Asia and the ‘Global War on Terror’

On September 11, 2001, four planes were hijacked and crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and (after passengers and crew fought back) into a field in rural Pennsylvania. More than 2,700 people died, most of them in New York when the towers collapsed. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

9/11 changed the focus of U.S. foreign policy seemingly overnight. After the attacks, the U.S. government focused nearly all of its national security efforts, and much of its diplomacy as well, on eradciating terrorism. The “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) was born.

The opening salvo in the GWOT was, of course, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, where al-Qaida, the terrorist group behind 9/11, was being sheltered by the Taliban regime. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and swiftly overthrew the Taliban, but did not succeed in killing the mastermind of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, until May 2011 (in a surprise raid into neighboring Pakistan where he was hiding). The GWOT’s original conflict – the “good war” in Afghanistan – was set to end by the 20th anniversary of 9/11 with the withdrawal of U.S. troops. But the withdrawal precipitated the rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and the triumphant return of the Taliban to power in Kabul.

We’ll have plenty on the tragic end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan later in this issue, but as Sean Roberts writes, the GWOT had far-reaching consequences beyond the direct impact of the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq:

It created a global consensus that the human rights of “terrorists” should be suspended in the interest of global security while simultaneously leaving the definition of “terrorists” vague enough to allow states latitude in determining who within their borders should be labeled as such. Subsequently, states around the world have found it advantageous to label a variety of domestic opponents, if they are Muslim, as “terrorists” to justify the unfettered abuse of their rights. Although the international community did not necessarily promote such actions, it did help facilitate them by agreeing to list, often in the interests of politics, a broad array of Muslim political actors on international “terrorism lists.” This would have negative implications for a variety of Muslim political forces as well as for many marginalized Muslim ethnic groups around the world.

In our cover story, we explore the how the global war on terror narrative been repurposed across the Asia-Pacific, in Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. As Roberts suggests, GWOT rhetoric has been instrumentalized by local regimes for their own political ends, including cracking down on dissent and bolstering authoritarian legitimacy. Adopting the GWOT framework also provided an avenue to increased cooperation with – and positive attention from – the United States.

Terrorism existed long before the GWOT, as all of our cover authors note, and the “war” has not eradicated it (or even come close). Nevertheless, the narrative itself reshaped security priorities and diplomacy across Asia, often in ways that undercut human rights. The GWOT’s first war may be ending, but the global war on terror endures.

Central Asia

— Dr. Mariya Y. Omelicheva

In Central Asia, the conflation of terrorism with so-called “radical Islam” predated the launch of the “Global War on Terror” by Washington. The government of President Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan had been waging a war against Islam for nearly a decade before 2001, using invasive security police to root out political and religious dissent. Coming out of a bloody civil war from 1992 to 1997, the Tajik government also sought to settle scores with former fighters it blamed for attacks in the country. The GWOT narrative, therefore, resonated with Central Asia, but also presented a challenge.

The rhetoric and policies of the war on terror created a geopolitical binary that divided the world into “civilized” and “uncivilized” parts. Islam was positioned at the center of the uncivilized world and defined as an archenemy of modern civilization. Central Asian governments ventured to present their Muslim-majority countries as modern secular states by framing Islam in terms of a popular “moderate” vs. “radical” dichotomy. The former was discursively connected to national identities and cultures of the Central Asian states, while the latter was portrayed as a dangerous admixture alien to the region.

The GWOT furnished the Central Asian governments with the license to define and prosecute what they perceived as dangerous Islamic varieties and regulate the loosely defined “moderate” and “official” Islam. The rhetorical hype about the governments’ efforts at protecting their countries from the dangers of “radical Islam” has served as an effective strategy of regime legitimization. In addition, the GWOT offered a discursive currency for valorizing “official” Islam in the process of nation-building across Central Asia.

