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Google’s John Mueller answered a question about link building practices in an Office Hours hangout. Mueller outlined Google’s passive and proactive actions against certain links and offered suggestions for a better way to acquire links.
Is it Necessary to Spend Thousands of Dollars for Links?The person asking the question noted that he watched many link building YouTube videos and read case studies that demonstrated that link building is necessary for best rankings.
The question asked:
“…The question is on link building practices. So we …approached many… companies… they say they will charge thousands of dollars or ten thousands of dollars to get the link… from the home page or the news sites and…
They also talk a lot… about …we should get a high authority …link and stuff like that.”
Next he explained how companies he approached showed him examples of sites that were high ranking because of their link building.
The person continued:
“…they also showcase that okay, see this is a site which is ranking high on …Google and …they have taken our service and they have paid us.
So if you pay us then your site will also rank because we are going to put …your site backlink with the good article on the home page…”
Are “Such Practices” Necessary to Rank in Google?Next he questioned the wisdom of spending money on what he perceived as low quality link building, what he called, “such practices,” implying manipulative practices.
He seemed troubled that according to the link building claims, Google’s search rankings reward manipulative practices that cost thousands of dollars.
He continued the question:
“I don’t think that it is wise to put money in such practices or not. Like what are your opinion, like what are your final wordings?
And one more thing. …There are a lot of people over at YouTube and they’re writing a lot of blogs also like these are the best link building practices, you do this… and you do like that and they are charging a lot of money but we don’t want to engage in such stuff like that.”
The person asking the question ended by asking:
“We just want to know… what we should do now?“
Screenshot of John Mueller in the Office Hours Hangout How Google Treats Manipulative Link BuildingJohn Mueller related how Google treats artificial links:
“What should you do now…
I think that’s a super complicated question because there’s no one answer for everyone.
So I think first of all, like you probably recognized, artificially building links, dropping links on other sites, buying links, all of that is against the webmaster guidelines.
And we take action on that algorithmically, we take action on that manually.
And the actions that we take include demoting the site that is buying the links, demoting the site that is selling the links.
Sometimes we also take more subtle action in that we just ignore all of those links.”
Screenshot of John Mueller Explaining How Google Handles Paid Links Google: Paid Links Have No EffectGoogle’s John Mueller says paid links have no effect:
“For example if we recognize that a site is regularly selling links but they also have other things around that, then we often go in and say okay, we will ignore all links on this website.
That basically means …a lot of these sites are things where people still sell links because it’s like they can sell it and they find a seller then of course they’ll try to do that.
But those links have absolutely no effect.
So that seems like a big waste of time from my point of view.”
Mueller Describes Non-Black Hat LinksMueller ends his answer by suggesting Google-friendly link building tactics.
His first suggestion is the classic create content and tell others about it approach. It’s an oldie but a goodie but it can work.
Mueller suggests to build it and tell others about it:
“That said, I do think that there are ways that you can approach the topic of links in a way that is less black hat where you’re buying links from other sites.
But where you’re actually kind of actively creating content that you know will attract links and then going out and reaching out to other sites and saying hey, we have this interesting content, don’t you want to take a look at it.
And …kind of encouraging them to link to your site but without this kind of exchange of value, exchange of money, all of that.
And that’s something where some people are very experienced in doing that and they can really kind of guide you to find those topic areas that are interesting for other people.”
Building Links to Product Pages is HardCreating content and telling others about it isn’t always an appropriate strategy for an ecommerce website. An ecommerce website offers products, not articles.
Attracting links to product pages is one of the toughest kinds of links to acquire because people generally don’t feel enthusiastic about certain products and when they do feel enthusiastic the typical ecommerce store is one store of out thousands selling the same product.
The problem with attracting links to product pages is that it’s extremely difficult to make the case that one store out of thousands is more deserving of a link than the other stores selling identical products.
The tactic of building content to help rank a product page rarely works because the links acquired for that content boosts the content and not the products.
One can internally link from the content pages to the product pages and that might help.
