Transnational Terrorism: Defeating the Threat

10:15, 9 - 10 Nov 2006
RUSI, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2ET

Link to map: multimap

Thank you, for that introduction.

It is a great pleasure to be invited here to speak at the Royal United Services Institute.
As Foreign Secretary I know something of the delicate balance that an organisation with a distinguished history has to strike between maintaining traditional strengths and adapting to a complex, modern environment. RUSI – which was a respected think-tank long before that term was even invented – walks that line, I believe, perfectly.

And it is a particular pleasure to share the stage with a man whom Richard Haass President of the Council on Foreign Relations has described as 'one of the wise men of the Middle East'. His Excellency Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim has a deep understanding of the nature of the terrorist threat we face and a clear grasp of how we can best tackle that threat. And his own efforts to find solutions to the underlying tensions in the Middle East are a significant, practical step in the wider campaign against extremism and terrorism.

Last year both of our countries – Qatar and Britain – were the victims of horrific terrorist attacks. In both cases the people responsible for those attacks claimed to act in the name of a wider Islamic or Islamist cause and in both cases there were international links: indeed the Doha suicide bomber was an Egyptian national.

The threat from that international Islamist terrorism remains serious and is increasing.

Today I want to talk about how we as a government – and the Foreign Office in particular – is responding to this threat.

Let me start with operational side. Of course, there is a limit to how much I can go into detail. But this summer's events show that we are scoring successes in this area. Indeed, since the July 7th attacks in London last year, we believe we have disrupted a number of other terrorist plots against UK targets.

This has followed on from a significant increase in resources for the intelligence agencies. The Secret Intelligence Service has more people deployed in more countries to counter terrorism than ever before. The Security Service now has more front-line staff than at any time since the Second World War and devotes 87 per cent of its resources to counter-terrorism.

The Foreign Office has not had new resources but we have made a very significant shift in existing resources. Our team in London working directly on counter-terrorism is now over five times larger than it was before the September 11th attacks.

There are many other FCO staff in London – whether they are working on EU issues, UN issues, human rights, counter-proliferation, the Middle East, travel advice – who are more and more involved in countering the terrorist threat.

And we have staff in our network of overseas posts with the language and local knowledge to make the right contacts and exert the right influence to help increase Britain’s safety.

That specific work – where counter-terrorism might be part of the actual job description – is core to our response to international terrorism.

But there is a much broader role for the Foreign Office too.

Historically its strength has been to reconcile competing agendas, perspectives and interests: to broker with our allies a way in which we can work together for a safe, prosperous and just world.

At a time when extremists are explicitly and continuously trying to divide and rule, to drive wedges between nations and between peoples, that task is more important than ever. Through diplomacy we can help mobilise the vast moderate, majority and push the extremists to the fringe where they belong.

To do that we need to understand the nature of that extremism.

International terrorism today is different from, to take a previous UK example, Irish terrorism. It does not have that same connection to a single national cause or still more to an achievable political demand.

Rather it seems to be based on a pseudo-religious vision of a transformed world. It is a cult that sells such a vision to impressionable young men and women. That is how it is able to persuade a young Briton, born into our tolerant, democratic society to blow himself up on a crowded commuter train or bus.

We need to address that warped vision head-on.

It is based on two fundamental falsehoods.

The first is that the West is conducting a deliberate, co-ordinated attack on Islam both at home and abroad.

That is nonsense. Insofar as 'the West' is a political entity with any meaning, the evidence shows that it has a powerful record of help and support to Muslims. Kosovo, Darfur, the tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake are just a few recent examples. We in the UK alone have given over £5 billion bilaterally and multilaterally in humanitarian, project and development aid to the Muslim world over the past five years.

Take the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. All too often we are portrayed as being indifferent to the tragic situation in which the Palestinians find themselves.

The British government has repeatedly expressed its deep concern over mounting casualties and civilian suffering in Gaza and raised these concerns with the Government of Israel. The continuing rocket attacks into Israel are also unacceptable. Only yesterday I expressed my grave disturbance at the killing of around 20 Palestinians in the Israeli strike on Beit Hanoun. Many more were injured and I was particularly horrified at the large numbers – as is all too often the case – of children and women amongst the casualties. It is hard to see what this action was meant to achieve and how it can be justified.

