Originally Posted: January 4th, 2007

I often hear that it’s important to go to war because the extremist Muslims inherently hate us, and they won’t be stopped any other way except by being put out of power, by smashing out their ideologies.

I disagree. People are extremely complex, as are motivations for their actions. It’s easy to simplify our enemies as insane and delusional, but this simplification is easy and doesn’t push us to look at other, more complicated roots of the problem.

While terrorism may, on the surface, be fueled by ideology, Thomas Friedman points out in The World is Flat that there are often other sources of this anger and hopelessness, namely poverty and political systems that maintain poverty. Friedman states this example:

A South Asian Muslim friend of mine once told me this story: His Indian Muslim family split in 1948, with half going to Pakistan and half staying in Mumbia (India). When he got older, he asked his father one day why half the family seemed to be doing better than the Pakistani half. His father said to him, “Son, when a Muslim grows up in India and he sees a man living in a big mansion on a hill, he says ‘Father, one day I will be that man.’ And when a Muslim grows up in Pakistan and sees a man living in a big mansion high on a hill, he says, ‘Father, one day I will kill that man.’” When you have a pathway to be the Man or the Woman, you tend to focus on the path and on achieving your dreams. When you have no pathway, you tend to focus on your wrath and nursing your enemies.

Friedman argues that when Islam is embedded in authoritarian societies, it tends to become the “vehicle of angry protest,” including such countries as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. However, when Islam is embedded in a “pluralistic democratic society,” such as India or Turkey—those with a more progressive societal outlook—people have a chance to go after their dreams, to stand on equal footing with the rest of the world. India has 150 million Muslims, the highest population of any in the world, and yet we do not hear about terrorist groups there.

India’s example shows us that when you create structures that encourage education, entrepreneurship, and small business development you create hope instead of hopelessness, global relationships instead of frustrated isolation. While I don’t mean to simplify a complex issue, I do think it’s important that we make addressing global poverty our priority, rather than terrorism. What would our world look like if we spent trillions of dollars setting up microfinance banks, or helping other governments reform their legislation to allow for better business development? People, when poor and hungry, get desperate. I’ve seen it in the Philippines, and we know it happens all over the world.

What if we put our powerful imaginations towards a different direction, one that addresses the root causes, rather than punishing an entire nation for the actions of a few extremists? Would that be the better war on terrorism? Would that be the better way to ensure the safety of our nation?