Fighting the Ideological Battle: The Missing Link in America's Effort to Counter Violent Extremism

[Valin]

Counter Terrorism Blog:

Matthew Levitt
6/24/10

Although the United States continues to successfully target high-level al-Qaeda leaders along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, efforts to contest the Islamist ideology that fuels and supports violence have not kept pace. At home, incidents of domestic radicalization have increased dramatically in 2010, while abroad, the myriad, complex security challenges inspired by various violent strands of Islamist ideology have multiplied from Yemen to Pakistan. Indeed, just today several Muslim-American youth from Northern Virginia were convicted in a Pakistani court of plotting terrorist acts with militants in Pakistan they had met via the internet and sentenced to 10 years in jail each.

In the context of the recent release of the Obama administration's National Security Strategy and the one-year anniversary of the president's Cairo speech, the Washington Institute convened a special Policy Forum marking the release of recommendations from the Institute's forthcoming report on Obama administration efforts to address violent extremism -- a follow-up to the Institute's 2009 bipartisan task force report Rewriting the Narrative: An Integrated Strategy for Counterradicalization This new report, soon to be released in full, was the product of a study group comprising J. Scott Carpenter, Matthew Levitt, Steven Simon and Juan Zarate.



Summary of the event and audio *Here


* do yourself a favor....very good.