According to Fareed Zakaria, the answer to the above question is a resounding No. Zakaria’s main argument is that if we try to fully understand the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism, there will be a clearer picture that not all Islamists are potential terrorists. The article in Newsweek, “Learning to Live with Radical Islam,” focuses on why “radical Islam has gained a powerful foothold in the Muslim imagination.” The instruction is that the U.S. and the West – to avoid an increasingly painful war between civilizations – should try to better understand various local Muslim contexts and specifically how Islamists with local agendas are different from global terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda.
Zakaria directly argues that “not all Islamists advocate global jihad” and that the past years of the Bush administration were characterized by an unwillingness to differentiate between local militants with national political ambitions for development and extremists, who were aiming for violence and terror at the global scale. Zakaria argues in his standard straightforward manner: “In the Bush administration’s original view, all Islamist groups were one and the same.” These arguments are particularly timely because they have significant potential to assist in the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan. For this reason, Zakaria makes the point that “no Afghan Taliban has participated at any significant level in a global terrorist attack.” He also cites the stat that 90% of the people referred to as Taliban are tribal fighters or Pashtun nationalists.
Gross generalizations about Islam also apply to Shi’a rule in Iran. Absurd rhetoric places Taliban fighters, the Iranian regime, and Al Qaeda all in one large pot of Radical Islamists. Based on the last years of strategy from the Bush administration, Zakaria correctly states that “we have an instant, violent reaction to anyone who sounds like an Islamic bigot.” Nevertheless, there are signs that the new Obama White House is going to take a more nuanced and sophisticated strategy based on the Alliance of Civilizations.