ABSTRACT
It is increasingly accepted that real progress in the current global war against radical Islamist terrorism requires more than the application of military and law enforcement measures against individual terrorist cells, their leaders, their funding and logistics pipelines, as well as their immediate support network. There is also a pressing need to neutralize the radical Islamist ideology that animates terrorist networks as well as the wider constituency of less active sympathizers who more or less buy into their ideology. Failure to neutralize this ideological ‘Story’ would mean that terrorist networks could suffer losses at the hands of security forces, but still replenish their ranks with ideologically committed fresh recruits from the wider ‘constituency of hate’. The threat would therefore be self-sustaining. Implicit recognition of the need to develop counter-strategies for targeting the radical Islamist Story has been evidenced by the apparent shift in official US terminology for the current conflict. Instead of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), certain circles in Washington now prefer the Struggle Against Violent Extremism (SAVE) (Regan 2005). We may be tempted to suggest that US strategic planners finally seem to be shifting from a ‘direct’, operationally-focused counter-terrorist grand strategy against al Qaeda and associated radical Islamist terror networks, toward an ‘indirect’, broader-based counter-terrorism grand strategy seeking to drain the ideological wellspring from which such networks sustain their movements. 1
