Category: Terrorism

 

 

So, we have started bombing. What next? – The Times 30 September 2014

 

 

Almost exactly 275 years ago, after the article in question was paraded round Westminster in a pickle jar, the House of Commons voted to go to war over the severed ear of an English sea-captain. The War of Jenkins Ear rewrote the borders of America, killed thousands and convulsed Europe for nine long years.

 

Egged on by our modern obsession with kinetics, rather than context, it seems we still cannot see a problem without reaching for a rocket or a bomb to solve it. We have forgotten the Clausewitz dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. And so last Fridays’ Commons debate was much more about war and weapons, than the politics and diplomacy that lie behind it – or needs to, if we are to succeed.

 

In defeating the ISIL convulsion in the Middle East, diplomacy will have a bigger part to play than military action. Western bombs alone will not do it. Indeed, unsupported by strategic diplomacy they may even make ISIL stronger. In this fight our key ally is, not American air power, but Muslim engagement.

 

Here we have at present, a parson’s nose of good and bad. The good is that an Arab anti-ISIL coalition exists, including some Gulf States who foolishly funded the Jihadism that now threatens them and some of Iraq’s moderate Arab neighbours (such as Jordan). But, as a coalition, this is too small, too narrow and, in a Middle East teetering on the edge of full scale religious conflict, far, far too Sunni.

 

The crucial backdrop to the ISIL crisis is the Sunni/Shia conflict which now reverberates across the Middle East, down into Africa, up into the Russian Islamic republics and even to Indonesia and the Uighur population of China. This is what makes the barbaric provocations of ISIL so potentially explosive. The danger is that we, the West, will get drawn in to the Sunni side of this divide, while Russia is drawn into the Shia one. Then we would have a regional war with global consequences – think the Balkans in 1913.

 

Here again, there is good news, and bad. Listening to Shia voices in the last few days, it is possible to discern two coalitions emerging, one in the visible spectrum and the other in the invisible. The silence – or at least restraint – of Tehran and Damascus, perhaps even Russia too, in the face of US bombing in Syria has been deafening. We seem to have a participating Sunni coalition against ISIL. And an acquiescing Shia one prepared, for the moment to wait and see. But how long will this last in the face of the inevitable accidents and stupidities of war?

 

There is an opportunity here, if grasped quickly, for a wider, more balanced coalition and we should seize it.

 

Some of this will be subtle, some straightforward, some very difficult.

 

Turkey should be brought in. We need to decide soon whether the currently faltering nuclear talks with Iran can be allowed to fail, just when there is so much to gain from a deeper engagement with the reformists in Tehran. We should be encouraging recent attempts to improve relations between the two giants of the Shia and Sunni worlds, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And finally, a settlement in the Middle East strong enough to resist the contagion of Sunni Jihadism, of which ISIL is only the latest example, requires a solution to the question of illegal Israeli settlements as the necessary prelude to any Israeli/Palestinian peace based on a two state solution.

 

Perhaps most difficult of all, the West needs to recognise that Russia too has a dog in this fight – arguably a much bigger one than we have. Sunni Jihadism is roaring away in the Russian Islamic republics of Dagestan and Chechnya, too. We in Europe may be concerned about Jihaddis returning from the battlefield. But Russia is one of the battlefields.

 

So why are we so reluctant to draw Russia in? Washington friends tell me that the reason is the personal animus between Putin and Obama. If so, get over it. A wider coalition which includes the Russians, actively or passively, could open the way to a Security Council Resolution, provide the best means of limiting the spread of the Middle Eastern crisis and vastly enhance our horse power in resolving it.

 

We cannot compromise on Ukraine, where Putin invites us to dig up the foundations on which the peace of Europe has been built for fifty years. But, with Russia, the best policy is not isolation, but balance; tough where necessary, partnership where possible. The current Middle East crisis offers us just such an opportunity. We should take it.

 

The War of Jenkins ear started with a provocation and ended in a catastrophe. It showed that military action is not a substitute for diplomacy, but an adjunct to it. It would be a pity, if 275 years later we have to learn that lesson again.

