Fareed: 10 Years After bin Laden Raid, the Threat of Islamist Terrorism Has Faded

Posted by :

View this email in your browser

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here.

April 30, 2021

Fareed: 10 Years After bin Laden Raid, the Threat of Islamist Terrorism Has Faded

"This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the operation, code-named Neptune Spear, that killed Osama bin Laden," Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. "It's an opportunity to reflect on the state of Islamist terrorism and radical Islam more generally. And the initial diagnosis is clear: The movement is in bad shape."

The number of deaths caused by terrorism around the world has fallen sharply since 2014, and right-wing extremism poses a greater threat in the US, Fareed notes. As a political movement, Islamism is flailing, as Iraqis and Syrians fled ISIS's caliphate "in droves," and as Egyptians protested the Muslim Brotherhood government there. Today, the appeal of jihadist groups—whether in Afghanistan, Nigeria, or the Horn of Africa—largely centers on local grievances, not ideology, a "major reversal from the glory days of al-Qaeda" and its global aims.

"For America, there is one big lesson," Fareed writes: "Stay calm. In the months after 9/11, we panicked, sacrificing liberties at home and waging war abroad, terrified that we were going to be defeated by this new enemy. This is part of a worrying American tradition of exaggerating the threats we face, from the Soviet Union to Saddam Hussein. As we scour the world for new foes, let's learn to right-size our adversaries and find a way to run fast but not run scared."

Why We Shouldn't Worry Too Much About 'Breakthrough Infections'

As vaccines are delivered widely, so-called "breakthrough infections" are cropping up very rarely among those who've been inoculated. In the US, the CDC said earlier this month that it had received reports of 5,800 infections among 77 million fully vaccinated people (about 0.0075%), 7% of whom required hospitalization.

At the MIT Technology Review, Cassandra Willyard writes that we shouldn't worry too much. "New studies published last week show that even in high-risk settings like nursing homes, these breakthrough infections seem to be rare," Willyard writes. "And when infections do occur, symptoms tend to be nonexistent or mild. What's more, vaccinated individuals who become infected have lower viral loads than unvaccinated people—meaning they are less likely to transmit the virus."

Tracking breakthrough infections will be important, Willyard writes, as it will help in monitoring for any viral variants that display degrees of "immune escape." But generally, "even if we do get reinfected, we'll be protected from the most severe outcomes," Harvard epidemiologist Stephen Kissler tells Willyard. "In the long term, the outlook is good."

The Case Against Bipartisanship

Is bipartisanship overrated? As US President Joe Biden pushes the second and third installments of his multitrillion-dollar economic program—a roughly $2 trillion infrastructure plan and a $1.8 trillion proposal for education, paid family leave, child care, and more—Ezra Klein argues in The New York Times that a lack of GOP support in Congress should be of little concern.

"Bills both parties agree on are often bills that have seen their most dramatic or unusual ideas sanded off," Klein writes. "Compromise bills can be wise legislation, but they often result in policy too modest and mushy to solve problems. We would never want industries to release only products that all the major competitors can agree on—we understand that it's good for the public to have choices, and sometimes the best product starts as a risky bet, not as a consensus pick. … A world of partisan governance is a world in which Republicans and Democrats both get to pass their best ideas into law, and the public judges them on the results. That is far better than what we have now, where neither party can routinely pass its best ideas into law, and the public is left frustrated that so much political tumult changes so little."

Why Not Let Smaller Countries Lead, for a Change?

At Foreign Affairs, Jared Cohen and Richard Fontaine make a "case for microlateralism"—i.e., for letting small countries take the lead in international relations, à la Norway's brokering of Israeli–Palestinian negotiations that culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords, Jordan's chairing of a multilateral forum on counterterrorism, or Qatar's convening of internationally backed talks between Lebanese factions in 2008.

"Such ad hoc collective efforts, led by small states but including much larger ones, are often more flexible than long-standing multilateral structures," Cohen and Fontaine write. "Drawing on smaller nations' particular strengths—Scandinavian countries' long history of conflict mediation, for instance, or Jordan's experience dealing with extremist groups—allows for a productive division of labor that combines deep expertise with the kinds of resources that larger, more influential countries bring to the table. Leadership by smaller countries can render a multilateral effort more politically palatable to great powers locked in rivalry with one another."

Cohen and Fontaine see promising signs in a 2020 Digital Economy Partnership Agreement between Singapore, Chile, and New Zealand—and room for more small-country leadership by Estonia on digital governance and Costa Rica on "ecotourism and conservation."

Serosurvey Says: Get Better at Surveying

How immune is the world becoming to Covid-19, and how quickly? How close are various countries to herd immunity? And which racial and age groups are more likely to catch the virus? At The Lancet Global Health, Manoj V. Murhekar and Hannah Clapham write that serosurveys—randomized, population-wide tests for Covid-19 antibodies—are important to answering those questions.

A recent Lancet Global Health meta-analysis, for instance, indicated that serosurveys in Southeast Asia have shown the highest concentration of detected antibodies, present among 19.6% of participants, while Western Pacific serosurveys reported the lowest, at 1.7%. "Furthermore, across the seven studies that compared different races, Black … and Asian …individuals showed a significantly higher risk of infection than did White individuals," while working-age adults saw the highest infection risk of among age groups, the meta-analysis found.

"Unfortunately, most serological studies done globally were of low quality," Murhehar Murhekar and Clapham write. Done at a large scale, they're "resource-intensive," and it will be important to design them better, with unbiased sampling and high-quality antibody testing, to guide policies like demographically targeted interventions.