Recall that the Moslem Boston bombers and London beheaders received plenty of state aid that didn't make them love their "home" country any more.
Which should make this opinion piece the obviously craptacular bit of nonsense that it is, notwithstanding the ten dollar word "paradigm" used in it.
Behold the summary:
US should replace drone strikes in Pakistan with outreach to tribal areas[.]
And who needs analysis when you have bumper sticker-levels of thinking?
Where one terrorist is killed by a drone, a hundred are created in his place.
Are you effing kidding me?
With all due disrespect to his diplomatic credentials, his educational credentials, and his fancy chair--Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic studies at American University--that surely swivels and goes up and down at the touch of buttons, the man is a fool or apologist, and it doesn't really matter which one he is. The only thing great about Akbar Ahmed is the idiocy he displayed in this piece.
As I've written many times, only ineffective violence creates more jihadis. There simply aren't more jihadis now. Jihadis were killing us when the Iraq War was just a gleam in NeoCon eyes. Funny enough, the jihadis found an excuse to slaughter us without drone strikes at all. Fancy that.
Indeed, the Iran-Iraq War proved that this simplistic notion of creating more jihadis is wrong. The Iraqis needed about 8 years to do it, but after killing about 400,000 Iranian jihadis, by Allah, the Iranians lost the will to send forth their men and boys to the front. By 1988, instead of fielding an army of 40 million of the faithful and angry, the Iranians found their annual cannon fodder recruiting drive came up empty. War over.
But these guys think our drone strikes create more jihadis than they kill, the authors say, longing for the pre-9/11 days when tribal Moslems received our aid. Hey, before 9/11 didn't tribal Moslems side with Osama bin Laden?
And our drones keep tribal families from sending their children to schools--not the jihadi nuts who'd rather throw acid in the faces of little girls rather than see them learn to read in a school.
But no, we need "outreach" to them as if they are completely oblivious to the fact that we don't like Islamist nutballs killing us.
Hey, I have an idea! Since the tribal Moslems don't like us killing jihadis in their midst, why don't they have an outreach of their own to "understand" us instead of sending forth their sons to kill us? Maybe killing us just creates more drones? Ever think of that?
No? Ah, I get it. It's only a two-way street in the sense that they kill us and we should just go the other way by understanding them. Got it. That's fairly convenient for the jihadis.
You know, I want to understand the tribal Moslems enough to kill the jihadis among them. Maybe when the tribal Moslems understand that, we'll make progress in ending the war.