But the UK is committed to achieving that peaceful, political solution. And here too we remain one of the world’s biggest donors. This year alone, despite our concerns about a Hamas government in office, we have committed £30 million to the Palestinian people. And we invented the main international mechanism through which all donors can channel assistance while bypassing the Hamas-run finance ministry.

I know that some elements of Britain's foreign policy concern some Muslims – particularly the military action in Iraq. But the notion that any of this is part of an anti-Islamic agenda – that somehow the Prime Minister and the Cabinet sat down and devised a plan to oppress Muslims – is, of course, ridiculous nonsense, even if it is dangerous nonsense.

Our foreign policy is simply not based on religion. It is based on our values and on our strategic interests. Both our values and our strategic interests lead us to want a safer, more just and more prosperous world for all.

And if people have problems with some aspects of foreign policy they have, of course, every right and freedom to raise them. That’s one of the benefits of democracy in this country. And that’s what most Muslims and non-Muslims do with regard to all areas of government policy.

There is no path in reason or logic which connects disagreeing with military action against Saddam Hussein and setting out deliberately to kill civilians, including Muslims, on a tube or a bus in London.

There is another fact that the extremists simply choose to ignore. That is that people of all faiths, all cultures, all backgrounds have come to this country – often fleeing violence and oppression – and have helped to build a tolerant, diverse and open society. We in Britain – Hindu, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic – are all free to speak our mind, to worship openly, to be friends with whomsoever we want. We all have the chance to build a better life for our families and loved ones. That is the very antithesis of the society that the extremists want to see. Where they have held power – as we saw in Afghanistan – the result has been misery: lives blighted, diminished, ruined. So July 7th was not an attack on 'the West'. It was an attack against our society – a society in which all decent men and women have a stake.

The second lie to the terrorist narrative is that while, as they claim, Muslims are under deliberate attack, they are in some way standing up for fellow believers. The tragic reality is that the vast majority of their victims are Muslim. They blew up a wedding party in Jordan. They execute teachers in Afghanistan. By murdering fellow Muslims along with others, they try to scare away tourists and investment from Egypt and Indonesia. Their actions make Muslim lives worse not better.

The truth is that the extremists have no positive vision for the future. And unlike the rest of the international community which is putting its efforts into ending the conflicts in the Middle East, they put their efforts into deliberately fanning the flames.

I don't pretend for a moment that getting this message across to young Muslims in this country and abroad is easy. We've made a start but we have a long way further to go.

The Foreign Office is now much more active in engaging with Muslim people around the world. We support delegations of British Muslims to key Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Egypt and Indonesia. The people on those delegations are no apologists for British foreign policy – but they give a real, not a distorted view to their fellow Muslims about the challenges and opportunities of living in the UK today.

We have also ramped up our work with the Arabic and Islamic media. The terrorists have been adept at exploiting mass media in the Middle East region to their advantage. We are encouraging our diplomats, including Ambassadors in the region, to put their language skills to good use, addressing the local and regional media in their own languages. The Foreign Office's hugely respected specialist press team is working with the Middle East and South Asian media and acting as spokespeople in Arabic and Urdu. We are in the process of strengthening this by recruiting a regional Arabic spokesperson, based in Dubai, but regularly visiting important media centres like Doha, Cairo and Beirut.

These activities reflect the rapid growth of a more independent and influential media in the Arab and Muslim world. Qatar, of course, was pivotal in this process: it took the initiative in establishing Al Jazeera, one of the first regional channels claiming to be independent of state control. Next week Al Jazeera, which is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, will launch its English channel. The existence of a critical, free and diverse media – able to debate difficult issues openly and honestly – is a powerful tool in countering the blinkered, worldview of the extremists..

So standing up for moderation and confronting extremism requires us to speak out clearly and loudly. But it requires more than that. We need to have the courage to take on extremism in our actions too.

Next week it will be five years since the Taliban were thrown out of Kabul.

Afghanistan was an example of what happens when we turn a blind eye to the activities of extremists. When the Soviet occupation collapsed, the international community provided some humanitarian aid but tended to put wider state development into the 'too difficult' tray. And we severely underestimated what this failure to engage would mean for our own security.

