Ten Recommendations for Obama’s CVE Summit

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7. Try not to give terrorists the war they want—but be willing to protect core political cultural values.

In a recent interesting piece in The Atlantic, Graeme Wood reports interviewing an Australian ISIS recruiter, who implies what has now become a well-known cliché of extremist asymmetric strategy: “death by a thousand cuts,” as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross puts it. The idea is that al Qaeda and other Islamist strategists opt for many, low-level, nonconventional attacks against strong states’ soft targets to bleed a country like the United States slowly. In short, what Islamist extremists often want is a war –preferably a direct confrontation, boots on the ground — so as to hike both economic and political costs and to convey the idea (in the counter-response) that the rag tag team of Islamists are worthy adversaries and warfighters.
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