Humiliation from Yemen to Times Square

Many efforts to understand why Middle Eastern and South Asian societies are plagued and disfigured by terrorism usually lead to suggestions that this is due to local causes, including poverty, corruption and abuse of power by ruling elites, the impact of charismatic religious radicals, or a sense of vulnerability to foreign cultures and military power. These are intriguing and relevant phenomena, but none alone conclusively explains the problem.

A more complete picture requires that we gaze beyond the local stresses of the Arab-Asian region, to get a more complete and accurate understanding of why terror persists as a chronic feature of this region. This also requires more political honesty and courage than have been permissible in mainstream public discussions in the Western world – most particularly the United States and the United Kingdom – where the prevalent analyses of Arab-Asian-based terror focus mainly on the local problems, and disregard the consequences of Anglo-American and other foreign policies.