 

The Independent 21 July 2015 Bombing ISIL

 

Towards the end of the 1960s jungle war Britain fought to protect Sarawak against rebel incursions, I received orders to cross the border and take the fight to the insurgents based on the other side of the Indonesian frontier. It was a controversial policy, but an effective one– the war ended not long afterwards. Britain claimed legality for these operations under the provisions in international law which, in some circumstances, permit a nation to pursue its right to self-defence onto the territory of a second state, where that state harbours or supports those who threaten its security.

 

It is no doubt this provision which the Prime Minister has in mind when he says that Britain, as part of the “coalition” who has been “invited” by the Iraqi Government to help defend its territory, is now legally justified in joining other coalition air-forces already bombing ISIL in Syria. Whether this is in fact so is a matter for lawyers, not me.

 

But whether this action, even if legal, is wise, is a different question.

 

Does it make military sense for Britain to pursue ISIL into Syria? Probably. Is it legal to do so? Possibly. Is this the most effective thing Britain can do to defeat ISIL? Definitely not.

 

We are not losing the war against ISIL because we do not have enough bombs – we are losing it because we do not have enough diplomacy.

 

The great military thinker Clausewitz famously said that war was the extension of diplomacy by other means. One of the reasons we in the West have suffered so many defeats in recent years is because we always seem to remember the war, but forget the diplomacy. We see a problem in the world and our first instinct is to bomb it. We have become obsessed with high explosive as an instrument for peace. George Bush senior knew better. He carefully constructed a Middle East Coalition before Gulf War one, making it seem Western forces were the instrument of Arab will – and he won. George Bush Junior ditched diplomacy in favour of Western “shock and awe” – and lost. We repeated the mistake in Afghanistan, using high explosive as a substitute for the kind of patient diplomacy to create a regional framework for peace with the neighbours, as we did in Bosnia – and lost. In Libya we could have created a regional coalition with countries like Turkey to first liberate the country and then rebuild it afterwards. Instead the West chose to blast Gadhafi out of office and then abandoned the country to chaos afterwards.

 

And now we are doing it all over again. Only this time it is much more dangerous. Some of us have been warning for three years that the real event taking place in the Middle East is a widening Sunni/Shia war which threatens to engulf the region. ISIL is only part of this. But we have become so obsessed with the small picture and the short-term threat to the West, that we cannot see the bigger threat to peace on a wider scale.

 

There is now a real danger that we become the unwitting handmaidens of that wider conflict by creating a so called “coalition” to fight ISIL which is too military, too Western, too small and far, far too Sunni. It is not just the West or the Sunnis Arabs who are threatened by ISIL. Turkey is too. And Tehran. And Moscow, struggling with Sunni Jihaddism in its Muslim republics. For us in the West the threat comes from Jihaddis returning from the battlefield. The Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan are the battlefield.

 

There is a real opportunity here, if only our obsession with high explosive would let us see it. We will not destroy ISIL just by killing more Muslim Arabs with Western bombs. And a few more British bombs will not change that. As Clausewitz knew, military action only makes sense where it is part of a wider diplomatic strategy. Our action against ISIL isn’t and that is why it is failing.

 

The new rapprochement with Tehran (achieved, please note, through patient long term diplomacy – no high explosive required) gives us a real opportunity. The best thing Britain could do to defeat ISIL is not to add a tiny quantum to the more than sufficient pile of high explosive already falling on Iraq and Syria, but to use its diplomatic skills, through the EU to begin to assemble a wide diplomatic coalition aimed at smothering ISIL. This should include the moderate Sunni states, Turkey and Tehran. And yes, why not Russia too? We have no choice but to play hard-ball with Moscow over Ukraine. But offering Putin a partnership on defeating the Sunni Jihad which threatens us both, would add huge weight too our ability to succeed and avoid the mistake of pushing Russia into a corner from which she has no route for escape.

