Five years on from bin Laden, 'campaign on terror' needs rebooting

MONDAY May 2 marked the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Half a decade on, the global terrorism environment has been reshaped by the rising prominence of so-called Islamic State (IS), originally a splinter group of Al Qaeda whose own fortunes have declined significantly.

In this landscape of change, one constant is that international terrorism has remained a continuing concern of international policymakers, as the recent IS attacks in Paris and Brussels underline. One of key challenges that world leaders face is that there remains a key weakness in the ongoing US-led global "campaign on terrorism".

That is, Washington's response has been hyper-militarised - dominated by counter terrorism and security, while other soft power instruments such as public diplomacy have been underinvested in. To be sure, even this unbalanced strategy has secured some key successes, including the unseating of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan, and potentially the progressive degradation of IS positions in Iraq and Syria too.