Akbar and The War on Terror

Akbar Ahmed’s “An Anthropological Excursion into the Muslim World” makes the case that people, led by their governments need to appeal to the principles universal to all religions in order to bring clashing groups together. This would be an ideal situation, on in which the United States could reach out to the Muslim world and hope to persuade moderate Muslims to dominate the dialogue so that extremists would have trouble gaining a foothold in the Muslim world. This is an excellent long-term strategy for fighting the War on Terror, but what about combating short-term threats posed by extremists who we are not going to change in this lifetime and who are still focused on their terrorist goals? Ahmed does not really address the fact that it is just as crucial for the West and especially America and Israel to deal with current terrorist threats. Americans living today want security now as well as security in the long-term. The invasion of Afghanistan was necessary because 9/11 was planned from there and America needed to destroy that safe haven for terrorism I order to combat the current wave a irreconcilable extremists. It can be debated whether or not it was necessary to invade Iraq but now that al-Qaeda, as evidenced by intercepted communications from Zawahiri, wishes to make a stand there we must fight them and keep them from getting control of any part of Iraq. I do believe that more needs to be done though in the way of influencing moderate Muslims so that they can force extremism out of the Muslim world. Whether this is accomplished through aid or perhaps something radical like changing the regime of one of our oppressive allies in the Middle East, more needs to be done. The United States and the West need to continue their offensive operations aimed at destroying the current extremist movements’ ability to attack us but do more to fight the extremist mentality by appealing to moderate Muslims as Ahmed says we should.