New America Policy Papers: 2013

When we and several colleagues assembled the interagency Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) at the State Department in late 2010, our primary focus was poking holes in al-Qaeda’s appeal to young recruits by identifying the terrorist group’s weaknesses, its contradictions, its victimization of other Muslims, and other clearly negative attributes.  The objective was to plant enough doubt in the minds of potential recruits that they would decide not to use violence to address their grievances.  At the same time, we began an effort to identify “positive narrat

This paper examines the emerging global phenomenon of mobile leapfrogging in Internet access. Leapfrogging refers to the process in which new Internet users are obtaining access by mobile devices and are skipping the traditional means of access: personal computers. This leapfrogging of PC-based Internet access has been hailed in many quarters as an important means of rapidly and inexpensively reducing the gap in Internet access between developed and developing nations, thereby reducing the need for policy interventions to address this persistent digital divide.

This paper concludes that the most likely medium-run end state to the conflict in Syria is de facto partition of the country into a region controlled by the current regime and another region divided among various rebel factions. Of the potential end states analyzed here, de facto partition is not only the most likely, it is also the worst for U.S. interests. The analysis is based on a series of decision matrices that are standard in the Multi-Attribute Decision Making approach, a method of systematically comparing objectives across a range of national interests.

The Arab uprisings that shook the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have raised significant questions about the efficacy of America’s leadership in the region. After decades of aligning with and materially supporting authoritarian regimes, the United States was forced to abandon several allied Arab leaders in a remarkably short amount of time, out of deference to universal values and public will. The result left Washington exposed, lacking long-standing traditional allies and doubting basic strategic assumptions.