"We are not fighting a handful of maniacs; we are fighting a long-term, worldwide movement. The strategy of the jihadis is clear. We have none."
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=990188&C=thisweek Posted 07/25/05 16:24 Print-friendly version A War With No Strategy U.K. Lacks Comprehensive Policy for Terror By MARK BAILLIE The London suicide bombings confirm the long-standing internal threat in the United Kingdom and Western Europe, and have forced into the public domain a debate that was ignored or politically sensitive until now. Now is the time to press the British government to study and adopt a strategic policy instead of its ad hoc and contradictory range of reactions: It is in the interest of the United States to have its closest ally fight back against the nest of terrorism that the United Kingdom has become. Britain (along with the United States and most other countries) lacks a unified political, social and security policy run by professionals, not politicians. The current situation in Britain is the result of confused and contradictory ad hoc policies over many years, swinging from the excessive permissiveness of allowing fundamentalist preaching in the streets to the excessive repression of detention without charges. It is worth remembering that the first highly visible sign of violent Islamist fundamentalism in the United Kingdom goes back to long before the Iraq war or 9/11, to 1989, when a mob in Bradford rioted over the publication of Salman Rushdie�s �The Satanic Verses.� It was this outcry in Britain that led to the Ayatollah Khomeini�s famous fatwa convicting Rushdie of apostasy (abandoning Islam), for which the sentence was death (reconfirmed by the Iranian Parliament in 1998 and by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in January 2005). The $2.5 million bounty for killing Rushdie is still available. Current British Member of Parliament Khalid Mahmood has said �The Satanic Verses� should not be protected by laws of free speech because it insults the prophet Muhammad. Since then, Britain has grown and exported terrorists, including shoe-bomber Richard Reid and two suicide bombers in Israel; the first three British citizens to die in combat in the latest Afghan war were fighting for the Taliban against us. Government documents recently leaked estimate that �hundreds� are prepared to carry out attacks and that support for them may be around 16,000. These figures match those of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in its 30-year campaign that forced the government to negotiate and concede most of its demands. Britain�s former top policeman, Lord Stevens, estimated that 3,000 British citizens or residents had been through training camps in Afghanistan. This long-term campaign that we face needs an equivalent of a General Staff, a command structure that executes a clear mission under political guidance but without political interference. Even Winston Churchill, who had been a soldier since the age of 19 and fought in many wars at every level, did not interfere in the military duties of Alan Brooke (although the chief of the Imperial General Staff did often have to beat back some of the prime minister�s enthusiasms) during World War II. Such a command structure would unite the forces of this war � the intelligence service, the security service, the police, parts of the armed forces (mainly special forces), parts of the emergency services and any other experts from the wide range that would be required and could even include social services and educators. This command structure, however, could only be effective if it had a mission � a clear, unified policy to tackle the political, social and security threats that terrorist movements present. Such a unified policy has probably not been seen since the Malayan Emergency and was certainly not in force in the Baader-Meinhof, Red Brigade, ETA or IRA campaigns in Europe. Learning the Lessons There are recent lessons to be drawn from Ulster and from Italy�s war against the Sicilian and Neapolitan mafias. In both cases, a small nucleus of dangerous men (terrorists or criminals) grew from socially isolated communities where ties of family or clan took precedence over notions of authority or justice, and where the killers could move around in safety, benefiting from a combination of romanticism, misplaced loyalty and fear. The United Kingdom suffers a great institutional weakness in that servants of the crown are not permitted to suggest policy: This is a noble constitutional principle in theory, but it prevents the real experts from making forceful suggestions to ministers who rarely have any relevant expertise in their subject. We also need U.S.-style ratification of military, police, intelligence and civil service chiefs so that they can only be dismissed by Parliament, and not at the whim of a government that does not like what they are saying. It is that supremacy of government, instead of Parliament, that made possible the distortions of intelligence that made up the government�s case for the Iraq war. The first step is to bring together retired (and therefore free to express themselves) police, military and intelligence officers and civil servants with interested politicians in a think-tank setting to debate in confidence and to make specific tactical and strategic recommendations in public. We are not fighting a handful of maniacs; we are fighting a long-term, worldwide movement. The strategy of the jihadis is clear. We have none. Mark Baillie is a London-based policy consultant and author of �Islamist Terrorism: A Primer,� published by the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12huqgfip/M=362329.6886306.7839369.3040540/D=groups/S=1705323667:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1122780931/A=2894321/R=0/SIG=11dvsfulr/*http://youthnoise.com/page.php?page_id=1992 ">Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back!</a>.</font> --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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