But I’ve rarely seen that happen, even for content pages that went viral.
There is simply no replacement for a direct link to a products page.
Here’s what John Mueller said about acquiring links:
“Where if you’re selling refrigerators then obviously a category page of refrigerators is not going to be very interesting for other people.
But if you can create a survey around refrigerators that is somehow fascinating to others that’s something that’s a lot more interesting for people where they say, oh… here’s this really cool survey about refrigerators.
Did you know that they were like this or they were invented like this or whatever.
That’s the kind of thing where you’re creating something that other people find interesting that other people want to link to.
From my point of view that’s the kind of link building that I have less of an issue with because you’re creating something that other people are linking to it because of what you’ve created.
But it’s not that other people are linking to your content because you’re giving them money to do that or because you have kind of these back door relationships with the other site.
So that’s kind of the direction I would take there.”
Mueller Warns Against Link Building Shortcuts Links More Important than Popularity?And this can skew Google’s search results to favor the site with the most links and not show the site that is most popular that a searcher would most likely want to see.
As an example, a wildly popular store I won’t name cannot rank for their key terms, which they pay PPC to appear for those search terms.
This company, which I’ll call Site A, has a popularity that is largely driven through social media, word of mouth and not search. They are an example of a truly popular company in their niche.
Two keyword phrases that the popular store should rank for but does not contains the usual top brands one would expect. One is the highly competitive two-word phrase and the other is the more descriptive three word phrase.
The search engine results pages (SERPs) for the two keyword phrase has a search result in fourth place that is a regional brick and mortar (Site B) with stores in a handful of rural states.
Site A is the wildly popular store and Site B is the regional store.
Google Trends Showing Search Popularity of Two Online Stores
Site A is wildly popular online with tens of millions of followers on social media.
Site B has social media followers in the low six figures.
The Google Trends graph makes it clear that there is enormous search traffic for Site A’s brand name but Google ranks a relatively unpopular website as #4 for a highly coveted two word keyword phrase.
The relatively unpopular Site B is a regional site that acquires many links from regional news media sites. They also have live links (with coupon codes) from “influencers” which seems to indicate an active promotional campaign.
Those coupon codes, by the way, are not from an affiliate program because Site B doesn’t have an affiliate program. So it could be that the coupon code and non-no followed live link is from a private agreement between the blogger and the company.
How Popular is Site A?Here is a Google Trends graph showing how Site A is nearly as popular as McDonald’s:
Google Trends Graph Comparison with McDonald’sAs you can see, site A is nearly as popular as McDonald’s but it can’t outrank a regional store that happens to have decent links…
Performance on BingBing is more resistant to link spam than Google is. When I search on Bing, it doesn’t rank Site A for the two-word phrase. But it doesn’t rank Site B either, which indicates that Bing probably was not influenced by the links the way Google was.
Most interestingly though is that Bing does rank the highly popular Site A for the more descriptive three-word phrase. If you want to see if something is ranking high on Google because of links, check the same keyword phrases on Bing.
If the SERPs largely are the same except the one suspicious site doesn’t rank in Bing, that’s a clue that that one site might be ranking in Google because of links.
This is just an illustration showing the power of links to influence Google’s search results.
The Question as to How to Link Build is FrustratingCircling back to the person who asked John Mueller the question, one can understand the frustration that is inherent in the question that was asked:
“We just want to know… what we should do now?“
The answer on how to build word of mouth popularity by promoting the site to both users and websites is a tough one to answer.
There are many out there proposing short term solutions to long term problems and it can be frustrating to see those solutions continually proposed as the answer.
CitationWatch John Mueller answer discuss link building at 1 minute mark:
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Google’s John Mueller Recommends Keeping Urls Under 1,000 Characters
Google’s John Mueller recently stated that URLs should be kept under 1,000 characters in length.
This number was mentioned in a Google Webmaster Central hangout during a discussion about URL length as it relates to SEO.
While it’s uncommon for URLs to reach, much less exceed, 1,000 characters – it’s not impossible. Various factors such as parameters and sub-folders can greatly expand the length of a URL.
