Bobby Ghosh has a piece in Time magazine celebrating the eradication of jihad from Saudi Arabia. I am inclined to think it's a little short-sighted. His evidence of the decline of Islamic extremism is, primarily, the relative absence of police checkpoints in the city of Riyadh. His treatment of the human rights violations that go along with the Saudi's aggressive crackdown on terrorism is cursory:
How did the Saudis do it? They used a combination of brute force and subtle persuasion. Few details are available on the crackdown on terrorist groups, because the authorities here don't much like talking about it. So it's a fair guess that many of the means they used wouldn't pass any Western human rights test. Riyadhis speak in whispers about midnight raids, arrests, torture and summary executions.
He acknowledges at the end that there may still be an extremist presence in the country. But there seems to be no connection, at least in Ghosh's rendering, between human rights violations and extremism. Perhaps a sentence on the ways that the so-called crackdown may have negative consequences would have been … helpful.
