I've been meaning to write this spotlight for several months now, such that most of my close associates likely know everything I'm about to say. When the Syrian refugee crisis started escalating I had planned an article (self-evidently postponed) about the abysmal international response, but in the wake of Paris and Beirut I feel this is again the more topical.

Remember al-Qaida? That nebulous organization said to have sleeper cells all over the world, constantly plotting suicide bombings against pretty much every major commercial centre in the western hemisphere? You know, America's Public Enemy №1? It seems ever since the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham 'broke off' from headquarters, the 'original' hub of Middle-Eastern extremism has rapidly faded into irrelevance. Did the ISIS defection bleed out Zawahiri's best? Has it simply gone underground to let al-Baghdadi take international flak? Al-Qaida used to pump out media spots almost every other week; nowadays the best we hear is African bandits "affiliated with" it.

Whatever happened to 'the Base'?

Or did it even exist in the first place?

Cast your mind back to 2004: NATO was garrisoning Afghanistan and the United States was settling into the occupation of Iraq. Though in the coming years insurgent groups would mobilize in both countries, the extremism that had stunned the world in 2001 seemed remarkably impotent on its home turf. Bin Laden was still at large, but all al-Qaida seemed capable of mounting were roadside bombs and raids on local civil offices; nothing on the scale of the September 11 hijackings had, or arguably has, been seen since.

And yet, even after months of scouring failed to find the legendary mountain strongholds dotting the Afghan highlands or the remotest hint al-Qaida had been embedded in Iraq, the Western public was kept in perpetual agitation that a new onslaught was 'imminent', enveloped by a cloud of fear that cast, say, a fourth-generation British Sikh as an undercover Wahhabi terrorist. Newspapers and government ministers proudly announced the arrest of dozens, if not hundreds of 'terror suspects' in ritualized police sweeps, but were not nearly so forthcoming when these arrestees were found completely innocent and quietly released. It didn't matter that level-headed security experts deemed the likelihood of repeat attacks minimal at best: if no physical threat existed, policymakers were content to make one up.

In 2004, Adam Curtis made a three-part documentary titled The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. In it, he demonstrates how in the wake of the Cold War the American neoconservatives and Islamist militants developed an inadvertent yet symbiotic relationship to advance their respective ideological objectives. It reveals that far from being al-Qaida's kingpin, Osama bin Laden was little more than a banker recruited by Islamic Jihad during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan who went on to serve as spokesman for the ideological leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. It argues that al-Qaida as a consolidated entity never existed, but is at best a patchwork of loosely-related insurgent groups; the name was invented by American prosecutors so as to charge bin Laden in absentia for the embassy bombings in 1998, and that only after 9/11 did bin Laden et al. begin using the term themselves, precisely to play into Western paranoia.

Humans are hard-wired to look for patterns and frame in metaphors. Fresh out of the Cold War, the neo-cons adapted the same propaganda model used for Soviet terrorism to Islamist radicalism: hence al-Qaida as the diabolical mastermind, bin Laden as its infallible commander, and total war as the means to its defeat. But in hunting a phantom enemy, the West blinded itself to the ideological root of the danger: that militant Islamism isn't tied to any one leader or country, but is a grassroots mentality that, as we have already seen, can even find traction amongst white Anglo-Saxons eager to latch onto the latest trendy counter-culture.

Bin Laden's death in 2011 changed nothing; boogeymen like al-Qaida and ISIS are merely the symptom of an underlying cause: a profound dissatisfaction with the global status quo. Terrorism cannot be bested by bombs or bullets; radicalism is a state of mind, and can only be successfully combatted psychologically. And it can be done: in the 1990s militant Islamism was a spent force, having discredited itself by its own hand; only after America's clumsy military response to what was at heart a criminal act did radicalism regain legitimacy as a form of regional resistance. People like al-Zawahiri and al-Baghdadi may be incorrigible zealots, but the vast majority of their supporters are little more than bandits and desperados merely out to bolster their lot in life. Alleviate the everyday grievances—poverty, illiteracy, political and social dysfunction—and extremism's attractiveness sloughs away.

But to declare we'll beat the terrorists by building a better world, a fairer world, is a phenomenally harder sell than vowing to drop bombs on some camp in the Levantine hills, and in a post-9/11 world it is politically expedient to campaign on perpetual fear rather than strive for real change. So when you listen to news about ISIS' latest desperate scramble to bolster its prestige, or the perpetual debate about why we can't accept desperate refugees because the families fleeing the terror are all secretly on al-Baghdadi's payroll, ask yourself: In accepting this nightmare world as the new status quo, have we not already surrendered?