Coll: "International Policy Failure"

Steve Coll

Two trends lie at the heart of the rise of the rise of ISIS. First, the rapidly falling cost of communication, and economic stagnation in the Middle East. Without dealing with the consequences of these, everything else is simply applying a band-aid to a severed artery.

The falling cost of communications has done two things; first, is has facilitated communication and coordination between people and groups that were previously disparate. That has allowed those with the most extreme views to find one another, coalesce and organize themselves. Second it has allowed people suffering both political persecution and economic hardship to see more acutely their plight, and to form views, in a more global framing, as to the causes of their inequity.

The second is the failure of governments in the Middle East to bring their populations into the 20th century, economically and intellectually. Economic underdevelopment is tightly coupled to a lack of education. Educated people are less likely to tolerate inequities and injustices, so it often serves the purpose of many in power to restrict access to education. But that only helps to slow economic growth and perpetuate the hardships of the underprivileged.

Frustration and ignorance are a breeding ground for a per-enlightenment approach to problem solving, an unwaivering reliance on doctrine and scripture, that is as ruthlessly exploited by the power hungry and ambitious today as it was in the middle ages.

Steve Coll, Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism and Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, described the antecedents of the current situation in the Levant as and "international policy failure". Indeed; the failure to address the consequences of these trends will condemn the region to a perpetual and unwinnable struggle to suppress forces whose root causes are only growing stronger.