At what point does URL length start to impact SEO?
Well it turns out you likely don’t have to worry about URL length until you’re approaching the 1,000 character mark.
In other words, you have plenty of room to work with. With that said, it’s generally recommended to keep URLs short and avoid making them any longer than they need to be.
Web browsers can handle URLs up to 2,000 characters in length, which is what makes Google’s limitation of 1,000 characters particularly noteworthy.
In fairness, Mueller may have been throwing an arbitrary number out there, but he brought up this number once before.
Back in 2009, in a reply to a thread in the Google help forums, Mueller stated:
“We can certainly crawl and index URLs over 1000 characters long — but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good practice :-).”
So, there it is. Keep URLs short, but don’t stress about it if they get a little long. As long as they’re under 1,000 characters.
Hear Mueller’s full statement in the video below, starting at the 42:39 mark:
“These are just different URL structures that some sites have. Some sites use parameters, some sites use folders with file names. Everyone does it slightly differently.
The important part for us is that we can take that one URL that you have, we can crawl it, and we can index it with that URL and pick up the content. How you determine which URL to use is ultimately up to you.
The only thing I would watch out for is it should be, I think, less than a thousand characters – which you probably have to work pretty hard to make URLs that long.”
Google’s John Mueller Q&A: 4 Seo Questions Answered
Google’s John Mueller answers four rapid fire questions about common technical SEO issues that almost everyone runs into at one point or another.
Mueller addresses questions sent in by people related to:
Blocking CSS files
Updating sitemaps
Re-uploading a site to the web
Googlebot’s crawl budget
These questions are answered in the latest installment of the Ask Googlebot video series on YouTube.
Traditionally, those videos focus on answering one specific question with as much detail as Google is able to provide.
However, not every question about SEO takes a whole video to answer. Some can be answered in one or two sentences.
Here are some quick answers to questions that are often asked by people just getting started in SEO.
Can Blocking CSS Files In chúng tôi Affect Rankings?Yes, blocking CSS can cause issues, and Mueller says you should avoid doing that.
When CSS is blocked in chúng tôi Googlebot is not able to render a page as visitors would see it.
Being able to see a page completely helps Google understand it better and confirm that it’s mobile-friendly.
That all contributes to a webpage’s ranking in search results.
How Should I Update The Sitemap For My Website?There’s no common simple solution for updating sitemaps that works across all websites, Mueller says.
However, most website setups have built-in solutions of their own.
Consult your site’s help guides for a sitemap setting, or for a compatible plugin that creates sitemap files.
It’s usually just a matter of turning a setting on and you’re all set.
What Is The Correct Way To Reintroduce A Site To Google?It’s not possible to reset indexing for a website by deleting its files and re-uploading them.
Google will automatically focus on the newest version of a site and drop the old version over time.
You can move this process along faster by using redirects from any old URLs to the new ones.
Would Deleting RSS Feeds Improve Googlebot Crawling?A person writes in to Mueller saying 25% of Googlebot’s crawl budget is going to the RSS feed URLs that are in the head of every page.
They ask if deleting the RSS feeds would improve crawling.
Mueller says the RSS feeds are not problematic, and Google’s systems balance crawling across a website automatically.
Sometimes that results in Google crawling certain pages more often, but pages will only be re- crawled after Googlebot has seen all the important pages at least once.
What Do Scientists Know About Mining Asteroids?
In April, Planetary Resources, a newly formed private space company, announced that it would begin mining asteroids for water in 2023. Asteroids, the firm said, could also be a valuable source of platinum-group elements (PGEs), six metals used in industrial chemical reactions and devices such as catalytic converters. Earth contains only four high-grade PGE deposits, and the demand for the metals is increasing. But is there enough information to know where to dig? The basics are clear—how asteroids form, where they are located, and, roughly, what they’re composed of—but details are scarce. Upcoming missions, including those by Planetary Resources’ own prospecting spacecraft, may fill in some of the holes. But if space mining is to work, prospectors will need much more accurate information about the solar system and its minerals.