First, despite the scarcity of terrorist violence in the region, Central Asian governments have used the “terrorist” and “extremist” labels embedded in the GWOT narrative to clamp down on perceived threats to the governing regimes in the name of combating terrorism. The trend was set by Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but quickly spread across the region. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, successive governments have played the “extremist” card to prosecute members and leaders of ethnic Uzbek communities. The clerics of the Kamalov family – ethnic Uzbeks who failed to fall in line with the Kyrgyz government’s requirements on teaching Hanafi Islam – were among the many victims of the GWOT narrative in Kyrgyzstan. The Kazakh government beefed up prosecution of missionary groups suspected as cover-ups for radical Islamic organizations and levied terrorist charges against hardened criminals.

The Tajik government has abused the “terrorist” label to the fullest by criminalizing the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT). The peace accord of 1997, which ended the country’s civil war, guaranteed the IRPT a place in public life, making the party the only outlet for Tajik political opposition. By designating the party as a terrorist organization and jailing scores of its members in 2015, the Rahmon government effectively eliminated any opposition to the nepotistic and corrupt regime in Tajikistan.

Second, the GWOT narrative has offered the Central Asian governments a license for exerting control over “official” religious activities, in spite of the constitutionally declared separation of state and religion. After gaining independence in 1991, all the Central Asian states instituted the mandatory registration of religious associations and introduced state tests and other requirements for establishing qualifications for clergy. Unregistered religious and missionary activity and private religious instruction were either criminalized or banned. The governments co-opted nominally independent Muftiates to keep a watchful eye on religious activities, while state agencies for religious affairs and security services have engaged in censorship of religious literature and information.

By creating a distinction between “official” and “dangerous” Islam, the Central Asian governments have managed to bring “official” religion into the realm of public affairs, making it subject to state regulation. State intervention into religious practices has been justified by the requirement of preventing religious extremism and terrorism. In this way, the GWOT has been instrumentalized for the purpose of “prevention” of Islamic radicalization in Central Asia by setting state-imposed limits on permissible and impermissible religious expression.

Third, the GWOT narrative has been used in the process of regime legitimation. Authoritarian regimes are not immune to concerns about legitimacy. Repression is costly, and autocratic governments need a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the population to ensure their persistence in the long run. If democratic legitimacy is usually attained via free and fair elections, authoritarian legitimacy has often been linked to the autocratic governments’ ability to meet citizens’ needs in public order, security, and development. The GWOT narrative has amplified the rhetoric of Central Asian leaders about the terrorist danger. It has also allowed these governments to take credit for bringing the supposedly volatile situation under control. In Uzbekistan, Karimov portrayed himself as the last bastion against the Islamist threat. Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan has derived his legitimacy from playing up his role in ending the civil war and maintaining internal stability since. The Rahmon government has discursively linked dissent to political divisions and used the threat of instability in thwarting democratic reforms.

Fourth, the GWOT provided a context for deploying “traditional” Islam in the process of constructing the Central Asian nations. Instead of forging national unity through practical measures or articulating the common bases of a national identity of these multiethnic and poly-confessional states, the Central Asian governments have built national unity and identity around “official” Islamic traditions. President Nursultan Nazarbayev portrayed “official” Islam rooted in the Islamic traditions of Kazakhstan’s forefathers as a source of national unity in Kazakhstan, welding diverse ethnic groups together under the umbrella of one state. “Traditional” and “official” Islam has become a key part of Uzbekistan’s nation-building project, too. Keenly aware of the place of Islam in the self-identification of Uzbeks, Karimov managed to mobilize the Islamic faith for fostering nationalism, and also presented himself as its symbol. In Tajikistan, the Rahmon government embarked on re-writing Tajikistan’s national history using the juxtaposition of “radical” and “official” Islam. The complex causes of the Tajik Civil War have been reduced to an Islamist vs. secularist standoff and references to the conflict have been purged from the oral histories and national monuments in Tajikistan.

The GWOT narrative has assisted the Central Asian governments in safeguarding their grip on power and denying authority to religious and secular opposition. In the end, their efforts to stamp out terrorism have resulted in more casualties in Central Asia than terrorism itself. This is an ominous legacy that will define the future of the region.

