‘War on terror’ termed misleading notion Meena Menon
British Foreign Secretary distances his country from U.S.-led campaign label
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband being welcomed by Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata on his arrival for an interactive talk “After Mumbai, Beyond the War on Terror” at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai on Thursday. —
MUMBAI: In an indictment of the controversial U.S.-led “war on terror” in which Britain was in cohorts with it, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has said the phrase was misleading and based on a mistaken notion. Historians would judge whether the “war” had done more harm than good, he remarked, addressing a gathering of Mumbai’s leading citizens at the Taj Mahal Hotel on Thursday.
Still insisting that the phrase “war on terror” had some merit, Mr. Miliband said that for a couple of years now the British government had used neither the idea nor the usage. He said terrorism was not invented or started on 9/11. But since then the notion of a “war on terror” has defined the terrain. “It captured the gravity of the threats that we face, the need for solidarity amongst allies and the need to respond urgently and where necessary with force.”
“The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available to us. We must. The question is how best we do so,” he told the audience, which included industrialist Ratan Tata. The Taj hotel reopened last month after the terror attack.
The call for a “war on terror” was a call to arms, he said, an attempt to build solidarity by portraying a fight against a single shared enemy. He believed the foundation for solidarity between people and nations should be based on the values they shared instead of who they are against. “The notion of a war on terror gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and the organisation of Al-Qaeda. In fact, as India has long known, the forces of violent extremism remain diverse. Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology,” Mr. Miliband explained. The tools
In the fight against terror, he said one needs to use all tools. “We need a political process,” he said. He emphasised that the war on terror implied a belief that the correct response to the terrorist threat was primarily a military one: to track down and kill a hardcore of extremists. “But as General [David] Petraeus [the U.S. General who led action in Iraq] said to me and the others in Iraq, the coalition there could not kill its way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife.”
He advocated a path of cooperation between India and Pakistan instead of confrontation. The governments of India and Pakistan have in recent years sought to establish a new relationship based on shared interests, he said. He knew from his own conversations with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari that he was equally keen to change the relationship for the better.
Three quarters of the most serious terrorist plots currently under investigation in the U.K. have links to terrorists in Pakistan. “So what is at stake is not just the security of this region, but the security of us all,” he said. The Lashkar-e-Taiba needs to be tackled at the roots. He said that in Islamabad [where he would be on Friday], he would emphasise that there must be zero tolerance for such organisations.
He commended the Indian government for showing “good sense” and refusing to be drawn into any rhetoric of isolation or retaliation. He said the trial for the November 26 attack can take place in Pakistan.
In response to questions, he clarified that the Pakistan government wants to prosecute the culprits on the basis of its own evidence. In the last six months in Pakistan the judiciary and the lawyers had showed a lot of independence. “We should hold the government to their promises.”
He expressed the sympathy and support of the British people and the British government for the people of Mumbai.
Mr. Miliband praised the staff members of the hotel for risking their lives to protect the guests.
He commended India’s and Mumbai’s response to the terror attacks, and said it was exactly the opposite of what the terrorists would have wanted.
By refusing to be cowed and quickly resuming their daily lives, the people of Mumbai have shown remarkable strength and courage, just as the people of London did in July 2005 [after a terror attack].
Democracies must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, he said.
“If we want to promote the politics of consent instead of terror and of democratic opportunity rather than fear and oppression, we must uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties both at home and abroad. That is surely the lesson of Guantanamo and it is why we welcome President-elect Obama’s clear commitment to close it.”
India longs to follow Israeli path of reprisal Shashi Tharoor | January 19, 2009 .. The Australian
AS Israeli planes and tanks exact a heavy toll on Gaza, India's leaders and strategic thinkers have been watching with an unusual degree of interest, and some empathy.
Unsurprisingly, India's Government has joined the rest of the world in calling for an end to the military action, but its criticism of Israel has been muted. As Israel demonstrates anew its determination to end attacks on its civilians by militants based in Hamas-controlled territory, many in India, still smarting from the horrors of the Mumbai attacks in November, have been asking: Why can't we do the same?
