This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
11 min read
A former Los Angeles gang member, a former skinhead and a former radical Islamist walk into a youth center. What sounds like the setup for an uneasy joke is at the core of Farah Pandith’s work: Put people who might otherwise never share a room in front of young people; let them explain what drew them into extremism and how they found their way out. “They’re the most authentic and credible voices there are,” Pandith says. More than once she has observed that their stories reach an audience that official warnings cannot.
For decades, including while working for the U.S. government under the Obama, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush administrations, Pandith researched why people embrace ideologies that divide the world into “us versus them.” Before people can be persuaded away from hatred, she argues, one has to understand what they are looking for: recognition, certainty or a place in the world. “You don’t suddenly explode and become an extremist overnight. You’re having some self-doubt, you’re asking questions about who you are,” she says from her light-filled living room in Arlington, Virginia. Preventing someone from becoming an extremist has been her lifelong goal, because it’s “infinitely easier than dealing with the fallout.”
She has traveled to over 100 countries, from Belgium to Bangladesh, to understand how extremists’ descent into violence can be interrupted. Today she applies what she learned to a broader problem: how to make compassion more than an admirable sentiment and help communities put it into practice.
Last year Pandith received the ADL Daniel Pearl Award, which is given annually to a person who has had a positive impact on understanding between Jews and the Muslim world, and is sponsored by the parents of the journalist who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002. “It is hard to think of anyone more knowledgeable than Farah Pandith when it comes to countering violent extremism,” Joseph Nye, the late chair of the National Intelligence Council, said about her.
On September 11, 2001, Pandith watched on television like millions of others as two planes struck the World Trade Center. “It felt very heavy,” she recalls, putting a hand to her heart. “The world kind of went still for a moment, like, ‘What do we do about this?’” She felt compelled to act, to help prevent such violence from happening again.
She especially rejected the way extremists attempted to define her religion on the airwaves. “Who are they to dictate what Islam is?” she remembers thinking. “For me, Islam means humility, compassion, to treat others with respect.”
Initially, when she worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), cooperating with local organizations showed her that effective policy depends on understanding the people on the ground. “You have to listen really well to find a solution that matches with the local community,” she says. “That’s tricky and complex. Trust has to be built first.”
The same principle, she realized, applied to preventing violent extremism. Government officials could not design effective strategies from Washington alone. They needed to hear from the people they hoped to reach, including those whose voices had been overlooked. After joining the National Security Council in 2004 to oversee the Countering Violent Extremism strategy alongside Nye, Pandith helped develop the “soft power” side of the Global War on Terror. She calls her way of deep listening “open power.” Military action might disrupt extremist organizations, but it could not prevent them from recruiting new members. Nor were public relations campaigns successful in overcoming the distrust of Muslims worldwide. Even in her own government, distrust was impossible to ignore. One congressman called the White House to complain a “jihadist” was sitting in the Council.
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Pandith was briefly living in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, in 2004 when photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib surfaced showing American soldiers humiliating Muslim prisoners. “In an instant, all our efforts on the ground were harmed irreparably,” she says. Locals asked how she could represent a government that treated Muslim prisoners that way.
The experience reinforced a lesson: Building trust also meant receiving criticism, sitting through uncomfortable conversations. Pandith carried that approach into her work at the State Department, where Hillary Clinton appointed her the first U.S. special representative to Muslim communities in 2009. Instead of treating Muslim populations as a single audience for American messages, she traveled widely, meeting people in homes, mosques and community settings to learn what mattered to them. “You have to go to the rural areas,” she says, aiming to support credible local voices that could offer alternatives to extremist narratives.
Pandith herself has been shaped by a background that made her an ideal diplomat. She came to the U.S. from Kashmir as a baby with her father, a businessman, and her mother, a pulmonologist “who knows the Quran inside and out” and who went to work running a hospital in a pantsuit. Pandith describes growing up in a highly educated Muslim family without experiencing discrimination. She remembers an America in which people of different faiths could live alongside one another, “with a synagogue, a church, a mosque and a temple in the same part of town.” Today, she admits, that harmonious coexistence feels nearly impossible.
Her parents separated when she was 10, and her mother raised Pandith and her brother on her own. One of her greatest influences was her uncle, a heart surgeon. “I’ve held the hearts of different people in my hands,” he would tell her. “Always remember: There is no difference between the heart of a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu or a Christian.”
Pandith feels she carries “many identities” — American and Muslim, immigrant and career woman. “I have a face that people can’t quite know where I’m from,” she explains. “Sometimes people think I’m Italian.” She also relies on what she calls her “superpower” when speaking with Muslims. When she tells them she was born in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, the atmosphere often changes. “Suddenly I’m like a sister to them.”