South Asia

— Abdul Basit

South Asia – particularly India and Pakistan – was no stranger to terrorism even before 9/11 and the ensuing “Global War on Terror.” In the 1990s, after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, sectarian attacks in Pakistan and the infiltration of Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) into Indian-administered Kashmir were commonplace. However, the GWOT’s onset further complicated an already complex regional security dynamic. Terrorism increased both in intensity and frequency, negatively impacting India-Pakistan relations. Following the JeM’s 2002 attack on the Indian Parliament, India and Pakistan almost went to war. Following the Mumbai attack in 2008, India-Pakistan relations could not recover from the dark shadow of terrorism.

In the discursive space, both countries used terrorism as a label of convenience by accusing each other of sponsoring it. Both sides claimed to be victims of terrorism for differing reasons. For instance, Pakistan used the victimhood card to deflect attention from its dual policy of supporting the Afghan Taliban while heavily cracking down on the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan has consistently highlighted the loss of human lives (70,000 approximately) and the economic damages it has incurred throughout this period. Pakistan also blamed India for allegedly providing financial and material support to various Baloch insurgent groups and some factions of the Pakistani Taliban.

On the other hand, the Indian narrative blamed Pakistan for the unrest in Indian-administered Kashmir, its mainland, and consulates in Afghanistan. By drawing attention to Islamabad’s continued infiltration, New Delhi shone a light on Pakistan’s dichotomous approach to terrorism in the region, epitomized by its fighting al-Qaida in Afghanistan while arming and funding jihadist proxies in Kashmir. India also used the Pakistan-sponsored terror narrative to deflect attention from human rights violations in its part of Kashmir. New Delhi successfully employed this narrative to weaken Islamabad’s policy of supporting Kashmiri jihadist groups and put it on the defensive vis-a-vis its Kashmir policy.

By persisting with its narrative of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, India succeeded in getting LeT and JeM chiefs Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar designated as global terrorists. Likewise, with U.S. assistance, India compelled then-Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to ban various Kashmiri militant groups. Later, these groups re-emerged with different names and continued their activities despite the ban. In 2018, Pakistan was urged by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global financial watchdog, to crack down on the leaders of Kashmiri jihadist groups. This step was taken mainly due to the long-standing Indian narrative of the Pakistani infiltration in Indian Kashmir and successfully convincing the U.S. to use the threat of sanctions to curtail these groups.             

Domestically, both countries have also used (and abused) the terrorism narrative and counterterrorism laws to stifle genuine dissent, anti-state fringe and civil society groups, and minorities. For instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Hindu nationalist government has legislated against stereotypical notions like “love jihad” and “land jihad” to suppress and demonize the Indian Muslim community as radicals. Love jihad is a Hindutva conspiracy theory alleging that the Indian Muslim community engages in romantic relationships with Hindu girls through seduction and promises of marriage in order to convert them to Islam.

Likewise, the term “corona jihad” was coined soon after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in India. One of the main vectors for the initial spread was Tablighi Jamaat’s annual gathering at the Nizamuddin Markaz in New Delhi. The BJP’s sudden announcement of a lockdown, which suspended public traffic, left a large number of Tablighi Jamaat congregants stranded at the Nizamuddin Markaz, resulting in a high number of COVID-19 cases. While large Hindu events and ceremonies were taking place during the same period, the Tablighi Jamaat was singled out for holding its annual gathering, followed by a vicious social media campaign framing it as a “corona jihad” waged by the Muslim community.   

Similarly, in Pakistan, counterterrorism laws have been misused against the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), a non-violent social movement of the Pashtun community hailing from the ex-Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) region. The PTM organizes rallies, protests, and sit-ins to draw attention to state atrocities and human rights violations against the Pashtun community. The PTM also demands that people illegally picked up by the security agencies on charges of terrorism appear in public, and have the chance to stand trial in a court of law. Pakistan has responded to the PTM’s open agitation and bold anti-state narrative by booking its leaders under various counterterrorism laws and framing them as Indian and Afghan proxies engaged in so-called hybrid warfare against the country. Likewise, various independent-minded Pakistani journalists who have openly criticized the state for its dichotomous or discriminatory counterterrorism policies have been booked under anti-terrorism laws for “conspiring against the state.”