Types Of Asteroids
Only one third of 1 percent of all asteroids have known composition, mostly from ground-based telescopic observations. Of those 1,665 classified objects, fewer than 300 have metal-rich surfaces.
Locations Of Known Asteroids
1) Of the 585,081 known asteroids between the sun and Jupiter, 562,224 are in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. 2) The innermost peaks have the most accurate asteroid counts, as rocks at the inner edge of the asteroid belt are easier to see from Earth. 3) At certain distances, Jupiter’s gravitational influence ejects smaller asteroids, creating gaps in their spatial distribution.
Asteroid Masses
Dwarf planet Ceres makes up a third of the asteroid belt by mass. Only 55 other asteroids have been weighed so far, since calculating the mass requires observing the gravitational tug it gives another passing body, such as another asteroid or a visiting spacecraft.
Elemental Breakdown
Each segment of these charts represents the relative mass abundance of each element in that body. Moving from the center out, each ring represents 1 percent of the ring inside it. The gray portions are the remaining unknown elements. Vesta is unique among large asteroids, so geologists can identify meteorites that came from it. Analysis of those meteorites allowed scientists to map chemical abundances in more detail than ever before.
Birth Of A Minable Asteroid
1) More than 4 billion years ago, the dust floating around the sun began to clump together to form larger bodies—asteroids and planets—in the early solar system. 2) A nearby supernova released radioactive aluminum-26, which collected in newly forming asteroids. The heat from the radioactive decay melted the surrounding material. Heavier metals sank to the center while rock floated to the surface. 3) When passing rocks smashed into layered asteroids, they stripped away the rocky crust and exposed the metallic core. The resulting asteroids, with their cores exposed, are miners’ best hope for finding platinum-group elements in space. 4) Eventually some chunks of the original asteroids escaped the asteroid belt and landed on Earth. Scientists use these meteorites to learn about the parent asteroid’s composition, information that could guide future space mining.
A Selection Of Asteroid Visitations
1) Mission: Deep Space 1 Date: 1999 Target: Braille 2) Mission: Hayabusa-2 Date: 2023a€”2023 Target: 1999 JU3 3) Mission: NEAR Shoemaker Date: 1997a€”2001 Targets: Eros [pictured], Mathilde 4) Mission: Stardust Date: 2002 Target: Annefrank 5) Mission: Rosetta Date: 2008a€”2010 Targets: Steins, Lutetia [pictured] 6) Mission: Hayabusa Date: 2005a€”2007 Target: Itokawa 7) Mission: Galileo Date: 1991a€”1993 Targets: Gaspra, Ida, Dactyl [pictured] 8) Mission: Dawn Date: 2011a€”2023 Targets: Vesta [pictured], Ceres 9) Mission: Osiris-Rex Date: 2023a€”2023 Target: 1999 RQ36
Here’s What We Should Do About Isil
Here’s What We Should Do About ISIL Tough choices, but they don’t include war
Photo by AP Photo/Thibault Camus
The French strikes on Islamic State positions following the November 13, 2023, Paris attacks point up the peculiar dual nature of this protean Salafi jihadist organization, whose ruthlessness, ability to capture and hold territory, significant financial resources, and strategic acumen make it a threat unlike any other the West has faced in the contemporary era.
The problem is, as the Paris killings and the French counterattack indicate, the Islamic State is partly a totalitarian state and partly a transnational terrorist organization. As a state it can be attacked and defeated, at least temporarily. And yet the more we in the West attack the state, the more its appeal as a terrorist organization will grow among those who see the West as an enemy.
The ISIL proto-state represents a marriage of Salafi jihadists and highly trained Baathist military and intelligence personnel, the very same Baathist personnel that the United States fired from their posts in 2003. The proto-state capitalizes on Sunni Arab disenfranchisement in Syria and Iraq, and thrives in the chaos caused by civil war in Syria. The state earns revenues not only by selling oil, but also by “taxing” people who are trapped in the territory it controls. It also taxes the export of antiquities, and most important, refugee flows. Although ISIL has denounced the refugees leaving Iraq and Syria as traitors, it is also making money from their duress.
