In case anyone had any doubts whether the foreign policy of the UK is a mere copycat of State Department memos, Mr. Miliband, her Majesty's Foreign Secretary, declared "War on Terror" wrong in today's Guardian (as well as a speech at the Taj Mahal hotel, in Mumbay). This comes a day after Hillary Clinton's remark on the use of American "smart power". In other words, and as one of the comments put it, this warmer weather seems to have brought the toads out. What is depressing is that the same Labourites could have voiced this mild criticism like, what, 4-5 years ago? And not now, 5 days before the Obama inauguration and amidst the highly unpopular Israeli invasion in Gaza. The UK might have avoided complicity in illegal detention and rendition, torture, drafting of horrid terrorism laws etc. It might also have saved its soul.
Here is part of Mr. Miliband's depressingly correct analysis:
The idea of a "war on terror" gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The reality is that the motivations and identities of terrorist groups are disparate. Lashkar-e-Taiba has roots in Pakistan and says its cause is Kashmir. Hezbollah says it stands for resistance to occupation of the Golan Heights. The Shia and Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq have myriad demands. They are as diverse as the 1970s European movements of the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, and Eta. All used terrorism and sometimes they supported each other, but their causes were not unified and their cooperation was opportunistic. So it is today.
The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics.
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