Gordon Brown and The War On Terror

Gordon Brown:

"We've got to ask ourselves why, eight years after September the 11th, nobody has been able to spot or detain or get close to Osama bin Laden, nobody's been able to get close to Zawahiri, the number two in al-Qaeda."

Yes, we should ask the question. And then note the very obvious answer. Which is that both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri aren't going to be advertising their presence. They won't be in the phone book. They are not going to have an e-mail account. They are terrorists on the run and they are on the run in an area of the world that is pretty close to being in a state of anarchy. Finding bin Laden and the other members of the al-Qaeda is never going to be easy. For some reason - like the fact that they are amongst the most wanted people in the world - bin Laden and al-Zawahiri aren't going to make it easy.

And I also fail to see why finding al-Zawahiri and bin Laden is supposed to make that much difference to the so-called War on Terror. Al-Qaeda is not structured like a traditional terrorist group. If you decapitate al-Qaeda, then you aren't going to end the threat from Islamic terrorism. It just isn't the way al Qaeda or the extremes of Islam work.

But of course bellicose words are always tempting for a beleaguered Prime Minister, particularly when said bellicose words are a call for someone else to do something. However, we shouldn't be fooled by Brown's crude tactic for one moment. His demand directed at Pakistan is nothing more than a distraction tactic. He is using the out-of-date rhetoric of the War on Terror - a spurious campaign against a concept rather than a meaningful war against a tangible enemy. Pakistan is fighting a terrorist foe that increasingly resembles an insurgency in parts of its domain. The very last thing they need is the endless prattle of a discredited British Prime Minister trying to claim some sort of authority in his final months in power.