UK : Winning Muslim hearts and minds

These wars will be won or lost not just by soldiers, spies, and policemen, but ultimately by the wider public, says Michael Burleigh.

Constant warnings about terrorist threats evoke mixed public responses: rage, indifference, panic, or, from the liberal-Left, the clever patrician conceit that these are invented "nightmares". None of these is open to anyone aspiring to government, including the Conservative Party as it wrestles with these terribly difficult issues.

The Tories need a long-term strategy. Armed force can hold the line, but there are also the weapons of "soft power" that Conservatives should master at a time when New Labour offers little beyond a reflexive belligerency that, domestically at least, is often less real than rhetorical.

The primary battle today lies in the minds of opposing publics. Dominate their minds and the leaders will follow. Create enough daily chaos and bloodshed in Afghanistan or Iraq, which the Western media will happily replay, and the West will cave in for want of will.

The widespread discredit into which the Left-liberal ideology of multi-culturalism has fallen should make us more, not less, cosmopolitan. This is not just a matter of recruiting people with Arabic, Dari or Urdu into the security services: we also need to expand the circle of what we take a sympathetic interest in. What happened, for example, to the 5,000 Africans maimed by al-Qa'eda bombs in 1998? Did the children blinded by flying glass get an education?

As in the Cold War we need to foster and respect cultural dissidence. This was brought home to me when I read Last Summer of Reason, whose author, Tahir Djaout, was murdered in 1993 by Algerian Islamists. Those who like pop music could try the Indonesian rock star Ahmad Dhani, whose hit Warriors of Love is a brave, moderate, Sufi challenge to the terrorists of that country. Everywhere in the Islamic world — 80 per cent of which is non-Arab — there are reasonable, cosmopolitan people who do not want, if they are Lebanese Shia, to be represented by Hizbollah or ruled by Syria, nor to have their tastes dictated by clerical zealots. Let's reach out to them, or at least create some forum where we can be reminded of their existence. So far the West's public diplomacy has been pathetic.

Rather, we lazily allow Islamist fundamentalists to equate our culture with trashy television programmes about penile implants, rather than Bach, Rubens or Mozart, Newton, Pascal or Einstein. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has written, we should be more careful about what image (and reality) of ourselves we project into more traditional societies.

Far too often we concede too much to the terrorists' vision, not only of us, but of themselves. How exactly would the caliphate of bin Laden's imaginings be governed? Hardly at all, judging by the carnage that enveloped Afghanistan under the Taliban. What precisely do the self-appointed emirs and imams know about Islam? How do you subvert the cultural supremacy of Arabic within it? Surely we should be encouraging authoritative voices that regard radical jihadists as heretics rather than kow-towing to useless so-called "community" leaders?

We also unconsciously seem to accept the purity of motive of people prepared to immolate themselves, which is what suicide-homicide is intended to achieve. If the tactic is so Islamic, then why did it only occur from the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon? How many suicide bombers have dysfunctional pasts involving adultery, criminality or prostitution? How much are the Saudis or Iranians paying posthumously for each "performance"?

Terrorist organisations are not monolithic. Those with limited regional goals could be "disaggregated'" from the aegis of al-Qa'eda. If they are essentially fundamentalists protesting about corruption, we might even agree with them, were it not for their tactics. The networks themselves are as amenable to analysis as any other organisation. They consist of ideologues, financiers, planners, engineers, public communications specialists, and humble dog's bodies. They can be engineering graduates or men who have been redeemed in prison, and, in the case of al-Qa'eda, they are from myriad ethnic backgrounds.

We also need to terminate the existence of "Londonistan". A dedicated border police might practise the sort of steely-eyed scrutiny that awaits anyone going to or leaving America. France and Germany have managed to deport 20 militant clerics each: what is the figure for Britain? These men chose to flout our liberality, so their fate elsewhere is not among our major concerns. It is a continent-wide disgrace that 200 European Muslims have been to Iraq to kill coalition soldiers. Did the trained survivors return here?

We are entitled to have accurate information about immigration, with open discussion of its cultural, as well as economic, merits and demerits. Clear lines need to be established about what the majority of people here are prepared to tolerate, for toleration is not some open-ended, one-way arrangement. It's all very well to say you are against the formation of inner-city ghettos potentially subtracted from common law, but how, precisely, do Conservatives imagine dispersing them or preventing their formation?

More thought needs to go into countering the main external sources of radicalisation, be it arranged marriages (for the malign role of women in perpetuating hatreds through children is often under-rated) or the textual and visual poison that streams through satellite and internet.

What is being done to counteract the build-up of committed convicted terrorists in our prisons, for it only took half a dozen IRA men to dominate Parkhurst or Whitemoor? What do Australian, Dutch, French or Israeli intelligence agencies have to say on these subjects, for our own do not have a monopoly of wisdom?

Military force plays a part in the present conflicts, but we will never prevail until we draw deeply on our cultural resources, thinking expansively and imaginatively, so as always to push our own game to a higher level. For, as I began by saying, these wars will be won or lost not just by soldiers, spies, and policemen, but ultimately by the wider public.

Michael Burleigh is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford and author of Sacred Causes: Politics and Religion from the European Dictators to al-Qa'eda (HarperCollins).

This article can be found at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=B2XJSBVOIUUCZQFIQMFCFF4AVCBQYIV0?xml=/opinion/2006/11/30/do3002.xml