Despite international pressure, Iran appears to be continuing its march toward getting a nuclear bomb. But Washington can contain and mitigate the consequences of Tehran's nuclear defiance, keeping an abhorrent outcome from becoming a catastrophic one.
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Money and Extremism
I agree with Nasr that the battle is between types of Islam and not with secularism.
Actually i believe secularism alienates Muslim that it want to reach out.. because it is like branding that Islam is bad , and believing in more than one good is good.
It actually fuels anti western sentiments among moderate Muslims, because it is as if the radicals clerics were right when they say western wanted to destroy Islam.
so secularism is empowering the radical clerics instead of weakening them.
In Indonesia secularism is not popular and people think that the most fiery advocates of secularism only doing it for the money.
Almost unnoticed by western observers, in Indonesia a moderate middle class group is growing, they are mostly teachers, young entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. just like what Nasr has predicted.
What western countries best do is to stop interfering and funding certain Islamic groups because most Islamic Countries have a bitter experience with colonialism and the divide et impera tactics. All those supports and funding will make even the most moderate Muslim grow suspicious of intentions and believe that there is a ulterior motive
Money and Extremism
With only having taken a cursory look at this subject matter, I think it's important to note that as we take a look at homegrown extremism in rich Western states, we see that money matters little for turning ideological and socially alienated Muslims away from "the dark side."
Within the context of growing eastern economies, we see that according to scholars like Fatema Mernissi, money is being pumped, largely, into the growth of traditional Qur'anic schools (we sometimes call them madrasas) whose messages are sometimes anti-Western. Though they now make-up a small share of schools in general in places like Pakistan, richer states like Saudi Arabia are funding this type over general schools which will largely feed the sectors that grow economies (math, science, etc).
Though money is an absolutely crucial factor, it often seems disjointed from the ideological and intellectual traditions which have a larger bearing on what Samuel Huntington might cite as feeding a civilization or culture-based conflict with the West and the state-structures which extremists often consider un-Islamic or beholden to foreign interests.
Given the diversity of causes that feed extremism, only an effective state, as Aly-Khan Satchu, states, can contain this impulse. What can totally eliminate it? Can it be totally eliminated?
Groups like al-Qaeda which has the aim of establishing a global Islamic emerate are actually super-empowered by access to markets. In this sense, the enrichment of economies where foes can potentially grow wealth and use their wealth to harm others seems problematic. Further, where governments lack the necessary intervening mechanisms to thwart incursions into growing licit economies, a market in itself is again, insufficient.
Insofar as we've known for decades, perhaps centuries the radicalizing effect of poverty, this is no breakthrough in the most general sense.
The skeptic in me doesn't see extremism going away anytime soon and indeed our attempts have only ever seemed to backfire.
"In the Quicksands of Somalia" concerts, that interventionism, even directed by our best intentions, is often a source of strength for the very forces we seek to disempower. This lesson seems to be applicable in more places than our foreign policy would realize until after the fact. Jack Snyder has called this "over-expansion" of foreign policy.
Free Markets Free Muslims
I think the Architecture of Government is also key.
Aly-Khan Satchu
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