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War on terror was mistaken, admits Miliband

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Jan 16, IRNA – Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted Thursday that the launch of the so-called ‘war on terror’ following the 9/11 attacks in the US in 2001 was wrong and may have caused "more harm than good".

“Ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken. The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available. We must. The question is how,” Miliband said.

“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,” he said.

His comments, expressed in an article for the Guardian newspaper, signal a change in British government approach to combating terrorism after years of warnings from the country’s Muslim leaders that it was not only misguided but counterproductive.

It was seen as distancing the UK government from some of the excessive policies of US President George W Bush just days before he leaves office ends eight years in office that was marked by a succession of pre-emptive wars supported by Britain.

“Seven years on from 9/11 it is clear that we need to take a fundamental look at our efforts to prevent extremism and its terrible offspring, terrorist violence,” Miliband said.

“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,” he admitted.

His argument was that instead 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.”

The foreign secretary did not go as far as suggesting that the UK government had over-reacted in embarking on a succession of draconian measures but said that the “best antidote to the terrorist threat in the long term is cooperation.”

“We must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society,” he said.

“We must uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home and abroad. That is surely the lesson of Guantánamo and it is why we welcome President-elect Obama's commitment to close it.”

Miliband criticised the perception of the war on terrorism as having a “single shared enemy, saying that “the foundation for solidarity between peoples and nations should be based not on who we are against, but on the idea of who we are and the values we share.”