How to defeat the jihadis in something other than a war

How to defeat the jihadis in something other than a war
By Philip Stephens
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: July 5 2007 19:08 | Last updated: July 5 2007 19:08


Britain’s new prime minister is eschewing talk of “a war on terror”. The attempted bombings in London and Glasgow have also seen Gordon Brown’s government avoid references to “Islamist terrorists”. Instead, ministers have denounced the attacks as acts of criminality. The talk is of a need to win hearts and minds in the wider Muslim community.

One interpretation of this change of language and tone is that Mr Brown is seeking to distance himself from his predecessor Tony Blair and from George W. Bush’s administration in Washington. Another, and the two are not mutually exclusive, is that the new government wants to formulate a broader strategy for the long war – sorry, struggle – against the violent extremism of al-Qaeda and its ilk.

Change is the mantra of the moment in London. In office for only nine days, Mr Brown’s administration has not been queasy about distancing itself from the perceived mistakes of its predecessor. These include Mr Blair’s closeness to the White House and his habit, like Mr Bush, of casting the confrontation with violent Islamism as an existential struggle between good and evil.

In so far as British officials have read the runes of Mr Brown’s overall approach to foreign policy, they have concluded that he probably wants a relationship with Mr Bush more akin to that of Germany’s Angela Merkel than that of his predecessor. The special relationship will endure, but with room for public candour.

Over at the Foreign Office, it has been noted that David Miliband, the new foreign secretary, was a strong critic last year of Mr Blair’s unflinching support for Israel’s war in Lebanon. This week Mr Miliband stepped out to applaud the role played by Hamas in the freeing of the kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston. In parenthesis, friends add that Mr Miliband leans more naturally towards Europe than the US.

Whatever the motives of the new British government – and I suspect they are mixed – there is much to be said for an effort to reframe the struggle with extreme Islamism. The use of force can be only one dimension. Hearts and minds are critical in the effort to counter terrorism. Language and tone matter.

Mangled grammar apart (terror is a method not an enemy), the “war on terror” catchline has seemed to validate the jihadi claim of a clash of civilisations between Islam and the west. That in turn assists al-Qaeda and its affiliates in drawing the myriad conflicts in the Middle East into a single narrative of western oppression. Thus US policy has provided a unifying thread for groups across the region that have otherwise wholly different objectives and perspectives on Islam. The idea of one struggle encourages Shia terrorists to make common cause with Sunni, secular Muslims with fundamentalists. As my colleagues at the FT have been reporting in a series of articles this week, al-Qaeda has had considerable success in establishing an overarching ideological “order”, tapping into Islamist and other terrorist groups across the region.

There is more to this than words, of course. Language has driven policy. Terrorism in the Middle East is not monolithic. Even within avowedly violent groups there are often leaders ready to consider political accommodation. Hamas is one example. Put everyone in the same jihadi box and an opportunity is lost to isolate irredentist Islamists. There have been moments when the Bush administration might have recognised this. Two years ago, under the guidance of then state department official Robert Zelikow, there was a move to drop “war on terror”. Officials began experimenting with alternatives such as “the global struggle against violent extremism”.

Mr Zelikow, it was said at the time, wanted the US to develop a strategy that would discredit and demystify the extremists’ ideology and promote moderate Islam. Implicit was a recognition that the terrorists could not be defeated by purely military means – something that even Donald Rumsfeld, the then defence secretary, seemed ready to sign up to.

The initiative collapsed, though, when Mr Bush publicly slapped down his advisers. The war on terror had become his signature phrase. More than that, it provided the vital political cover for the war in Iraq. The phrase stayed. Even Democrats have seemed loathe to abandon it.

Mr Bush’s attachment to the war paradigm is no reason for Mr Brown to sign up. By 2009 the US will have a new president. If enough other leaders reframe the conflict as one much broader than a military confrontation Washington may eventually be persuaded to do likewise.

Above all the west needs to differentiate between al-Qaeda’s brand of irreconcilable extremism and the many other grievances, conflicts and stand-offs that fuel violence in the Muslim worlds. Some at least of these are susceptible to political solutions if they can be disentangled from violent Islamism.

So far so sensible. The intrinsic arguments for settlement, say, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are stronger than they have ever been. It also makes strategic sense to deprive al-Qaeda of some of the oxygen of radicalism. It is more difficult, but rational, to admit that the war in Iraq has proved a highly effective recruiting sergeant for Islamist extremism.

But there is a dangerous line here that must not be crossed. To say that the west should better understand and address the conditions that nurture the extremism of al-Qaeda and other violent manifestations of Wahhabi Islam must never be to ignore what these terrorists actually stand for.

Few things give more succour to the terrorists than an apparent acceptance by some in the west – in non-Muslim and Muslim communities alike – that their violence is somehow a response to western intervention. That, if only foreign troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan and Iraq and the Palestinians given their own state, the Islamist fundamentalists would lay down their car bombs.

Even the most cursory examination of views that motivate the Islamist extremists says otherwise. Behind the demand for a Muslim caliphate lies a brutal totalitarian ideology that is violent, deeply anti-Semitic and casts all but fellow fanatics as worthless kafirs. This is a movement that will draw any grievance, valid or otherwise, to its cause but will not be satisfied by anything short of its medievalist vision of an intolerant society based on their corruption of Islam. Whatever we call it – war, struggle, confrontation – and however we label them – criminals, Islamist terrorists, jihadis – we need to be absolutely sure of one thing. They must be defeated.

philip.stephens@ft.com