Theresa May can’t outsource counter-terrorism to Silicon Valley | Alia Brahimi

Theresa May called on technology companies to go “further and faster” in taking down extremist content at the UN on Wednesday. “Ultimately it is not just the terrorists themselves who we need to defeat,” the British prime minister said. “It is the extremist ideologies that fuel them.”

The proliferation of extremist material online is a significant problem that we need to challenge. However, May’s remarks are based on the common yet misguided assumption that extreme ideological material, and its availability on the internet, is what drives terrorism.

Certainly, extremist ideas online can play a powerful role. Roshonara Choudhry, for example, decided to stab her local MP, Stephen Timms, after listening online to lectures by the al-Qaida propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki. Choudhry told police that she targeted Timms because he had voted in parliament in favour of the Iraq war. Timms survived Choudhry’s attack; Awlaki was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Reflecting on the life sentence handed down in November 2010, Timms said it was alarming that Choudhry had reached the decision to attempt to murder him and throw her life away “simply by spending time on the internet”.

These cases do exist. But while we acknowledge the power of extremist ideology, we must be careful not to conclude that it is the main driver of the terrorist threat globally. For the most part, ideology is an enabler of terrorism, used by terrorist leaders and ideologues to influence others for their own purposes. It is not, however, a driver of terrorism in any meaningful sense, particularly outside the west.

More often than not, terrorism is driven by grievances arising from armed conflict, poor governance and state collapse – which are usually left out of the conversation on counter-terrorism. These grievances create the political and social space in which the majority of terrorist groups recruit and operate. Ideology matters, but grievances, many of them desperate and real, provide the critical context in which ideas take hold – for audiences both on the ground and far away.

Of course, this recognition is not to excuse terrorism in any way. Moreover, plenty of fanatics are attracted to terrorist groups simply through hate or the desire to kill – in fact, the distinctive markers of the Islamic State worldview are unbridled bloodlust, and an apocalyptic obsession with a messianic deliverer. However, we have to ask ourselves honestly whether a reduction of extremist content online would reduce the threat from terrorism so long as catastrophic conditions persist in places such as Syria, Iraq and Libya.

This instability has provided terrorist groups with unprecedented access to operating spaces and training bases far beyond the reaches of western intelligence services. It has enabled them to recruit freely among desperate populations who have no good choices when the alternative is a government that is weak – in the case of Libya and Afghanistan – or associated with sectarian atrocities, in the case of Iraq and Syria. And it has allowed extremists to reach back into the western heartland – yes, sometimes via the net, but also through networks of capable militants who are able to move between Europe and Syria without detection. Disrupting online content will not change those realities.

Even if technology companies were to become more efficient at removing extremist content, Isis would still be regrouping in Libya – not only in the south and the west, but also around Sirte, in the centre of the country, from where its men were ejected only last December. It would still be escalating its attacks in Afghanistan, across nine provinces, as part of a major challenge to the Taliban. Groups allied to Isis would still be making major pushes in the Sinai, the Philippines, and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Thousands of foreign fighters fleeing the collapsing “caliphate” would still be massing in the borderland straddling Syria and Turkey, plotting a way back to Europe. For its part, al-Qaida – obsessed, as ever, with attacking the west – would still be a resurgent force in the Levant and the Sahel.

The political and humanitarian crises in these regions are intimately bound up with the terrorism threat in the UK. Suppressing extremist content online is important, but it cannot form the core of our counter-terrorism effort.

May is right about one thing: it’s not just the terrorists themselves we need to defeat, but also extremist ideologies. However, this ultimately means dealing with the toxic conditions in which these ideologies gain traction. Silicon Valley can get better at writing algorithms to reduce the spread of extremist material online, but it cannot write a stabilisation strategy for the Middle East and north Africa, or Afghanistan. That task falls to May, her government, and its international partners.

• Alia Brahimi is co-founder of the thinktank Legatus Global