 

Our mistake these last decades has been to believe that this is the age of high explosive, when in fact it is the age of diplomacy. If we want to make Britain safer, we will do it better by using our skills to help create the wider diplomatic coalition to smother ISIL which will enable military action to succeed, rather than contributing our tiny portion of bombs to a policy that won’t.

 

892

 

Keep Calm and Carry On 

The Independent 12 Jan 2015

They say that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.

 

The “Charlie hebdo” atrocities of last week are many things; frightening, terrifying, atrocious, a horror, an attack on what we stand for. But, as a phenomenon they are not new, or exceptional or uniquely Muslim.

 

You do not have to be a young Muslim living in the 21^st century to be subject to radicalisation. It has always been possible to persuade young men (and a few – a very few – young women) of all faiths and none to the believe that it is noble to kill in pursuit of what they have been persuaded is a great cause. As far back as the first century, the Jewish Zealots did it against Roman rule. In the 11^th century the Shia Muslim Hashashin added another word – assassin – to our vocabulary of terror by their attacks on the Persian Government of the day. In our own time we have had to deal with our own “home grown” so called “Catholic” terrorists of the IRA (who by the way killed and destroyed far more than the current wave of jihadist outrages) – as well as the outrages perpetrated by anti-imperialist young middle class white Germans in the Bader-Meinhof Gang and its successor the Rot Armee Fraktion. And then of course there was the 2011 “massacre of the innocents” by Christian fundamentalist Anders Brievik.

 

Perhaps the closest parallel to what we are seeing now is the Anarchist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. All entirely “home grown” and without any kind of formal command structures, they too were a collection of “lone wolves” inspired by texts and prepared to destroy lives in pursuit of their dream of replacing states with borderless self-governed entities which, leaving aside that they were based on a political rather than a religious creed, bear a striking similarity to the caliphates of today.

 

In pursuit of what they called “the propaganda of the deed” they too used the bomb and the gun to kill and maim a large numbers of innocents – as well as an extraordinary number of the most powerful and prominent. On June 2 1919 simultaneous bombs attacks in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Patterson in New Jersey killed a mayor, a state legislator, three judges, two businessmen a policeman and a catholic priest. A year later perhaps the earliest “car bomb” blew up outside Wall Street killing 39 and injuring hundreds more. These were no more than the last lethal splutterings of a spate of anarchist attacks which had been going on for more than 30 years. In 1893 an anarchist bomb in Barcelona’s opera house killed or injured 72. That same year, a hungry, vagabond, socially outcast Frenchman threw a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies. A year later another threw a bomb hidden in a lunch box into a Paris café killing or wounding more than 20. He, too died shouting “We, who hand out death, know how to take it”.

 

Among the very ordinary casualties of the “anarchist years”, were also some very prominent ones, too. Those assassinated included a US President, a Russian Tsar, the empress of Austria, the President of France, the King of Spain on his wedding day, the heir to the Austrian empire on the corner of a Sarajevo street, the King of Italy and countless European Government Ministers and notables. Among many dynamite attacks on public buildings they placed the best of half a ton of explosive below the Imperial dining room of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, failing in their first attempt on the Tsar and his family, but killing or wounding more than 40.

 

Then, too, as now the security forces complained they needed more powers to tackle the threat. After a bomb in the city, the Chicago police, even went so far as to recycle exactly the same piece of gas piping three times in order to prove that they had “foiled” three subsequent “bomb outrages”.

 

None of this of course is to say that recent events are not serious. Or that we are not under threat. Or that we do not now have to respond in a serious and thoughtful manner.

 

But if we are to react as we should, then it is as well to remember that what we face is NOT new. And it is not unique and it is not just Islamic and we have been through this before and we should not panic or over-react. Almost every recent generation has had to respond to these kind of events.

 

And almost every recent generation has managed to do so without fundamentally undermining our freedoms or setting our societies at war with themselves.

 

It is worth recalling that throughout those same bloody anarchist years around the end of the nineteenth century, the long march towards the European ideal of states founded on individual liberty, tolerance and human rights continued unchecked. Defending the Charlie Hebdo principle means refusing to allow either terrorism or our fear of it to deflect us from that path.