At the same time, ISIL is also a millenarian cult with global terrorist ambitions. A number of existing terrorist organizations have pledged allegiance and become “wilayat,” or provinces, among them the Sinai Province in Egypt; Barqa, Tripoli, and Fezzan Provinces in Libya; Khorasan Province in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and Boko Haram’s West Africa Province in Nigeria. We can expect provinces to continue to spread into lawless or poorly governed areas. Volunteers are coming to the Islamic State by the tens of thousands, enticed by the chance to live in the only “place on the face of the Earth where the Shari’ah of Allah is implemented and the rule is entirely for Allah,” in the words of the Islamic State’s online magazine, as well as the promise of sex, violence, and money. Many of them will end up serving as cannon fodder. While many experts focus on ISIL’s narrative of victory, I see a narrative of overcoming humiliation and a chance to recover lost dignity. This narrative is meant to appeal to all the world’s oppressed.
A principal source of the threat to the West is that ISIL and its Salafi jihadi ideology have metastasized into the banlieues of Europe. It appeals, in ISIL’s words, to the people “drowning in oceans of disgrace, being nursed on the milk of humiliation, and being ruled by the vilest of all people.” To those oppressed, ISIL promises the chance “to remove the garments of dishonor, and shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace, for the era of lamenting and moaning has gone and the dawn of honor has emerged anew. The sun of jihad has risen.”
With the Paris attacks, ISIL has taken this challenge to a whole new level. Until now, we have mostly seen relatively unsophisticated self-starters, inspired by ISIL’s ideology, but not directed by its leadership. But it was only a matter of time before ISIL would be able to coordinate attacks outside its territory. To do so requires not only trained labor and weaponry, but most important, intelligence and counterintelligence, the latter greatly enhanced by a Snowden-inspired antisurveillance mood. We are likely to see ISIL-trained operatives working together with local personnel who know the targeted city or facility.
Over time, we will likely see more use of insiders, as we may have seen in the explosion of the Russian airliner over Egypt on October 31.
Carrying out such attacks invites a devastating counterattack on the Islamic State. These attacks do not further the interests of the totalitarian state. But again, they do further the interests of the millenarian cult, the goal of which is to goad the West into a final battle in Syria.
With enough will, and enough ground forces, we can defeat the Islamic State on the territory it controls. It would require a massive infusion of military might, but the West certainly has the means. Many of the millions of people living under ISIL’s totalitarian rule do not wish to be there, and we’d have to be willing to live with their blood on our hands. Still, many would argue that the stakes are so high that the “merciless” war that French President François Hollande has called for is the right approach.
For example, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has argued quite persuasively that the attacks in Paris prove that the only objective commensurate with the threat is the elimination of ISIL’s stronghold in Syria and Iraq. “A certain quality of evil cannot be allowed physical terrain on which to breed,” he says, and he is right. Unlike previous totalitarian regimes, the Islamic State flaunts its evil with grisly images calculated to terrorize. It seduces vulnerable youth with a wide array of promises, catering to eclectic fantasies and needs—the opportunity to recover lost honor, to help those in need, to rape and kill with impunity, to purify the world and reinvent themselves. Crushing the Islamic State would surely serve the interests of justice.
A downside to this approach is that it would be a temporary fix. Defeating ISIL in Syria would require ending the civil war there; a tall order indeed. The 2007 “surge” in Iraq resulted in a temporary rout of the predecessor organization to ISIL. A number of generals warned before the surge that we would need to occupy Iraq for three decades to create a viable state. Even if we were prepared to occupy Iraq and Syria for the next 30 years, there is no guarantee of success. And if there is anything we ought to have learned from our mistakes in both Iraq and Libya, it is that a failed state riven by sectarian tensions may well be the worst of all possible outcomes.