Finally, the war on terror narrative in both countries has redefined the traditional conception of security. In India and Pakistan alike, counterterrorism authorities were formulated after 9/11. Similarly, both countries have their own Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE) policy frameworks. However, implementation remains sketchy on both sides. In Pakistan, PCVE messaging becomes self-defeating and contradictory in the face of the duplicitous “good Taliban vs. bad Taliban” approach. Meanwhile, in India, the PCVE strategy is Muslim-centric and a conversation on the threat of right-wing Hindu extremism is absent.

After the Middle East, South Asia has the second-highest number of terrorist groups globally – mostly in the Af-Pak region. The U.S. withdrawal and rapid Taliban takeover may allow these groups to reassemble, regroup, and revive in Afghanistan. These groups and their extremist narratives have impacted interstate ties, particularly between India and Pakistan, and inter- and intra-communal relations in the region. The presumed end of the war on terror allows the South Asian states to rethink their counterproductive counterterrorism approaches, to stop their misuse and exploitation, which play to the advantage of terrorists.

Southeast Asia

– Bilveer Singh

Long before al-Qaida militants launched the 9/11 attacks against the United States, Southeast Asian nations were battling a gamut of terrorist groups. Since 1945, in particular, terror tactics have been used by various religious and political groups to advance their goals in the region. However, these terrorist groups tended to be localized and national-based with no notion of internationalism guiding their activities.

Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the United States and its allies organized a “jihadi united front” to dislodge the “atheist communists” from Muslim Afghanistan. While this was largely a success, it also led to the emergence of transnational jihadi groups that were later to coalesce, among many other formulations, into al-Qaida and its affiliates under Osama bin Laden. As many Southeast Asian jihadi groups participated in the Afghan struggle to dislodge the Soviets, it also created a new jihadi consciousness in the Southeast Asian region that was extra-territorial and international in orientation.

Initially, most governments in Southeast Asia supported the United States’ efforts to punish those involved in the 9/11 attacks. But over time, this underwent a change as Washington came to be seen as increasingly unilateral in its approach toward counterterrorism, paying little attention to local and regional realities. Even more challenging was the increasing hostility of local Muslim communities in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, where U.S. military engagements in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, came to be seen as a war against Muslims and Islam.

Moreoever, the 9/11 attacks fundamentally altered the manner in which the threat of terrorism was perceived, narrativized, and countered in the Southeast Asian region. Partly out of the necessity of dealing with the rising “Islamic threat” in their own countries and partly to present themselves as respectable members of the global community, most Southeast Asian states supported the U.S. “Global War on Terror” and adopted policies aligned with Washington’s counterterrorism mantra, especially in its war against al-Qaida and its affiliates and supporters.

The U.S.-led GWOT represented a break from the past in several respects. First, the Southeast Asian region came to be seen as an integral part of the GWOT, with some even dubbing the it the war’s “second front.” This was despite terrorism having existed in the region for decades before the 9/11 attacks.

Second, the United States engaged the region through political, diplomatic, economic, and military-security channels in order to strengthen its now-prioritized GWOT. This saw the U.S. investing heavily in almost every country in the region. Washington dangled all sorts of assistance in front of Southeast Asian governments to bring them into line with countering the terrorist threat, especially in view of the many terrorist groups active in the region. This was in part due to the region’s “Afghan connection” since the 1980s, facilitated, in part, by the United States.

Third, the U.S. facilitated regional counterterrorism efforts by providing counterterrorism training, help in the drafting of counterterrorism laws, and even assistance for the establishment of counterterrorist units and centers, especially in Malaysia and Indonesia. Intelligence sharing – countering terrorist financing and the falsification of documents, among other things – was also an area in which the U.S. played a role in “hardening” the region’s “war on terror.”

Fourth, partly under U.S. pressure and partly to prevent the United States from becoming more directly involved in counterterrorism policies, as happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, ASEAN member states decided to enhance their counterterrorism capabilities and policies. This saw almost all states in the region undertaking robust counterterrorism measures that involved arresting and even killing suspected pro-al-Qaida terrorists, with Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore being the “leader states” in this regard.

