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July 10, 2005
David Clark's Strategy For Containing Muslim Fighters
David Clark, a former adviser to Britain's Labour government, thinks "an effective strategy can be developed to counter Al-Qaida and other Muslim fighters, "but it means turning our attention away from the terrorists and on to the conditions that allow them to recruit and operate," according to an opinion piece in the July 10, 2005 edition of Khaleej Times Online, He added: 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 organize 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.
From this point of view, it must be said that everything that has followed the fall of Kabul has been ruinous to the task of winning over moderate Muslim opinion and isolating the terrorists within their own communities. 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. Mr. Clark said, "The hostility engendered has been so extreme that Iraq may become a worse breeding ground for international terrorism than Afghanistan was."
See "Look for the causes" for more of Mr. Clark's analysis.
Posted by Munir Umrani at July 10, 2005 09:07 PM
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