We walked away precisely at the moment when we should have been supporting the people who spoke with the voice of moderation and who shared our values.

The result was a disaster for the people of Afghanistan – who suffered a terrible civil war, followed by years of repression under a brutal regime which had one of the worst human rights records in history. But it was a disaster for the rest of us too. The Taliban encouraged terrorists to use the country as a safe haven from which to launch an increasingly deadly series of attacks – culminating in the horror of 9/11.

That is why we, on behalf of the international community, and in concert with over 30 other nations, went into Afghanistan.

That is why we are there today.

We are helping to try to turn a failed state into one that provides for its people and functions as a part of the international community. What is being achieved is rarely reported.

Four million who fled their homes have returned. Men and women turned out in their millions to vote. The media is flourishing. Healthcare has vastly improved. Girls are back in school.

There is a massive amount left to do. Insecurity is the biggest challenge. It threatens the lives of individuals and the future of the nation. President Karzai and his Government want and need to help the NATO-led International Force bring the rule of law to all parts of the country.

That is why we – along with the Dutch, the Canadians and others – have taken responsibility for helping Afghan forces in the South of the country. The alternative is to leave the Taliban and the drug traffickers to operate with impunity. That would undercut everything we have worked to achieve in Afghanistan.

I am under absolutely no illusion about how tough it is there. British soldiers have died. My own staff have suffered attacks by suicide bombers. But we have to be there.

Pull out, walk away again and the only winners will be the Taliban and the terrorists.

We are not going to let that happen.

The same goes for Iraq.

There were very many people in this country who vehemently opposed the original military action. I respect the strength of their convictions. But today we are where we are.

Again, I do not kid myself or try to kid you. We can't make foreign policy by ignoring the facts on the ground. The situation in Iraq is one which is dangerous and volatile. We are at a critical juncture in which the fate of that country hangs in the balance. There is the very real risk of even greater instability and bloodshed than we have already seen.

My response to that situation is to be clear that we will do what we told the democratically elected government we would do: stay there as long as that government asks us to do so: we will leave when they are confident that they can take the role of security in the country on their own shoulders.

I ask those who are calling for more precipitate action to consider the consequences of such action: we would be leaving the Iraqi government without the means to prevent a further escalation in the violence, without the tools to enforce the rule of law and without the authority to prevent their country from turning into a base for terrorism.

Again, we must not let that happen.

In both Afghanistan and Iraq we have to have the courage of our convictions.

And, of course, those two countries are not the only ones in which there is a need for us to recognise and stand up for the values in which we believe: to avoid the cultural relativism which says that the freedoms and rights that we hold so dear are not relevant, or not important, to others – something to which the millions who braved the threat of death, to cast their votes in Iraq and in Afghanistan have testified.

There has been a profound failure of development and governance right across the region we call the Middle East. This has been recognised by successive UN Arab Human Development Reports – all written by eminent Arab scholars.

It is also a theme about which I know Sheikh Hamad has spoken in the past. And some Arab states, including Qatar, are putting an emphasis on education and the development of a healthy civil society.

But the region as a whole has a long way to go. And this failure brings with it two dangers.

On the level of the individual, it feeds a historical sense of humiliation – understandable when the people of the Middle East, the cradle of civilisation, can see the rest of the world moving ahead of them – and it combines this with powerful political disillusionment.

In impressionable, young people this is fertile ground for extremism and radicalism.

On the national and regional level it risks instability. Disenfranchisement, poor economic prospects, resources not shared, human rights abused – these are the conditions which we have seen underpin violent political movements time and again in many parts of the world.

So that means we have to be active in encouraging and supporting economic and political reform in the region: on the ground through project work, but also multilaterally through the G8 Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative and the Euro-Mediterranean partnership.

We need to show a real commitment to human rights, to the rule of law and to the long term pursuit of more representative government.

There is a further role for diplomacy in the Middle East: dealing with the running sores of conflict in the region and far beyond it.

Extremists and terrorists use these conflicts as a propaganda and recruiting tool – as well as a testing ground to battle-harden fighters who then go on operations further afield.

Here our policy must be to seek to strengthen those who are now committed to peaceful resolution of conflict – including even those who may have used violence in the past.

We can do this by helping to address legitimate national grievances while showing that violence is both wrong and counter-productive.

