The current with-us-or-against-us business won't do, Zakaria argues, with eight years of evidence on his side. Not every radical Islamic regime is a synonym of al-Qaeda. Not even the Taliban, 90 percent of whom "are actually tribal fighters or Pashtun nationalists or people pursuing their own agendas." So why not put up with them? Better than bombing them and turning more of them into the al-Qaeda kind of Islamist--the kind that kindles terrorism.
As Zakaria writes,
We have an instant, violent reaction to anyone who sounds like an Islamic bigot. This is understandable. Many Islamists are bigots, reactionaries and extremists (others are charlatans and opportunists). But this can sometimes blind us to the ways they might prove useful in the broader struggle against Islamic terror. The Bush administration spent its first term engaged in a largely abstract, theoretical conversation about radical Islam and its evils—and conservative intellectuals still spout this kind of unyielding rhetoric. By its second term, though, the administration was grappling with the complexities of Islam on the ground. It is instructive that Bush ended up pursuing a most sophisticated and nuanced policy toward political Islam in the one country where reality was unavoidable—Iraq.
How Bush Learned to Love Islamists in Iraq
In Iraq, the administration figured out that it was better to deal with Islamists such as Sunni extremists (the so-called "Sons of Iraq") than fight them. It worked. Iraq's Sunnis extremists had no interest in al-Qaeda. To the contrary. They reviled al-Qaeda's interference and opportunism.
For all their Islamism, Iraq's fundamentalist Sunnis, like most Pashtun and Taliban militants, have their own local agendas. The trick for the American military was to find points of intersecting interest. Plenty were found. So was the counter-intuitive realization that the way to defeat bin-Ladenism was not through moderate Muslims necessarily, but through local fundamentalist-Islamist tribes and interests who want their Prophet Muhammad but don't want bin Laden.
Respecting Muhammad, Rejecting Muhammad Atta
It's a different way of saying what Martin Amis did: "Naturally we respect Muhammad. But we do not respect Muhammad Atta,” although Zakaria is willing to put up with people who have the fundamentalist beliefs of a Muhammed Atta as long as they don't drive planes into high rises, and as long as they don't extend their Islamist rule beyond their own borders.
In other words, we must come to terms with the fact that the West cannot defeat a Taliban regime that stones adulterers and chops off hands of thieves and beheads blasphemers and murderers in stadiums packed with spectators. But it can, and in Zakaria's world view, must, deal with such a regime.
"In the end," Zakaria writes quite hopefully, "time is on our side. Bin Ladenism has already lost ground in almost every Muslim country. Radical Islam will follow the same path. Wherever it is tried—in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in parts of Nigeria and Pakistan—people weary of its charms very quickly. The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. We do. That's the most powerful weapon of all."
Is Islamism Increasing or Retreating?
That concluding paragraph is at odds with Zakaria's observation at the top of the essay "It is not just in [Pakistan's] Swat valley that Islamists are on the rise. In Afghanistan the Taliban have been gaining ground for the past two years as well. In Somalia last week, Al-Shabab, a local group of Islamic militants, captured yet another town from government forces. Reports from Nigeria to Bosnia to Indonesia show that Islamic fundamentalists are finding support within their communities for their agenda, which usually involves the introduction of some form of Sharia—Islamic law—reflecting a puritanical interpretation of Islam. No music, no liquor, no smoking, no female emancipation."
Zakaria resolves the contradiction by suggesting that accepting that fundamentalist wave, dealing with it, letting it unravel of its own, is a far smarter strategy than any attempt to bomb it. Again, evidence is on his side.