January 16, 2009
 

David Miliband echoes Barack Obama's prescription

In an article in "The Guardian", David Miliband, currently visiting India in his role as the Foreign Secretary of the UK, reckons that the various terrorist entities across the globe need to be handled differently since their motivations are different and points out the example of groups like the IRA & Eta to back his argument since those groups really had nothing in common.

The central difference is that the main aim of terrorist organizations is to challenge the state, rule of law, liberty and various freedoms by using violence, including mass-scale attacks & suicide attacks, as a mechanism to achieve their goals. In this respect, terrorist groups are all identical - take your pick from the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, LTTE, SIMI, the various units of the Sangh Parivar which went on a killing spree in Gujarat, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Naxalites, Maoists, etc.

Miliband goes on to write

Although I understand the current difficulties, resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders.

This echoes what Barack Obama said in his interview with MSNBC late last year.

The flaws in this thinking are:

1. Assuming that the terrorists' only aim is the liberation of Kashmir.
   
2. Assuming that Pakistan will co-operate in helping eliminate the Al-Qaeda & Taliban in Afghanistan when the Kashmir problem has been resolved.
   
3. Assuming that if Kashmir and Afghanistan are both cleaned up & resolved, then the Pakistani army and the ISI will sit idle when their raison d'être is to bleed India with a thousand cuts.

As expected, the Ministry of External Affairs has reacted, pointing out that David Miliband was free to express his views. Pranab Mukherjee and Manmohan Singh need to find out if these views are David Miliband's alone or does Gordon Brown & his government share the same sentiments. If so, there's a lot of diplomacy work needed to debunk this thinking given that Barack Obama has identical thoughts.

Labels: india, jammu and kashmir, pakistan, terrorism, uk

Rambled @ 11:36 AM

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