pick up in a deeply buried test. Typically hydrogen bombs have greater explosive power or yield. This test is currently believed to have resulted in a seismic tremor of 5.1 on the Richter earthquake scale. That would make it roughly equivalent to the third nuclear test in February 2013. At that time, North Korea claimed it tested a miniaturized atomic bomb – there was no mention of a hydrogen bomb. My estimate of the yield for the 2013 test is roughly 7 to 16 kilotons – which is in the range of the 13-kiloton Hiroshima blast. As far as destructiveness, a Hiroshima-scale explosion is bad enough. Detonated in Manhattan, it may kill as many as a quarter million people. The power of the 2013 and the current explosion is more consistent with fission bombs than hydrogen bombs.

Can you rule out the possibility that it was a hydrogen bomb?

I find it highly unlikely that the North tested a real hydrogen fusion bomb, but we know so little about North Korea’s nuclear weapons design and test results that we cannot completely rule it out. A modern hydrogen bomb is a two-stage device that uses a fission bomb to drive the second stage fusion device. A two-stage device is very difficult to design and construct, and is likely still beyond the reach of North Korea today. However, by comparison, China’s early nuclear weapon program progressed rapidly. It tested its first fission bomb in 1964 and less than three years later demonstrated a hydrogen bomb – and that was 50 years ago. North Korea has now been in the nuclear testing business for almost 10 years, so we can’t rule anything out for certain.

If it wasn’t a hydrogen bomb, what kind of bomb might it have been?

What may be more likely than a two-stage hydrogen bomb is that they took an intermediate step that utilizes hydrogen (actually hydrogen isotopes) fuel to boost the explosive yield of the fission bomb, a sort of turbocharging. Such a device has a fusion or “hydrogen” component, but is not a real hydrogen bomb. It allows miniaturization – that is making the bomb smaller and lighter. Moreover, it would be the first step toward eventually mastering a two-stage hydrogen bomb.

The most important aspect then is to miniaturize, whether it is a fission bomb, a boosted fission bomb, or a hydrogen bomb. The Nagasaki bomb weighed 5,000 kilograms. It was delivered in a specially equipped B-29 bomber. North Korea wants to demonstrate it has a deterrent. To do so, it needs to be able to credibly threaten the U.S. mainland or our overseas assets. For that, you have to make the bomb (more correctly, the warhead) small enough to mount on a missile. The smaller and lighter, the greater the reach. At this point, what makes their nuclear arsenal more dangerous is not so much explosive power of the bomb, but its size, weight and the ability to deliver it with missiles.

How close is North Korea to being able to credibly threaten a nuclear strike against the mainland United States?

North Korea is still a long way off from being able to strike the US mainland. It has only had one successful space launch. It needs a lot more, but it has a large effort in that direction.

Do you think North Korea conducted this test for political or technical reasons?

North Korea had very strong technical and military drivers for this test, as well as follow-on tests. The political environment is mostly what has constrained it from testing earlier and more often. However, this test demonstrates that Pyongyang is willing to weather the political storm this test will bring. It has done so for all previous tests.

What are your current estimates on the size of North Korea's stockpile of nuclear weapons and materials?

Much like in the area of sophistication of the bomb, we have little information of what North Korea actually possesses. The best we can do is to estimate how much bomb fuel, plutonium and highly enriched uranium, they may have produced and estimate how many bombs they can produce from that stockpile. My best estimate at this time is that they may have enough bomb fuel for 18 bombs with a capacity to make 6 to 7 more annually. That, combined with the increased sophistication they surely achieved with this test, paints a troublesome picture.

How should the U.S. respond?

I am concerned about we haven’t done to date. Washington has lost many opportunities we have had since North Korea began its nuclear weapon production in earnest in 2003. One thing that’s clear is that doing what we and the rest of the world have done so far – half-hearted diplomacy, ultimatums, and sanctions – have failed, so these are not the answer. I have previously argued that we should focus on three “No’s” for three “Yes’s” – that is no more bombs, no better bombs (meaning no testing) and no export – in return for addressing the North’s security concerns, its energy shortage and its economic woes. This could have worked when I first proposed it 2008 after one of my seven visits to North Korea. It will be more difficult now.

