A Response to Zakaria’s, “Learning to Live with Radical Islam”
Recently, Fareed Zakaria published a piece in Newsweek entitled Learning to Live with Radical Islam.” In it, he argues two broad points, both of which I think are important questions that we are not properly addressing.
• At what point do internal politics in a Muslim-majority country become a foreign policy concern for the US?
• Are all Islamist movements our concern?
• Is there a natural turn against extremist ideology?
The basic problem, as he describes it, is that there is no nuance in our understanding of Islamist movements. As a result, I believe, we fear that which does not need to be feared and miss the organic debates and evolution going on in the Muslim-majority world. In the 1980s, the US had a more pragmatic foreign policy, funding the Afghan mujahidin, the soldiers that would go on to become part of the Taliban. President Ronal Reagan called them the greatest freedom fighters since the Revolutionary War. We encouraged Saudi Arabia to establish schools that taught violent warfare against enemies in our client state of Pakistan. The goal was to create a highly localized, reactionary force that would be a counter-force to the invading Soviets. Although that eventually metastasized, I do not believe that is the reason we have become reluctant to engage with new Islamist groups.the truth is that all islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. they do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women.”
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