Finally, the U.S. enhanced state-to-state security cooperation with every country in the region, especially those confronted with strong terrorism dangers. Washington enhanced security cooperation with the Philippines by providing military assistance and even upgrading U.S.-Philippines counterterrorism cooperation in the southern Philippines through exercises such as Balikatan. The Philippines was also invited to join regional military exercises such as CARAT and Talon Vision. A similar approach was seen in Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia.

The GWOT had a number of lasting consequences for Southeast Asia.

First, it saw the United States reengage in the region in a big way, departing from a post-Cold War approach that had downgraded Southeast Asia’s importance. Second, it saw U.S. security cooperation in the region greatly enhanced both in terms of conventional and non-conventional warfare. Third, the U.S.-led GWOT succeeded in degrading al-Qaida and its regional affiliates, such as Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). Following JI’s last major attack in Indonesia in 2009, the group was largely defanged militarily, with more than 1,000 of its members under arrest and more than 100 killed. Fourth, the GWOT helped create a region-wide security framework for countering terrorism that has remained to this day. The counterterrorism framework established in 2001 has incrementally been enhanced through coordinated patrols in the Straits of Malacca and the Trilateral Maritime Patrols in the Sulu Sea.

Despite these positive achievements of GWOT policies in Southeast Asia, the downsides cannot be ignored. While the United States initially exuded an understanding that the region’s terrorism challenges were inextricable from their specific historical, political, economic, and social-cultural roots, it later adopted a more assertive and often unilateral approach that antagonized several states in the region. This was especially the case following its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which stoked immense negative sentiments toward the U.S., especially in the Muslim majority states of Indonesia and Malaysia. The U.S. was seen not so much as interested in countering terrorism as it was in pursuing a vendetta against Islam and Muslims, and this, in turn, created difficulties for the governments of these nations in cooperating with the United States.

Some of the measures that the U.S. used in the GWOT also saw its moral standing in the region drop. These included the use of torture and CIA “black sites,” while the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay came to stand as a symbol of Washington’s violations of the very same principles to which it expected others to adhere.

The GWOT was akin to the U.S. containment strategy following World War II. While the latter was aimed at stalling the march of communism, the GWOT was aimed at neutralizing the threat posed by terrorism, especially the Salafi-jihadi threat. While a broad framework can be useful, especially for a global power, where a terror threat anywhere was seen as a threat to the U.S., the same could not be said of Southeast Asia’s perceptions of terrorism. The ASEAN countries were focused primarily on the regional threat, except for possible links with networks in the Middle East and South Asia. As such, differences were bound to arise, especially when U.S. policies increasingly came to be perceived as anti-Islamic in character.

The fact that the al-Qaida threat was replaced by a more potent danger posed by the Islamic State in 2014 is also a signal that while the GWOT was useful in containing the threat of terrorism, it did not terminate it. With U.S. President Joe Biden withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the invasion of which was coterminous with the beginning of the GWOT, and the Taliban returned to power, it is difficult to conclude that the GWOT was successful, all the more as pro-al-Qaida groups remain relevant in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia.

China

— Sean R. Roberts

The U.S.-led “Global War on Terror” has had far-reaching negative implications for Muslims around the world, even those who were not directly targeted by U.S. military actions. While not the only instance globally or even in Asia, the plight of the Uyghurs in China since 9/11 serves as perhaps the most emblematic example of this problem.

The People’s Republic of China had already begun viewing their own Uyghur citizens as a “threat” prior to 9/11. Worried about meeting a similar fate to that of the collapsed Soviet Union, China’s government began viewing the indigenous peoples of the Uyghur region, along with those of Tibet and Inner Mongolia, as potential secessionists in the early 1990s. Subsequently, it targeted all signs of Uyghur national pride, dissent, or even criticism of state policy as actions of “separatism” throughout the decade. This resulted in almost constant state-initiated anti-separatist campaigns, leading to hundreds if not thousands of political arrests and executions, and drawing international criticism of China’s curtailment of Uyghurs’ human rights.

