The end of the Obama presidential administration is coming to an end, so has his part in the war on terror. How did he do? Well, I think he got B or B+ in fighting terrorists but a D on combating terrorism. Under his administration, we got rather proficient at killing terrorists. We killed them in raids; we killed them with bombs, and we killed them with drones. We pretty much killed them and many around them in all ways possible. But we accomplished very little in our strategic goal of stopping Islamic extremism. When we kill one another just takes his place.
So a new strategy must be adopted to address the strategic goal, defeating an ideology. In order to defeat an ideology, you must destroy the idea. Many recruits join extremist groups because they feel it is what God wants them to do. They also feel that whatever happens to them is "Inshallah," God's will. To attack this idea of its “God's will,” we must use that in conjunction with our tactical advantage. Every time we killed an extremist in a raid or by blowing him up with a drone, we must show that it was God's will that happened. We will have to bring the more moderate Muslims and Muslim countries, like the Kingdom of Jordan, where King Hussein calls these extremist outlaws, into the campaign. They have to get onboard and preach that what the extremists are doing is not right in the eyes of God and that we (the US or coalition forces) are just a tool of God's will, punishing them and the people around them for what they are doing in his name. If they are using our actions against us in propaganda to recruit, we need to do the same and more. It is God's will that they will be stopped and we must show them that.
This new strategy will take time, years maybe. But it has been years already, and we are nowhere close to winning this war.
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