---

Terrorism

My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Chidgey, who has made as informed and informative a maiden speech as I and those who know him would have expected. He brings an extraordinary breadth of experience to your Lordships’ House. Trained as a mechanical and aeronautical engineer, his career spanned the Admiralty, highways and the engineering industry at home, in the Middle East and in Africa. As we have heard, he has been the Member of Parliament for Eastleigh—when he was eventually elected to Parliament—since 1992, and has been our party’s spokesman in the other place on employment, transport and trade and industry successively. He has a wealth of experience. In addition—this is relevant to today’s debate—he has been a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee since 1999, which does so much good work in considering the causes of terrorism. He brings a wealth and breadth of experience that I know will be valued. We look forward to his future contributions. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, for giving us the opportunity to consider how the current approach to international terrorism is progressing. I believe that I agreed with everything he said, and mostly with the same passion that he expressed. The cause of defeating global terrorism is unhappily likely to be a lost cause in this century. What we can best do is look at ways to reduce risks from existing terrorists, reduce their number and aim to eliminate the growth of recruits to extremist movements. This should shape our thinking in terms of where we put our effort nationally or through the G8, the EU or, indeed, the UN as between short-term defences against the threat and long-term cures to address the causes. The Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the other place produced on 22 March 2005 a report entitled, Foreign Policy Aspects of the War against Terrorism. I commend it to your Lordships as an excellent piece of analysis. It concluded that al-Qaeda and associated groups continue to pose a serious threat to the UK and its interests. However, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Judd, that that is not the most serious security threat that we face. I refer to threats such as climate change, disease, poverty and so on. However, it is a serious threat. How do we best tackle this threat? Your   Lordships will probably not have read a recent report by Professor Coolsaet of Ghent University. His analysis is relevant to the matters that we have discussed so far this afternoon. He states:"““Jihadi terrorism now basically is a cloak patched from different sources of local discontent, real and perceived, stitched together by a puritanical and radical interpretation of Islam, and thriving on an enabling global momentum. The root causes underlying this particular brand of terrorism are composed of one major global root cause and a multitude of local root causes””." He sees the major global root cause as,"““an astonishing degree of solidarity amongst Muslim communities worldwide, built upon shared feelings of humiliation, bitterness and besiegement””." The Select Committee highlighted the role that Iraq is playing as a training ground, and the noble Lord, Lord Judd, spoke of that as well. It is a training ground for the new generation of terrorists, just as Afghanistan was in the past. Therefore, it is in those two countries that we need to examine our policies most carefully. My noble friend Lord Chidgey has dealt with Afghanistan in detail, and I agree with his analysis. In Iraq, we need to ensure that our actions do not stoke up further the fires of extremism. Heavy-handed peacekeeping may give short-term military successes, but the families of the dead will be the fertile grounds for new terrorist recruits. In that respect, I am sorry to see the United Kingdom is providing aircraft to operate with American aircraft in Fallujah-style offensive operations near the Syrian border. Will the Minister comment on that? Even if the intelligence were reliable, which one might doubt, there will be innocent deaths and growing resentment. That is not the way to reduce the long-term threat from terrorism. If Iraq is now at the centre of our problems, we must look for a grand strategy and not just continue to operate at the military tactical level. That means a realistic approach to the political process, which is the key to stabilising the country. The drift and the worsening insurgency since the elections of 30 January must be reversed. That means that we must bring together the United Nations, the G8, the EU, the neighbours and the Iraqis in forming a coherent plan. It is not good enough just to say, ““We are going to stay there as long as the Iraqi Government want us to””—that is not a plan. We need a co-ordinated approach, or we may eventually have to leave and we will have a nest of terrorism to strike at all our interests for decades to come. As the Select Committee concluded when it looked at Iraq:"““The counter-insurgency strategy has not succeeded. This may reflect an overriding focus on a military approach to the detriment of political engagement””." There are, of course, other regional priorities as well as Afghanistan and Iraq for the political action that we need to reduce the long-term threat from terrorism. I know that noble Lords agree that the Middle East peace process is key. Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons and long-term stability problems, is a particular worry. Syria and Iran need careful engagement rather than isolation if we are not to generate new sources of extremism. The Select Committee looked closely at problems of   the Maghreb, and the significance particularly of Algeria, Morocco and Libya to countering terrorism. I agree strongly with the conclusion that this emphasises the need for reform in the EU’s policy towards the region, an overhaul of the Barcelona process, and full engagement. Perhaps the Minister will comment on how the UK presidency will take that forward. Three other aspects of the Select Committee report were just as important: the multilateral framework, the   importance of human rights, and the role of non-proliferation. The Motion rightly speaks of the G8 and EU, but the importance of the United Nations to the multilateral framework must not be forgotten. The lack of a secretariat for the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee has been a poor indication of commitment. Similarly, in the EU we have an action plan on terrorism under Mr de Vries, but progress has   been remarkably slow. EU members agreed in December last year,"““that in order to be effective in the long run the Union’s response to terrorism must address the root causes of terrorism. Radicalisation and terrorist recruitment can be closely connected””." The analysis is right; the strategy is right; and we must use our presidency to put some urgency into that area. Promotion of human rights is a key factor in preventing support for terrorism increasing. Injustice, lack of dignity, abuse, and torture by repressive regimes have always led to extremes of violence. In promoting democracy, the members of the G8 and EU must never sink to the moral norms of their terrorist enemy. I agree   totally with the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord   Judd, about Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram, and the many other interrogation centres of which we know nothing. They are not just a moral outrage, they are against our interests in combating terrorism. Information gained by undue pressure and outright torture is always unreliable and recruits many more to the terror banner. We must stop it and bring back due process for all suspects. Non-proliferation approaches have also assumed much greater importance in the age of the suicide bomber. It is now more likely that a non-state actor will use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons—CBRNs—to achieve their aim. The Cold War left us with unwanted mountains of fissile material, and also biological and chemical weapons expertise. All the responsible nations of the world should be working together to deny access to those materials and manufacturing processes. In that respect, the failure of the NPT Review Conference was also a failure of counter- terrorist strategy. I trust that the Government will make that an important aspect of their G8 work. I shall draw my remarks to an end by questioning whether we nationally have the balance of our efforts correctly drawn. The Ministry of Defence sees its role as tackling the threats at a distance. We and our allies seem to think that we can take a robust military approach when the action is thousands of miles away. I do not recall us contemplating the use of aircraft-launched missiles on the Irish border for the terrorist problems closer to home. Yet if we generate five new radical recruits for every mis-targeted bomb, we will be storing up more trouble for the future. The need for engagement and respect for all peoples is in our interests as well as theirs. If that is true in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is also true in Bradford and Bethnal. Each EU member nation needs to work hard to prevent its own minorities becoming isolated and radicalised. Fallujah and Guantanamo Bay radicalise young people in Iraq and Afghanistan. To an extent they do so here as well, but discrimination and racism can do the same at home. We must take care that, in legislating to protect against terrorism, we do not spawn more recruits to the cause by alienating and isolating our citizens.