Nathan Field, in World Politics Review, writes about the failings of American counterterrorism, and how this is tied into a failure to understand groups like al-Qaida in a religious, cultural, and historical sense:
For al-Qaida, terrorism is only a means to an end, designed to further the organization’s strategic objective of implementing its version of Shariah, or Islamic law, throughout the Muslim world. To measure both its potential and actual progress in achieving that goal, the group must be understood in the context of Arab and Islamic culture, religion and society.
The counterterrorism approach, with its emphasis on political science, downplays these factors, largely because political science as a discipline denies the importance of culture, history, religion and sociology. To illustrate the point, one need only glance at the bibliographies cited by the major books on al-Qaida written from the counterterrorism perspective, or even the resumes of the major terrorism scholars themselves. Few of the former list books on Arab and Islamic society, history or culture, few of the latter reveal a knowledge of Arabic or any significant time spent in the region.
Not surprisingly, the resulting analysis treats al-Qaida as if it were no different from other terrorist organizations, like the IRA, the PLO, or the ETA, and offer little more than tactical assessments of financial, organizational and operational capacity.
Read the full article here.