It's perhaps unusual for an interior minister to be in charge of foreign policy, travel to world capitals and negotiate transfers of arms to rebels in regional conflicts. But conventions often do not apply in the Arab world and certainly not in Saudi Arabia, where princes perform multiple and diverse tasks. Reports are circulating in the media that Minister of Interior Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, known for his counterterror efforts, will replace his nephew Prince Bandar bin Sultan as the man in charge of the Syrian file. Saudi sources remain unsurprisingly silent on the speculations. The prince’s task allegedly revolves around defeating President Bashar al-Assad by arming moderate Syrian rebels and fighting al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Syria. Such a specific agenda is reportedly meant to reinvigorate Saudi efforts to remain relevant in Syria, where bin Sultan's strategies have failed miserably over the last three years. Can bin Nayef achieve this rather difficult objective that would allow him to go beyond his narrow expertise as the security man who defeated al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and eventually emerge as the future monarch of Saudi Arabia?

One outcome of the war on terror was the making of "big men" who were granted extensive powers and unlimited budgets to fight the menace of terrorism, uproot its fiercest practitioners, de-radicalize its sympathizers and emerge triumphant over not only terrorists but societies that are ruled with an iron fist. Bin Nayef’s career over the last decade seems to correspond to that of the counterterror "big man." Like the terror they fight, such "big men" seek to be global. To succeed, they need to reach out to an international constituency and a web of world leaders and intelligence services. Bin Nayef visited Washington several times over the last year or so — the last such visit was on Feb. 11 — seeking dialogue with US President Barack Obama and senior officials in the State Department and the CIA. A counterterror "big man" needs to convince Washington that he knows the terrorists and their hideouts and can turn their religiously saturated discourse on its head and catch them before they unleash their terror on peaceful civilians.

Bin Nayef must have convinced Washington that he knows the terrorists very well, so well in fact that they came too close for comfort. On one occasion, a terrorist was invited to meet him to discuss repentance and reunion with his wife. But treachery won out, and the terrorist turned up with hidden explosives that exploded and mildly injured the prince. The prince inaugurated a showpiece de-radicalization program, almost a five-star rehabilitation resort, where a number of religious scholars, psychologists and sociologists work as counselors re-educating terrorists in the art of tolerance and moderate religious interpretations. After graduating from the program, they are rewarded with a comfortable life, a stipend, a wife and a job. The project attracted international attention as a success story despite the fact that some graduates may relapse and return to their original convictions. Nevertheless, as the program's founder, bin Nayef emerged as the tamer of terrorists whose expertise is now sought by international counterterrorism agencies from Washington to Singapore.

One difficulty that hindered the program's success was the fact that Saudi Arabia was fighting a battle with its own ideology. The terrorists were simply putting into practice what their government and its agencies had taught them for years. Bin Nayef was not fighting a battle with an external ideological trend, but a very local one, so local in fact that it helped forge the Saudi state itself, which was conceived as a project to "purify" Islam and eradicate differences. The prince wanted to eradicate the ideology of terror in a state that was founded on eradicating other ways of thinking and behaving, so this dilemma will continue to haunt any serious effort to contain terrorism. To put it bluntly, the prince did not succeed in eliminating terror; he simply pushed it away to countries like Yemen, Iraq and now Syria and Lebanon.