What He Said...

From David Clark, a former Labour government adviser, writing in the Guardian:

It must now be obvious, even to those who would like us to think otherwise, that the war on terror is failing...

The very idea of a war on terror was profoundly misconceived from the start... It is quite meaningless to talk about destroying the "terrorist infrastructure", unless we propose to carpet bomb Microsoft. We have entered the era of do-it-yourself terrorism.

It should be clear by now that we cannot defeat this threat with conventional force alone, however necessary that may be in specific circumstances...

An effective strategy can be developed, but it means turning our attention away from the terrorists and on to the conditions that allow them to recruit and operate. No sustained insurgency can exist in a vacuum. At a minimum, it requires communities where the environment is permissive enough for insurgents to blend in and organise without fear of betrayal. This does not mean that most members of those communities approve of what they are doing. It is enough that there should be a degree of alienation sufficient to create a presumption against cooperating with the authorities. We saw this in Northern Ireland...

In Iraq we allowed America to rip up the rule book of counter-insurgency with a military adventure that was dishonestly conceived and incompetently executed. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed by US troops uninterested in distinguishing between combatant and noncombatant, or even counting the dead. The hostility engendered has been so extreme that the CIA has been forced to conclude that Iraq may become a worse breeding ground for international terrorism that Afghanistan was...

The political dimensions of this problem mean that there can be no hope of defeating terrorism until we are ready to take legitimate Arab grievances seriously. We must start by acknowledging that their long history of engagement with the west is one that has left many Arabs feeling humiliated and used. There is more to this than finding a way of bringing the occupation of Iraq to an end. We cannot seriously claim to care for the rights of Arabs living in Iraq when it is obvious that we care so little for Arabs living in Palestine...

The current approach is failing and it's time for a change.