Guardian : West's strategy on terrorism all wrong, says Ashdown

West's strategy on terrorism all wrong, says Ashdown

Patrick Wintour | The Guardian | September 19, 2007

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."