War on Terror May Breed More Terrorism, Experts Tell Madrid Summit
... the US military's detention of Islamic militants captured in Afghanistan as "prisoners of war" at Guantanamo Bay had exacerbated the threat of extremism.
"We have the Guantanamo effect. That is dealing with terror in such a way that it has an incubator effect. One has to examine the penal system's role in creating more terrorism," Juergensmeyer said.
Arguing that government should behave in a "counter intuitive way", he said military strikes in the aftermath of a terrorist attack were meant to appease voters. But they often played into the hands of extremists by helping them recruit more followers, he said.
Jerrold Post, a professor of psychiatry and international affairs at George Washington University, said "many terrorist acts are designed to provoke a societal backlash.
"Most strong counter terror attacks are for ensuring domestic voters that something is being done," he added. "But there is usually an increase in terrorism afterwards."
Louise Richardson, the dean of the Radcliff Institute at Harvard, said she opposed the US-led war "on Iraq precisely because I feared that it would have this effect.
"The US government has done a lot of things in response to terrorism that it may regret," she said.
"The over-arching message we want to share is that we need to ensure in our counter-terrorism strategy that our short-term efforts do not undermine our long-term objective."
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