We Can't Kill Our Way Out of This

Britain's foreign secretary says the "war on terror" waged in the wake of the 9/11 attacks may have done more harm than good. David Miliband, in a critique in today's Guardian, says the war on terror was misconceived and that the west cannot "kill its way" out of the threats it faces.

In remarks that will also be made in a speech today in Mumbai, in one of the hotels that was a target of terrorist attacks in November, the foreign secretary says the concept of a war on terror is "misleading and mistaken".

"Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good," Miliband says, adding that, in his opinion, the whole strategy has been dangerously counterproductive, helping otherwise disparate groups find common cause against the west.

"The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common," Miliband argues, in a clear reference to the signature rhetoric of the Bush era. "We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is."

"Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology," he says.

In reality, Bush has made a succession of blunders over the past five years that have done little more than play into the hand of Islamist radicals. The fallout from those blunders will reverberate for years to come throughout the Middle East and South Asia regions from Islamabad to Beiruit to Gaza.