Moreover, it is not enough to defeat the Islamic State in its stronghold in Syria and Iraq. Its provinces must be defeated, its ideology crushed, and its seductive appeal undermined. Western recruits are the principal threat to the West, at least for now. A massive attack, which would inevitably involve civilian casualties, could well increase their number.
What options are left to us? The unsatisfying answer is that we need to continue what we’re doing, but do a lot more of it and do it better. That includes working with our allies to cut off the flows of foreign fighters and funding, continuing airstrikes, and deploying special forces against high-value targets. Our Arab allies, who are far more threatened by the Islamic State, need to step up to the plate militarily. We need to rethink our opposition to surveillance, a critically important counterterrorism tool. We also need to get a lot better at undermining ISIS’s claim that it is offering a “five-star jihad,” and that the West is at war with Islam. Many former members have come back horrified by the brutality and corruption that they witnessed. We need to find a way for them to tell their stories to vulnerable youth.
The bottom line is this: terrorism is psychological warfare. It has been used by the weak against the strong for millennia. Among its multiple objectives is to make its victims overreact. We want to wage war to banish the feeling of being unjustly attacked or unable to protect the blameless. We want to wage war on evil. But sometimes the effect of our reaction is precisely that which we aimed to thwart—more terrorists and more attacks, spread more broadly around the world. This is the paradox of counterterrorism—the military strategies required to defeat the threat today often bring more terrorism tomorrow.
A version of this piece was published in Politico on November 17, 2023.
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Pov: Here’s What We Should Do About Isil
POV: Here’s What We Should Do About ISIL Tough choices, but they don’t include war
The French strikes on Islamic State positions following the November 13 Paris attacks point up the peculiar dual nature of this protean Salafi jihadist organization, whose ruthlessness, ability to capture and hold territory, significant financial resources, and strategic acumen make it a threat unlike any other the West has faced in the contemporary era.
The problem is, as the Paris killings and the French counterattack indicate, the Islamic State is partly a totalitarian state and partly a transnational terrorist organization. As a state it can be attacked and defeated, at least temporarily. And yet the more we in the West attack the state, the more its appeal as a terrorist organization will grow among those who see the West as an enemy.
The ISIL proto-state represents a marriage of Salafi jihadists and highly trained Baathist military and intelligence personnel, the very same Baathist personnel that the United States fired from their posts in 2003. The proto-state capitalizes on Sunni Arab disenfranchisement in Syria and Iraq, and thrives in the chaos caused by civil war in Syria. The state earns revenues not only by selling oil, but also by “taxing” people who are trapped in the territory it controls. It also taxes the export of antiquities, and most important, refugee flows. Although ISIL has denounced the refugees leaving Iraq and Syria as traitors, it is also making money from their duress.
At the same time, ISIL is also a millenarian cult with global terrorist ambitions. A number of existing terrorist organizations have pledged allegiance and become “wilayat,” or provinces, among them the Sinai Province in Egypt; Barqa, Tripoli, and Fezzan Provinces in Libya; Khorasan Province in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and Boko Haram’s West Africa Province in Nigeria. We can expect provinces to continue to spread into lawless or poorly governed areas. Volunteers are coming to the Islamic State by the tens of thousands, enticed by the chance to live in the only “place on the face of the Earth where the Shari’ah of Allah is implemented and the rule is entirely for Allah,” in the words of the Islamic State’s online magazine, as well as the promise of sex, violence, and money. Many of them will end up serving as cannon fodder. While many experts focus on ISIL’s narrative of victory, I see a narrative of overcoming humiliation and a chance to recover lost dignity. This narrative is meant to appeal to all the world’s oppressed.
A principal source of the threat to the West is that ISIL and its Salafi jihadi ideology have metastasized into the banlieues of Europe. It appeals, in ISIL’s words, to the people “drowning in oceans of disgrace, being nursed on the milk of humiliation, and being ruled by the vilest of all people.” To those oppressed, ISIL promises the chance “to remove the garments of dishonor, and shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace, for the era of lamenting and moaning has gone and the dawn of honor has emerged anew. The sun of jihad has risen.”
