The global struggle against Islamist extremism requires an understanding of the forces that drive it

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PeshawarThe Paul Richards column

Islamist terrorists planted the car bomb which killed more than 100 people this week in the old city area of Peshawar, Pakistan for two reasons. The first was because it was crowded, and the bomb would kill many people. The second is that the Peepal Mandi market is famous for selling women’s make-up and wedding outfits, so the bomb would kill many women. If there’s one group that the Islamists hate with particularly murderous rage, it is Muslim women going shopping. That the bomb brought a mosque crashing to the ground is irrelevant to the Islamists. Islamist terrorists kill Muslims just as readily as Jews or Christians.

The point about Islamist terrorism is that it aims to kill without limit. As a political movement founded on the religious certainties of heaven and hell, good and evil, it has no strategic limitations. It kills, not in pursuit of territorial gains, or to force governments to the negotiating table, but to create a global order where every person on earth lives under a government like the one in Iran, and a society where girls do not go to school, gays are beheaded and rape victims are stoned to death.

If the terrorists who set the bomb in Peshawar could have killed not 100 people, but 1,000, they would have done so. If they could have got their hands on chemical weapons and killed 100,000 they would have done so. If they could have captured a nuclear weapon, they would have wiped out a city. And the important point for us in the UK is that if they could have planted the bomb in a crowded part of the west end of London, or central Manchester, or Birmingham’s Bull Ring, then it would have been British, not Pakistani doctors appealing for blood donors.

Even after 9/11, the bombs in Bali, Madrid, Glasgow and London, the conviction of the ‘liquid bombers’ who sought to bring down dozens of planes, and Islamist suicide bombings in Iraq, Israel and Afghanistan, there are those in western governments who see Al Qaeda and its off-shoots as being cousins of ETA or the IRA. They could not be more mistaken. Al Qaeda is not a national liberation movement, or the armed wing of a political organisation. It has no demands; it cannot be offered concessions; it has no leaders to be bought off. It requires a different way of thinking from the one we developed during the IRA’s bombing campaigns. This is a global war, fought by people who believe in democracy and human rights, against people who want to return humanity to a pre-enlightenment state of darkness.

This global war requires a titanic ideological struggle alongside the security response. The starting point for the ideological struggle is a proper understanding of Islamism – the political movement born in the twentieth century, nurtured in Egypt, Pakistan, and Iran, allowed free rein in ‘Londonistan’, and anchored in shared concepts of a pan-national Caliphate, theocratic laws, women as slaves and the destruction of Israel. As long as people fail to understand the politics of Islamism, or worse confuse it with the religion of Islam, then it cannot be conquered. The UK government’s official guidance forbids ministers from even uttering the word ‘Islamism’ for fear of causing offence or confusion. Surely the role of government is to lead and shape public debate, not acquiesce to ignorance? Few understood climate change a decade ago, but ministers were not banned from using the phrase for fear of people not understanding it.

It requires a tough approach by ministers. There are people in public life in the UK who back suicide bombing in Israel, and they should be isolated and shunned by Labour ministers, not invited in for a cup of tea.

Pakistan’s war with the Taleban and Al-Qaeda in southern Waziristan is both courageous and necessary. The terrain is perfectly suited to guerrilla warfare, as British troops discovered over a hundred years ago when it was the ‘north west frontier’. It is unlikely that Pakistan’s offensive will be over quickly, or decisively, as it was in Swat. The Islamist terrorists have declared war on the population of Pakistan, and there will be further attacks on civilians, more women killed by bombs, more Muslim mothers and fathers burying their children.

It is a war that Labour party members should fully support, because we are democrats, support women’s rights, and believe in a pluralist society where people can hold different points of view. The presence of Hillary Clinton in Pakistan this week should not allow anyone to assume that this is America’s war being fought by proxy. American support is vital for the forces of democracy in Pakistan. Pakistan’s soldiers are fighting, not on behalf of America, but on behalf of all of us who reject the idea of theocracy.

That’s a hard argument to win with the British public, who view events in Peshawar as taking place in a far-off land about which we know very little. In Camilla’s Bookshop in Eastbourne yesterday, I came across a copy of John F Kennedy’s thesis on Britain’s appeasement of the Nazis. The future president wrote it when an undergraduate at Harvard in 1940. He wrote, in relation to the Munich Crisis:

“The idea that Britain loses every battle except the last has proved correct so many times in the past that the average Englishman is unwilling to make great personal sacrifices until the danger is overwhelmingly apparent.”

The danger is overwhelmingly apparent, but are we willing to bear the sacrifice?

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