It is not surprising that the Chinese government saw an opportunity in the 9/11 attacks to escape international criticism of its treatment of the Uyghurs. Almost immediately after the attacks, China launched a campaign to convince the world that its alleged problem with Uyghur “separatists” was actually an international “terrorism threat” linked to al-Qaida. In addition to pressing various states to recognize the presence of this alleged Uyghur “terrorist threat,” China issued two high-level policy papers characterizing the threat as coming from over 40 Uyghur diaspora organizations, which were allegedly funded and supported by the Taliban and al-Qaida. These documents also claimed that the groups had been responsible for 200 “terrorist attacks” resulting in 162 deaths and 440 serious injuries in the Uyghur region of China throughout the 1990s.

Initially, most of the international community dismissed these claims, knowing many of the diaspora groups allegedly involved to be secular human rights groups. However, the position of the United States would abruptly change in the summer of 2002, likely to prevent China’s opposition to a planned U.S. invasion of Iraq the next year. After months of dismissing Beijing’s claims about a Uyghur “terrorist threat,” in August 2002 the U.S. State Department placed one little-known Uyghur organization in Afghanistan, the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), on the terrorism exclusion list. Then, on September 11, 2002, the U.S. sponsored a motion at the U.N. Security Council with support from China and Kyrgyzstan to place ETIM on the U.N. Consolidated List of terrorist organizations linked with al-Qaida and the Taliban. In recognizing ETIM as a “terrorist organization,” the U.S. even went beyond Beijing’s claims – it attributed the 200 alleged “terrorist attacks” in China during the 1990s to ETIM alone, rather than to the 40 groups claimed in Chinese policy papers.

In a recently published book, I note that no group calling itself ETIM ever existed, and those alleged by the U.S. and China to be members of ETIM were a small group of religiously inspired Uyghur nationalists and would-be insurgents in Afghanistan established only in 1998 who had never been proven to carry out any violence, to have members inside China, or to have received funding from a-Qaida and the Taliban. Furthermore, the group essentially ceased to exist in 2003 when the Pakistan military killed its leader. While another group aligned with al-Qaida calling itself the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) and claiming the legacy of those previously in Afghanistan emerged in Waziristan in 2008 to make multiple videos threatening China, I have found no evidence that this group either followed through on these threats by committing violence within China or had members on the ground in China.

Nonetheless, since the 2002 U.S. recognition of ETIM as a “terrorist threat,” the Chinese government has consistently used ETIM as a Uyghur “boogeyman,” blaming it for all signs of Uyghur dissent or violence and using it as justification for an escalating series of repressive “counterterrorism” campaigns to weed out its alleged members within the Uyghur population.  These campaigns, along with aggressive state-led attempts to assimilate Uyghurs and transform their homeland, created a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” as Uyghurs responded to state violence with violent resistance. By 2013-14, this situation had devolved into an escalating cycle of violent repression-resistance-repression that ultimately resulted in a handful of Uyghur acts of violence targeting civilians that could legitimately be considered “terrorist acts.”

This was the situation in 2016-17 as China began its present campaign of obliterating Uyghur culture and identity, which Beijing predictably justified as combatting an existential terrorist threat. As I have argued elsewhere, China has other reasons for what it is presently doing to Uyghurs, and it alone should be held accountable for its actions. However, the United States and its allies should also bear some responsibility for the cultural genocide presently being carried out in the Uyghur homeland because it was the ideology of the U.S.-led GWOT that made China’s actions possible with international impunity.

If the Biden administration truly wants to uphold human rights and prevent genocide around the world, it cannot claim its withdrawal from Afghanistan as the end of the “forever wars.” Rather, it must curtail the real legacy of 9/11 – the “forever war” of identifying, hunting down, and killing alleged Muslim “terrorists” around the world who pose no imminent threat to the United States. This war has already created a dangerous global ideology of Islamophobia that will continue to mutate around the world to justify atrocities against marginalized Muslim groups like the Uyghurs. Its end may not save the Uyghurs, but it may prevent future atrocities like those we are witnessing in the Uyghur region of China today.