For many Indians, the temptation to identify with Israel was strengthened by the terrorists' seizure of Mumbai's Chabad House Jewish centre and the painful awareness that India and Israel share many of the same enemies. India, with its 150-million strong Muslim population, has long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and remains staunchly committed to an independent Palestinian state. But the Mumbai attacks confirmed what has become apparent in recent years: the forces of global Islamist terror have added Indians to their target list of reviled "Jews and crusaders".
Just as Israel has frequently been attacked by rockets fired from across its border with Gaza, India has suffered repeated assaults by killers trained, equipped, financed, and directed by elements based next door in Pakistan. When US President George W.Bush's press secretary equated members of Hamas with the Mumbai killers, her comments were widely circulated in India.
Yet there the parallels end.
Israel is a small country living in a permanent state of siege, highly security conscious and surrounded by forces hostile to it; India is a giant country with notoriously permeable borders and an open society known for its lax and easygoing ways.
Whereas many regard Israel's toughness as its principal characteristic, India's citizens view their country as a soft state, its underbelly easily penetrated by determined terrorists. Whereas Israel notoriously exacts grim retribution for every attack on its soil, India has endured with numbing stoicism an endless series of bomb blasts, including at least six major assaults in different locations in 2008 alone. Terrorism has taken more lives in India than in any country other than Iraq, and yet, unlike Israel, India has seemed unable to do anything about it.
Moreover, whereas Israel's principal adversary is presently Hamas, India faces a slew of terrorist organisations: Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Jamaat-ud-Dawa and others. But whereas Hamas operates without international recognition from Gaza - its legitimacy questioned even by the Palestinian Authority - India's tormentors function from Pakistan, a sovereign member of the UN. And that makes all the difference.
Hamas is in no position to repay Israel's air and ground attacks in kind, whereas an Indian attack on Pakistani territory, even one targeting terrorist bases and training camps, would invite swift retaliation from the Pakistani army. Israel can dictate the terms of its military incursion and end it at will, whereas an Indian military action would immediately spark a war with a well-armed neighbour that neither side could win. And, at the end of the day, one chilling fact would prevent India from thinking that it could use Israel's playbook: the country that condones, if not foments, the terror attacks on India is a nuclear power.
So India has gone to the international community with evidence to prove that the Mumbai attacks were planned in Pakistan and conducted by Pakistani citizens, who maintained contact with handlers in Pakistan throughout the operation. While India's Government had briefly hoped the proof could enable Pakistan's weak civilian Government to rein in the malign elements in its society, the Pakistani authorities' reaction has been one of denial.
Yet no one doubts that Pakistan's all-powerful military intelligence has, over the past two decades, created and supported terrorist organisations as instruments of Pakistani policy in Afghanistan and India. When India's embassy in Kabul was hit by a suicide bomber last July, US intelligence sources revealed that not only was Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence behind the attack, but that it made little effort to cover its tracks. The ISI knew perfectly well that India would not go to war with Pakistan to avenge the killing of its diplomatic personnel.
The fact is that India knows that war will accomplish nothing. Indeed, it is just what the terrorists want:
insert: YEEAHHH!!! TRIPLE UNDERLINE THAT, PLEASE
a cause that would rally all Pakistanis to the flag and provide Pakistan's army an excuse to abandon the unpopular fight against the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in the west for the more familiar terrain of the Indian border in the east. India's Government sees no reason to play into the hands of those who seek that outcome.
Yet, when Indians watch Israel take the fight to the enemy, killing those who launched rockets against it and dismantling many of the sites from which the rockets flew, some cannot resist wishing that they could do something similar in Pakistan. India understands, though, that the collateral damage would be too high, the price in civilian lives unacceptable, and the risks of the conflict spiralling out of control too acute to contemplate such an option. So Indians place their trust in international diplomacy and watch with ill-disguised wistfulness as Israel does what they could never permit themselves to do.
Shashi Tharoor, an acclaimed novelist and commentator, is a former undersecretary-general of the UN.
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