If there's one thing more scary than ISIS, it's the muddle-headed plans for dealing with it. In the debates about what to do, ISIS has been almost entirely viewed as a military and security problem while the ideological aspects have been almost entirely ignored. President Obama, in his statement last week, dismissed them in just three words. ISIS/ISIL, he said, "is not Islamic".

But ideology, based on a particularly extreme interpretation of Islamic teaching, lies at the heart of the so-called Islamic State. Without it, ISIS could not exist. 

The danger here is that treating ISIS almost exclusively as a military/security problem can easily make the ideological problem worse.

Obama doesn't want the US to tackle ISIS single-handedly and has been seeking to form a broad alliance, especially one that includes Arab and Muslim states. This sounds like a sensible strategy until we consider who those Arab and Muslim allies might be – and realise that there are probably none worth having as partners.

Last weekend, John Kerry, the US secretary of state was in Egypt – of all places – urging the Sisi regime to play a "key role" against ISIS. Sisi, however, reportedly wanted to broaden the anti-ISIS campaign to include his local political foe, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Sisi regime may disagree with ISIS over many things but apparently not over methodology, having slaughtered  
at least 800 and perhaps more than 1,000 Egyptian citizens in a single day last year.

Then we have the Gulf states which may be less uncivilised than ISIS (though Saudi Arabia appears to chopped off more heads than ISIS in recent weeks) but nevertheless claim backing from God and use religion politically to impose their will on the populace – much like ISIS.

The idea that a "correct" version of religion can – and should – be imposed is very widespread in the Middle East. Not just among extremist groups like ISIS but among governments and societies. The way this operates is documented in some detail in my new book, Arabs Without God – especially through laws against apostasy and blasphemy but also through more subtle pressures.

It's also worth remembering that while ISIS is the fiend of the day, even if it is defeated militarily there will still be plenty of similar violent movements dotted around the world, among them Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and Tunisia, Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and the Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia. Ideologically, a large portion of the blame for these can be laid at the door of Saudi Arabia which for several decades has been the world's leading exporter of hardline religion.

The ideology that sustains these organisations cannot be bombed out of existence; it has to be confronted in other ways – basically by developing a consensus that people are free to believe what they like, so long as they don't impose it on others.

This is where America's allies in the fight against ISIS become part of the problem rather than the solution. Until they can be persuaded to abandon sectarianism and start promoting tolerance among their citizens, nothing much is going to change.