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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. One way to look at the moment we’re in, leading up to the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is through a question society has been asking ever since that my next guest who's about to come on, might have the very best answers to of anyone. It's the question of how do we get people off of violent extremism and prevent it from taking root in the first place? Unfortunately, we can look at how relevant the question still is. The Taliban just won in Afghanistan, maybe because their radical devotees wanted it more than we did.

But wait, the modern, allegedly more moderate Taliban of today-- if that's what they are-- got attacked in the middle of the evacuation along with Americans and other Afghans by an ISIS-K suicide bomber willing to die to make fleeing to safety go awry. Of course, there was January 6th, still coming into focus. This week's headlines include a Republican member of Congress saying if there are more rigged elections-- he thinks there are rigged elections-- there's going to be bloodshed. Never mind there was no rigged election. How does society deradicalize people like him or people happy to vote for somebody who would say that?

Apparently, there are ways. With me now is Carla Power, a Pulitzer Prize National Book Award finalist for her previous book If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran. Her new book is called Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism. Carla, thanks for your work, and thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Carla Power: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian: Let me start on a connection between your book and the news of this week with the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, again. Your book includes a description of a school in Pakistan that deradicalizes former Taliban soldiers. Can you describe what they do there and some of the people who've gone there?

Carla: Yes. It's up in the Swat Valley, where the Pakistani Taliban took over from 2007 to 2009. They took over, and young kids were being recruited and groomed. Some families were handing over their boys, if they couldn't afford to feed them. What Fariha Paracha, who is the head of the school, is doing is she-- it's sort of an old-style boarding school. They bring in these kids, the army will bring in kids who have either surrendered or run away, or have been captured by army forces. They will work for years and years with these kids to try to turn them around. It's very slow, and it's very painstaking.

Fariha and her team are in for the long haul. They do it through sports, they do it through academics. They teach them critical thinking, and they're guarded by the Pakistani Army. It has been called by some rehabilitation experts academics here in the States, the most successful de-radicalization program in the world. They know that they have to have sort of wrap-around solutions. They follow these boys, even after they leave, through their university careers. Some go on to be lawyers, some go on-- one went off to study psychology and came back for a while to work as a psychologist with other Taliban. It's an extraordinary sort of grassroots, very painstaking process, and they're very successful.

Brian: Since you said that's run in part by the Pakistani military, and people are now saying the new Taliban are basically a function of the Pakistani military, do you have an impression of whether today's Taliban leadership is deradicalized, or less radicalized in the ways that you mean that word, compared to the Taliban that ran Afghanistan before 2001? They're trying to present a public image at least somewhat like that.

Carla: I would hesitate to comment on the new Taliban leadership. I'd leave that to Afghans or people on the ground. What I would say is that it's incredibly important, as we move forward, to try to disaggregate who we mean by Taliban. I remember as far back as the '90s, when I was in Kabul and Afghanistan, when the country had its first Taliban ruling. You'd meet a farmer in the fields, and they'd be like, "Am I a Talib. Sure, I'm a Talib." It's a very fluid, very networked situation. I think the dangers of kind of trying to stamp a corporate identity onto the Taliban is actually maybe one reason we're in the mess we're in right now.

Brian: We had former NPR correspondent there, Sarah Chayes who then went on to advise the US military, describing how it often means different things to people in the more cosmopolitan centers like Kabul and in the country, almost similar to the way cultures would be different in this country, urban, rural, but very Afghan version of that. If you're going to disaggregate, how about the difference in radicalization terms between the Taliban now and the group ISIS-K, being blamed for the suicide bombing attack at Kabul Airport last week?

To the untrained Western eye, we might assume those groups believe a lot of the same things and would be allies of some kind, but they're apparently enemies. I don't know if this is enough in your area of expertise, but is there a difference there that you can explain that's relevant to your assessment of radicalization forces?

Carla: Eell, I think one of the things that has let us down into the mess we're in is that we've tended to see all Islam as being powered by an ideology. That's just not true. The leaders at the top may be incredibly ideologically driven, but for the followers and for the people who sort of back into these movements for various reasons, often, it's a whole range of reasons. It can be poverty. It can be seeing the way the wind is blowing. It can be desperation. If they're from the west, it can be feeling alienated, or that you can't get ahead as a second or third-generation European in the west.

I think, again, there's a real importance to breaking down these movements and not just making monsters of the latest news headline--

Brian: Atrocity. Yes. Can you explain the title of your book, maybe even in that context? We all know the term homeland security, like the Department of Homeland Security that was created after 9/11, but your title is the three words separately, Home, Land, Security. What are you getting at?