With the Paris attacks, ISIL has taken this challenge to a whole new level. Until now, we have mostly seen relatively unsophisticated self-starters, inspired by ISIL’s ideology, but not directed by its leadership. But it was only a matter of time before ISIL would be able to coordinate attacks outside its territory. To do so requires not only trained labor and weaponry, but most important, intelligence and counterintelligence, the latter greatly enhanced by a Snowden-inspired antisurveillance mood. We are likely to see ISIL-trained operatives working together with local personnel who know the targeted city or facility.
Over time, we will likely see more use of insiders, as we may have seen in the explosion of the Russian airliner over Egypt on October 31.
Carrying out such attacks invites a devastating counterattack on the Islamic State. These attacks do not further the interests of the totalitarian state. But again, they do further the interests of the millenarian cult, the goal of which is to goad the West into a final battle in Syria.
With enough will, and enough ground forces, we can defeat the Islamic State on the territory it controls. It would require a massive infusion of military might, but the West certainly has the means. Many of the millions of people living under ISIL’s totalitarian rule do not wish to be there, and we’d have to be willing to live with their blood on our hands. Still, many would argue that the stakes are so high that the “merciless” war that French President François Hollande has called for is the right approach.
For example, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has argued quite persuasively that the attacks in Paris prove that the only objective commensurate with the threat is the elimination of ISIL’s stronghold in Syria and Iraq. “A certain quality of evil cannot be allowed physical terrain on which to breed,” he says, and he is right. Unlike previous totalitarian regimes, the Islamic State flaunts its evil with grisly images calculated to terrorize. It seduces vulnerable youth with a wide array of promises, catering to eclectic fantasies and needs—the opportunity to recover lost honor, to help those in need, to rape and kill with impunity, to purify the world and reinvent themselves. Crushing the Islamic State would surely serve the interests of justice.
A downside to this approach is that it would be a temporary fix. Defeating ISIL in Syria would require ending the civil war there; a tall order indeed. The 2007 “surge” in Iraq resulted in a temporary rout of the predecessor organization to ISIL. A number of generals warned before the surge that we would need to occupy Iraq for three decades to create a viable state. Even if we were prepared to occupy Iraq and Syria for the next 30 years, there is no guarantee of success. And if there is anything we ought to have learned from our mistakes in both Iraq and Libya, it is that a failed state riven by sectarian tensions may well be the worst of all possible outcomes.
Moreover, it is not enough to defeat the Islamic State in its stronghold in Syria and Iraq. Its provinces must be defeated, its ideology crushed, and its seductive appeal undermined. Western recruits are the principal threat to the West, at least for now. A massive attack, which would inevitably involve civilian casualties, could well increase their number.
What options are left to us? The unsatisfying answer is that we need to continue what we’re doing, but do a lot more of it and do it better. That includes working with our allies to cut off the flows of foreign fighters and funding, continuing airstrikes, and deploying special forces against high-value targets. Our Arab allies, who are far more threatened by the Islamic State, need to step up to the plate militarily. We need to rethink our opposition to surveillance, a critically important counterterrorism tool. We also need to get a lot better at undermining ISIS’s claim that it is offering a “five-star jihad,” and that the West is at war with Islam. Many former members have come back horrified by the brutality and corruption that they witnessed. We need to find a way for them to tell their stories to vulnerable youth.
The bottom line is this: terrorism is psychological warfare. It has been used by the weak against the strong for millennia. Among its multiple objectives is to make its victims overreact. We want to wage war to banish the feeling of being unjustly attacked or unable to protect the blameless. We want to wage war on evil. But sometimes the effect of our reaction is precisely that which we aimed to thwart—more terrorists and more attacks, spread more broadly around the world. This is the paradox of counterterrorism—the military strategies required to defeat the threat today often bring more terrorism tomorrow.
A version of this piece was published in Politico on November 17, 2023.
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