As hundreds of millions of young Arabs watch the world around them, they see the Saudis ordering a thousand lashes and ten years in prison for a blogger who encouraged online debate about religious and political issues... They see a mass murderer running what little is left of Syria, using barrel bombs and chemical weapons against his own people. And what are the Western powers doing? Next to nothing. 

For the past couple of months, the government of Kenya through its top security, administrative and legal machinery has been burning the midnight oil in an effort to find the appropriate response to the spread of violent extremist narrative that forms the nucleus of terrorism.

There are extraordinary elements in the present U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria that are attracting surprisingly little attention. In Iraq, the U.S. is carrying out air strikes and sending in advisers and trainers to help beat back the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (better known as ISIS) on the Kurdish capital, Erbil. The U.S. would presumably do the same if ISIS surrounds or attacks Baghdad. But in Syria, Washington’s policy is the exact opposite: there the main opponent of ISIS is the Syrian government and the Syrian Kurds in their northern enclaves.

The beheading of American journalist James Foley, apparently by a British jihadist, has drawn renewed attention to the dangers posed by radicalized young British Muslims. The government estimates that 500 or more British men and women have gone to fight for militant groups in Iraq and Syria, some of whom have already returned.Britain monitors its citizens on social media sites as part of its counter-terrorism strategy.

The Mahinda Rajapaksa government has been outstanding in fighting terrorism at home but has fared disastrously in diplomacy. This is in marked contrast to the Chandrika Kumaratunge government whose record in fighting terrorism at home was an absolute disaster but was outstanding in its efforts diplomatically getting the LTTE proscribed as a terrorist organisation by most of the important Western nations.

"Within the State Department, a Silicon Valley veteran has quietly launched an improbable new initiative to annoy, frustrate, and humiliate denizens of online extremist forums," writes Wired's Spencer Ackerman today, reporting on the government's Viral Peace initiative, which sounds more apt to take down a World of Warcraft guild rather than a terrorist network.

As a nation, we invest in and deploy SEAL teams to do very specialized, very difficult counterterrorism work. We need to adopt the same approach to the people we ask to carry out very specialized and very difficult PD functions.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has established a cyber wing to counter the propaganda and hate being preached by terrorist outfits like al Qaeda on the Internet. Being described as an alternative to hacking, a team of interagency officials at this recently established the Centre for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication (CSCC) indulges in counter-spoof to the nasty propaganda of the terrorist and radical outfits like al Qaeda.