Senior Military Fellow John Chu was promoted to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army at Stanford last Friday, a position selectively afforded for distinguished service and leadership. Colleagues and Stanford affiliates attended the afternoon ceremony marking the occasion.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Karl Eikenberry led the proceedings and recognized Chu’s accomplishments in the Army and his tenure as a researcher at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

“We look over the course of John’s life and where he’s been, and it says so much good about him and the strengths of the United States of America,” Eikenberry said.

“As threats have changed, doctrine has changed and our national security has changed, John has continued to adapt. It says a great deal about him, our services and our country that he has been able to steadily make those shifts over the course of his career.”

Chu was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the United States. He attended West Point and later achieved advanced degrees in environmental engineering and national security. Chu has had three tours of duty in Korea and served in Iraq as staff at the highest strategic level, among other posts.

At Stanford, Chu has been studying U.S. policy toward North Korea and strategic deterrence on the Korea Peninsula as a fellow at FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center during the current academic year.

The fellowship program, supported by the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, provides military officers an opportunity for self-directed study under the tutelage of Stanford scholars. The program started under former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry. Five fellows came to campus this year; their brief bios can be found here.

Chu thanked his wife of eighteen years, Tina, and expressed gratitude to everyone who guided him over the years.

“You are the real heroes – the people I’ve worked with throughout my career,” Chu said, addressing the audience. “It is you that really deserves all the recognition, for I would not be here today without the support of many.”

Chu expects to deploy to Afghanistan as his follow-on assignment.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said he was concerned that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could buy, steal or build a nuclear weapon capable of killing a hundred thousand or more people in a single strike.

And, he said, stopping the flow of oil money to ISIS should be the main, short-term objective of the United States and its allies in the fight against the terrorist organization.

“They have demonstrated their objective is just killing as many Americans as they can, or Europeans as the case may be…and there is no better way of doing that than with nuclear weapons,” Perry said.

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“If they can buy or steal a nuclear bomb, or if they could buy or steal fissile material, they could probably make a bomb – a crude improvised bomb,” he said.

Even a crude nuclear weapon could have an explosive power equivalent to around fifteen thousand tons of TNT – similar to the bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima near the end of World War II.

Perry said there was evidence that Al Qaeda had actively tried to get nuclear weapons, and he said it was likely that ISIS was also pursuing its own nuclear strategy.

“The big difference between ISIS and Al Qaeda in that respect is that ISIS has access to huge amounts of resources through the oil that they now control,” Perry said.

“I believe that our primary objective in dealing with ISIS should be to stop that flow of money, stop the trading they’re doing in oil which is giving them the resources.”

U.S. warplanes reportedly destroyed 116 trucks in Eastern Syria on Monday that American officials said were being used to smuggle crude oil.

U.S. fighter jets dropped leaflets before the attack, warning the drivers to abandon their vehicles, according to a report in The New York Times.

The Russian Air Force also claimed its planes had struck around 500 oil tankers that were carrying oil from Syria to Iraq for processing.

Perry said that combating ISIS over the long run was a “hugely difficult problem” for Western powers.

“To really stop ISIS completely it would be a long and brutal and ugly fighting on the ground, which I don’t believe we’re going to want to do again,” he said.

“What we can do however, a more limited objective is stopping the resources they’re getting, stopping their access to this oil money. And that limits quite a bit what they can do…That can be done I think in more of a targeted and effective way, and without having to put armies on the ground to do it.”

The deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday that killed 129 people and wounded around 350 more signaled a significant change in strategy for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the radical jihadist organization that has claimed responsibility.

“It underscores that this threat is real and that ISIS is not going to be content to consolidate its power in Iraq and Syria,” said Joe Felter, a former Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces and senior research scholar Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

“They have demonstrated their ability to project power into foreign countries and conduct what I would call an “asymmetric strategic bombing capacity” in the form of these home-grown Western citizens who are willing to strap on suicide vests and blow up targets in support of ISIS directed objectives.

“They’re able to launch attacks with centralized planning and decentralized execution in a way that makes anticipating and interdicting them very difficult.”