Nowhere is the need for a political solution more imperative than in Palestine.

The Prime Minister and I are determined to contribute to this effort by working directly with the parties and with the international community to find a way back to the Quartet's Roadmap.

So far I have talked about the role of diplomacy and of the Foreign Office in tackling extremism, in marshalling the forces of moderation and tolerance against those who only have an interest in chaos and division.

Tackling global terrorism will first and foremost always be a job for government. I accept that. And in recent weeks we have heard my Cabinet colleagues including John Reid and Ruth Kelly setting out how we are going to go about that task.

But today I want to end by putting out a challenge to all those who reject violence to stand up and be counted.

We are the too often silent majority. We don't see eye to eye on all things. But what binds us together, the values we have in common are infinitely more important than the differences between us. We have to be as determined and unflinching in our defence of those values as the terrorists are desperate to destroy them.

These values are not restricted to any one faith or creed.

The Muslim communities in this country did not ask the terrorists to act in their name. The vast majority are sickened by the slur on their great and noble faith.

They make a huge and vital contribution to the life of this country. And they, the Muslim communities, have a special ability to make a difference in the struggle against extremism.

There are nearly two million Muslims in this country. Many travel to and from countries with large Muslim populations – particularly in South Asia. They are the most powerful potential ambassadors for Britain. The greatest means we have of bridging the divide which the terrorists are trying to widen.

When fellow Muslims speak up against extremism and correct the skewed world-view of the terrorists, it is much more powerful, much harder to dismiss than when those same words are spoken by a government minister.

And I too would call on the media, the experts and the commentators to help build a sense of common ground upon which we can all stand.

It's all to easy to buy into the terrorist rhetoric of a great clash of civilisations and of a moment of crisis.

I am not underestimating the gravity of the threat we face.

But let us deny the terrorists the historical importance they claim to themselves. They have no right to speak for the great and noble faith of Islam. This is a not a battle between civilisations but a stand-off between the whole of society on the one hand and a fairly small and particularly nasty bunch of murderers and criminals on the others.

In practical terms that means avoiding the temptation to artifically polarise debate.

I've seen it so often in the long-running debate on climate change: wheel out the resident sceptic, however unrepresentative or discredited, to generate tension and voice provocative views in the name of editorial balance.

It makes for more heated exchanges and louder headlines. But it is not the way to build a common consensus on the ground we share. And when it comes to counter-terrorism that is positively dangerous. It buys into the twisted rhetoric of division, so assiduously fostered by those who are the enemies of us all.

So when the next story about relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in this country hits the headlines lets look for other voices than those that represent a tiny minority viewpoint on one side or the other – and offer the microphone to measured, mainstream voices who have the credibility and influence to tackle extremist distortions and offer a genuinely more balanced interpretation of events.

In other words, we should let the extremists bark in the night while we, the vast moderate majority, find a common way to defeat them and the terrorism they espouse.

Ladies and Gentlemen

The extremists talk of a clash of civilisations, of an implacable war between Muslims and non-Muslims.

But there is no such clash, no such war.

There is only the determined struggle of the vast majority of civilised people in the world who want to live, work and prosper together against a few who would drag that world into chaos.

One of the most chilling statements I have ever heard was made by one of the British men responsible for last July’s bombing, Shezhad Tanweer. He was repeating a mantra used many times before by Al Qaeda. He said that those who sent him to his death would be victorious because 'We love death in the same way that you love life'.

No. And that is why the terrorists will lose. Whatever their religion or creed, whatever their colour, the peoples of every country in the world love life with a ferocity that the terrorists will never match.

It is why people travel half-way across the world seeking a better life for themselves and for their children. It's why so many who have fled violence have come to our own shores to take advantage of our tolerant, democratic society. It is why on a daily basis you see ordinary men and women committing extraordinary acts of courage and sacrifice.

When I was in Mumbai two days ago, I spoke of those who had died in the train attacks in July this year. They had suffered, just as we had suffered a year earlier.

I met the counter-terrorism experts there. We were united in horror. But we were also united in determination.

Terrorists recognise no boundaries. In our response, neither can we.

If we join forces, if through hard work and diplomacy we can stake out our common ground, our common values and defend them with resolve and with strength, then we will, together, defeat terrorism.