Excerpt:
Recent attempted extremist attacks with international connections should prompt us to take a deeper look at root motives instead of simplistically faulting religion.
The tired cries of the un-nuanced, such as former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani stating that President Barack Obama is complicit in the recent failed Times Square attack because he fails to use the nomenclature "Islamic terrorism" to define such attacks, plays no constructive role in making our nation safer. Moreover, the Giuliani-type discourse misses a clear yet painful point. Many of these criminal acts are direct blowback in response to our foreign policy missteps.
The admitted Times Square attacker, Faisal Shahzad, who is of Pakistani origin and ethnically Pashtun, did not have a history of radicalism up until close to one year ago. Like the overwhelmingly majority of Pakistanis, Shahzad held a sharply negative view of the expansion of drone attacks in the Wazirstan province of Pakistan, which have resulted in a large percentage of civilian causalities. Moreover, his Pashtun kinsmen in Afghanistan have also suffered civilian causalities by drone attacks, and many of them view our presence in the region as a military occupation.