Jeffrey D. Sachs is truly an idealist and a pacificist. It is not totally untrue that recent terror attacks on Paris and the Russian plane over Sinai are a form of “blowback terrorism.” He says the US and European states are to blame for their "covert and overt military actions throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Central Asia that aimed to overthrow governments and install regimes compliant with Western interests."

It is true that in the 1980s, the US armed and funded the Afghan Mujahideen (of which Osama Bin Laden was a part) when they were fighting the Soviet forces, who had invaded the country in 1979. Although the CIA had been involved in many clandestine operations that led to regime change in many countries, yet the agency was initially reluctant to get involved in Afghanistan. According to BBC report April 17, 2006, it was the Texan Congressman Charlie Wilson who bullied the CIA "to accept and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fuel the anti-Soviet jihad (holy war)."

Later "some elements of the Mujahideen morphed into Al Qaeda" and its host, the Afghan Taliban indulged in turncoat attacks on Americans and their NATO allies since October 2001. In fact it's the failure to address the root causes of al-Qaeda that enabled ISIS to emerge. Pakistan is also to blame for supporting and giving shelter to the Taliban and other Islamist groups in Afghanistan. Iran's grip on the Shia-led government in Iraq was the cause for Sunni resentments, and Saddam Hussein's former loyalists are now advising ISIS.

Sachs doesn't seem to favour uprisings, and he believes that "by upending established, albeit authoritarian, governments in Iraq, Libya, and Syria and destabilizing Sudan and other parts of Africa deemed hostile to the West," the CIA had left behind a vacuum which was then filled by "chaos, bloodshed, and civil war."

He proposes "three steps" to fight "ISIS and other violent jihadists." He urges Obama to prevent the CIA from meddling and to end all "mayhem" the agency has caused. It's unclear how much the CIA is involved in Iraq and Syria. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council should stop bickering over their differences and work on a peace plan for Syria. What will be difficult is to urge opposition groups in Syria to stop fighting Assad. A "UN-mandated military force" may be a good idea to fight ISIS for the mission to appear genuinely credible. An international coalition will look less like a war for defending the West, but more an effort to fight terrorists.

Terrorism must be fought in the short and medium terms. It is important to denounce ISIS et al and bring them to justice. Yet in the longer term, a world that turns a deaf ear to dispossessed and disaffected, is not a safe world. For security so tightly interwoven with economic stability, Sachs says the international community ought to address grievances in countries in the Middle East and Africa with "fresh water stress, desertification, high youth unemployment, poor educational systems, and other serious blockages." But it is a tall order.