Carla: I really wanted people to think about what are some of the things that people who are drawn into these extremist groups are looking for. I also wanted people to think about security in a different way. The classic security paradigm that we've been seeing for the last 20 years hasn't necessarily worked. I mean, we've got global deaths from terrorism going up nine-fold between 2000 and 2014. You've got the seven countries that the US invaded or bombed during our so-called war on terror suffered a 1,900% rise in terror attacks. These are stats from the Conservative Cato Institute.

Really, I wanted to sort of turn around this idea of homeland security being something that we all take for granted now. It's part of the fabric of our lives-- and really think about what some of these people may be defending or searching for, and to force readers to think about new ways that we might want to think about security.

Brian: To what you said before about how, to a large degree, people don't join extremist groups for ideological reasons. How would you compare that among, let's say, people joining ISIS versus people who tried to take over the Capitol on January 6th, or the white supremacists mass murders of recent years?

Carla: I think ideology is a sort of topcoat of something that you go towards, but there are other things. We've got to go back, we've got to look at the root causes. We've got to look at the situations in our societies that drives these people toward that ideology. Yes, you can wrap it up in religion, you can wrap it up in replacement theory, or so on, but people don't get driven towards these groups without causes or reasons, whether it is isolation, alienation, economic hardship. Every person's story-- I was talking with a former white supremacist who now works in rehabilitation, yesterday.

The weird thing is, each of these stories is so incredibly different, but somewhere there is usually trauma of some sort. The ideology is a useful package that can lure people who are working out various issues in their own lives.

Brian: Has anything changed these 20 years because of the horror of 9/11? People either recoiling from it around the world, it being a de-radicalizing force in the long run, just because it was so horrific? Or, conversely being attracted more people to violent extremism as a result of whatever it inspired?

Carla: Well, I think if you look at the stats, yes. Certainly, our actions overseas and the sort of tone and the rhetoric of a polarized world, I think it's been tremendously dangerous. Spencer Ackerman has just written a terrific book on how we have gotten into this divisive state, domestically, in part because of the War on Terror. The dangers I see in the divisive language of populace, now all over the world, whether it's-- and this has nothing to do with Muslim majority countries or not. It's happening in India, it's happening in our own country. There's a sense of, "You're either with us or against us".

Nine days after 9/11, President Bush went on TV and said, "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." That kind of black and white Manichaean thinking, I think set us off on perhaps the wrong route. It's rather chilling that a little over a decade later, he was being quoted and extolled by the Islamic State propaganda magazine, saying, "Yes, this division is exactly what we're looking for." We have to find ways to sort of roll this back, we've got to look for the connective tissues, again.

When I see very successful attempts at deradicalizing, or rehabilitating former militants, it's people recognizing their humanity and trying to see them-- loathing the fact that they are Nazis or former Islamic State, but still accepting the human being and trying to work with them to bring out those elements, rather than simply demonizing them or locking them in jail.

Brian: To that point, one of the arguments in your book, as I read it, that may not go over very well in weekend religious services of any type, the Friday ones, the Saturday ones, or the Sunday ones, is that we shouldn't think about violent extremists in terms of good and evil. Can you explain your thinking about that?

Carla: Good and evil don't get us very far. When we're so sure of a single label, either virtue or vice,, and we don't step back and look at the context and look at the nuances that are pushing people to do awful things-- I'm not condoning them, but I think evil is just a blunt instrument that comes down and doesn't allow us to explore and understand. In a secular environment, we don't really have very many good ways to get to redemption, to get some sort of sense that you can be forgiven. Using that kind of language, I think, is extremely dangerous.

I went around the world and was trying to listen to as many former militants and as many people who are working to rehabilitate them as possible. I did a pretty good job on the listening tour, until I went to Indonesia and had been at a conference for four generations of Jihadis. They were there to learn skills and to network with other sorts of people outside of their Jihadi networks. It was three days, and I was really being able to humanize a lot of them.

Then, the final day, I got into the elevator with a guy that I had been terrified of talking to the whole time, who, it turns out, had served time in prison for beheading two Christian schoolgirls. I could not talk to him. I sort of failed as a journalist and, arguably, as a humanist. I'm sure he has a story, too, and it's at least worth hearing but I was so overwhelmed with this idea that this guy was evil, that I left not knowing anything more about him. I'm not proud of that, but we all have our bedrock [unintelligible 00:17:29]--

Brian: Yes, and a good place to leave it with Carla Power, whose new book is called Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back from Extremism. Thank you so much.

Carla: Thank you.

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