French President François Hollande said that the attacks were “planned in Syria, organized in Belgium, perpetrated on our soil with French complicity.”

CISAC senior fellow Martha Crenshaw said the Paris attacks represented “a shift in strategy” for ISIS with the group “taking a more Al Qaeda-like stance and striking Western countries.”

However, she emphasized that the carefully planned nature of the coordinated strikes, where multiple teams carried out simultaneous attacks in three locations across downtown Paris, indicated that this new strategy had been secretly underway for some time.

“These attacks were planned a long time ago,” said Crenshaw, whose Mapping Militants Project includes more information on groups like ISIS.

“You shouldn’t think they’re reacting to very recent circumstances…It’s not like we bombed them one day and the next day they planned these attacks.”

Apocalyptic visions

ISIS has long advocated a plan of provoking the West into a larger confrontation that would lead to an apocalyptic victory for Islam, according to Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law.

“There’s a lot of method to this madness,” Milani said.

“If you read their literature, they have always talked about creating this sort of mayhem.”

ISIS’s propaganda magazine Dabiq, which is available online in Arabic and English, is named after a village in Syria with important symbolism for jihadists.

“They claim that the prophet has predicted that if you can get the West to come and fight the Muslims at Dabiq, then Islam will conquer the world,” Milani said.

Unlike France’s earlier battles against extremists in Algeria, it cannot rely on a proxy state to take the fight to the terrorists, according to Crenshaw.

“When terrorism in France has its origins in Algeria, France could rely on the Algerian state to crack down on these groups,” she said.

“Now you’ve got a situation where the planners are in a country where you don’t have a reliable state to go in and get them for you and wrap up their networks.”

With French warplanes already bombing targets in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Felter warned against the limits of air power in the fight against ISIS.

“There’s a risk that as we ramp up the bombing campaign and increase civilian casualties, this does play into the narrative of these extremists,” he said.

“It’s a very difficult targeting process. ISIS has occupied urban areas full of non-combatants and civilians…It’s the ultimate human shield.”

Felter acknowledged that increasing the number of US ground forces sent to interdict ISIS in Iraq and Syria may ultimately be necessary, but also that this increased presence, if not managed carefully, could backfire.

“At some level, they want to bring Western military forces to occupy these lands, because that will help turn popular opinion against the West and aid in their propaganda and recruitment,” he said.

The fight against ISIS is not limited to the territories it claims in the Middle East. It must be a global effort and include increased international cooperation and information sharing across intelligence, law enforcement and other agencies around the world, Felter said.

ISIS wants to drive a wedge between Europeans and the growing Muslim communities in their countries, so recruiting French citizens to participate in the Paris attacks served a dual purpose, Milani said.

“Using French citizens helps them with logistics, but it also helps them in terms of their strategy in that it makes it difficult for Muslims to live in a non-caliphate context,” he said.

Failed states problem

In the wake of the attacks, European nations are working to create legislation that would toughen criminal penalties for citizens who travel abroad to fight with designated terrorist organizations such as ISIS, or strip them of their citizenship, according to CISAC affiliate Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen, a former executive director of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service.

Individuals who are seen as inciting people to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the jihad could also face tougher sanctions, she said.

The emergence of ISIS and its nihilistic theology is a symptom of broader underlying problems in the Middle East, which is grappling with failed and failing states across North Africa and in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Milani.

“ISIS is the most militant and brutal manifestation of something deeper that’s going wrong,” he said.

“I honestly have never seen the Middle East as perilously close to complete chaos as it is now… [and] I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet.”

Resources & links

Get more background on the Islamic State and its leaders from Martha Crenshaw’s Mapping Militants Project

Is There a Sunni Solution to ISIS? – The Atlantic | By Lisa Blaydes & Martha Crenshaw

Airstrikes Can Only Do So Much to Combat ISIS – New York Times | By Joe Felter

The Super Smart Way to Dismantle ISIS – The National Interest | By Eli Berman, Joe Felter & Jacob Shapiro

The Rise of ISIS and the Changing Landscape of the Middle East – Commonwealth Club of California | Abbas Milani