-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 20, 2007 9:24:30 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: UK Committee on Terrorism Calls Bush's Approach
Wrongheaded, Counterproductive
West's strategy on terrorism
all wrong, says Ashdown
Patrick Wintour
The Guardian (UK), September 19, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2172206,00.html
The west's strategy to defeat international terrorism will be
attacked today as historically illiterate and counter-productive by
Paddy Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader and chair of a
new commission on terrorism.
In what will be seen as a wholesale rejection of the American-led
war against terrorism, he will say: "Our problem is that we have
chosen the wrong mindset, the wrong battlefield, the wrong weapons
and the wrong strategies to win this campaign. We have chosen to
fight an idea, primarily with force."
The remarks by Lord Ashdown, who has been courted by the US
administration to coordinate the struggle against the Taliban in
Afghanistan and is rated by Gordon Brown, add to the sense that
British thinking is moving much more towards a battle of hearts and
minds rather than victory by military coercion.
He will argue that the west's tactics "have strengthened the
concepts of our enemies and weakened our own" and the west has
"elected to fight on a battlefield of their choosing, where they
are strongest and we are weakest".
He will also suggest that the threat has been exaggerated if
compared with 19th-century anarchism or the bombing campaign of
Irish republicanism in the 70s, two threats that had not led to the
current erosion of civil liberties. Lord Ashdown is currently
jointly chairing a committee of inquiry into terrorism with the
former defence secretary Lord Robertson.
He will say: "The west seeks to control territory; they seek to
capture minds. We have chosen language and means which unite the
moderates in Islam with the fanatics, when we should be uniting
with the moderates in Islam against a common enemy. We have adopted
methods, or connived at their adoption, which undermine the moral
force of our ideas and strengthen the prejudices of our opponents.
"We are seeking to win a battle of values by sacrificing our most
precious and most potent value, our freedoms and our civil
liberties. We concentrate almost all our efforts on the short-term
struggle to prevent the next outrage, and almost none on the long-
term task of winning the hearts and minds of moderate Islam."
He will argue: "What al-Qaida and its sister organisations are
actually engaged in is a battle, not for the west, but for the soul
of Islam. They kill and maim in London, New York and Madrid, in
order to win in Riyadh, Cairo, Damascus and Tehran."
Western leaders, he will argue, are historically illiterate when
they persist in their language and actions in portraying this as a
great worldwide struggle for "our western values", inferentially
against the values of the Islam and the east.
He will say that al-Qaida's best weapon is its ability to remain a
deadly concept, inspiring recruits and planning operation s without
any of the cumbersome and vulnerable paraphernalia of a
conventional military structure."
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