Her ability to forge connections would become one of her greatest professional assets. By chance, Barbara Bush, the wife of President George H.W. Bush, visited Smith College after a racist incident. She was so impressed by a speech Pandith gave as student representative there that she helped her secure her job at USAID after graduation. That was how the young woman began traveling around the world.
Pandith’s work challenged conventional explanations of radicalization. Poverty and lack of education, she argued, could not explain why people embraced violent ideologies. Some of the 9/11 terrorists were well educated. Pandith pointed to a different cause she observed in Muslim communities: deep identity crises among young people who struggled to find their place in a rapidly changing world. She thinks of the 11-year-old girl in Denmark whose Imam told her she wasn’t a Muslim if she didn’t cover her head. Or Mubin Shaikh in Canada, who went to Pakistan and Syria as a 19-year-old to fight alongside the jihadists and who now teaches security politics at the University of Ottawa.
Pandith has seen firsthand that dialogue can change minds. “It’s less interesting for the media than a radical’s video, but the conversations we led affected people.”
Her initiatives have sought to make dialogue a shared responsibility. Against Violent Extremism became the world’s first and only network of former extremists, launched by Google. An Hour Against Hate encouraged teenagers to spend an hour doing something for someone different from themselves. Millions participated. Sisters Against Violent Extremism connected mothers concerned about their children’s vulnerability to extremist recruitment. In a citizen-dialogue program, Pandith traveled through Europe with other Muslim Americans to share experiences and listen to local concerns. People had the chance to meet someone they might otherwise see only through stereotypes and to develop a relationship that complicated those assumptions.
In her book How We Win, recently reissued, Pandith remains stubbornly optimistic: The fight against extremism can be won. Preventing people from being drawn into extremist movements requires intervening early and bringing together the people who can reach them — not just government officials, but business leaders, teachers, local communities and influencers whose networks, knowledge and credibility government agencies lack.
“The fight against violent extremism is not going to be won solely by the efforts of government,” she argues. “We need businesses to step up more than ever before, in the public interest as well as their own.”
She insists that this work cannot be dismissed as idealism or do-goodery but is “a matter of national security” — as important as the hard power of military force.
Pandith emphasizes that the underlying lessons extend beyond Islamist extremism. The same dynamics of exclusion and dehumanization can fuel hostility toward religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people and Asian communities, among others.
Still, she admits that the strategies for countering violent extremism never fully came to fruition, often mired in bureaucracy. “Congress provided 0.1 percent of funding compared to the funding for the military,” she calculates. “We know what we need to do. We spent 25 years researching and exchanging strategies. But we left the field to the extremists.” Pandith sees the reality as a call to action: “We cannot just wring our hands and keep saying things are bad and things are difficult and somebody else’s problem. We need everybody.”
She now works outside government to advance another part of this agenda, as senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, teaching countering violent extremism at the University of Georgetown, and as a Global Peace Laureate for the Muhammad Ali Center. She has been developing the Muhammad Ali Index on compassion.
For Pandith, compassion is the capacity to recognize another person’s humanity even amid disagreement, and to resist the impulse to turn differences into a reason for contempt. “There isn’t a faith on planet Earth that doesn’t have compassion in it. And even if you are not religious you understand what it means, right?” As part of the Muhammed Ali Index, more than 5,400 people in 12 American cities responded to the 2025 State of Compassion survey. Sixty-one percent said they felt compassion has declined in the last four years, but 43 percent were optimistic about the future of compassion in America.
A second index, planned for 2027, will cover 20 U.S. cities and 12 cities around the world. The ambition is practical. Pandith hopes the data will help mayors, school leaders, faith groups and local organizations identify opportunities to build stronger connections and design efforts suited to their own communities. The point is not to prescribe a universal program, but to create a framework that can be adapted. “We want to see people taking inspiration from the data to actually do something over time so we can measure and see what takes place,” she says passionately, insisting that compassion can be trained: “Compassion is a muscle that can be exercised.” Yet the starting point is personal: “Self-compassion is essential.” Building the capacity for compassion, Pandith argues, begins with recognizing what is happening inside oneself.
She is particularly interested in reaching young people early. “The world that they are growing up in is so polarized and so difficult and so different from the one that we have grown up in,” she says, “that they don’t have a memory of people who are different from them speaking to each other regularly.”
As Pandith sees it, waiting for polarization to disappear on its own is not a strategy. The task is to build relationships and connections that open up hearts and minds — and to keep investing in them long enough to learn what works. She repeats her favorite sentence: “Solutions are available and affordable.”
The post The Counter-Extremism Expert Building Our Capacity for Compassion appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
