The global war against terrorism began after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Seventeen years after the terrorist attack carried out by al-Qaeda, terrorism remains the most dangerous threat globally, raising questions about the effectiveness of strategies to counter this threat.
One of the major flaws in these strategies that hinder their effectiveness is associating Islam to terrorism in the West, a misconception that costs the sympathy and engagement of many Muslim voices in the combat against terror and provides a pretext for terrorist organizations to promote their radical agendas.
The false equivalence between Islam and terrorism seen in post-9/11 right-wing politicization of the war on terror and the rise of Islamophobia and the failure of many Muslims to identify with their Western societies were by-products. Many second- and third-generation immigrants went to Iraq and Syria to join Daesh.
The missing legal framework is another flaw of the global war on terror. We have not yet come to a definition of terrorism and States sponsoring terrorists are fine with that. They protect malevolent groups from being charged by questioning their links to terror. Some Western countries too are reluctant to include organized terrorists in their terror lists due to their influence on decision-makers or their interests they perceive they might gain in the long run like using such groups as pressure cards when necessary against, particularly Middle Eastern, States and regimes.
There are also suspicious relations between some countries and terrorist organizations. It has become clear that there are those who use these organizations to fight proxy wars in other countries, and their financing and arming relationships are known to specialists,and that also curbs the effectiveness of any international effort to combat terrorism.
Many Arab and Islamic States made great efforts in the war on terror on the security and military levels, but not much on the intellectual, cultural and religious fronts. Intellectuals are still theorizing about the roots and complications of the problem and not how to actually deal with it in religious discourse or school curricula.
