EDITS | Monday, January 19, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Perfidious Albion
The Pioneer Edit Desk
Miliband and Britain’s great cop-out
The spectacularly unsuccessful visit of Mr David Miliband, Britain’s jejune Foreign Secretary, was a multilayered phenomenon with the principal protagonist sending different signals to different recipients. What should have been a routine and even sombre journey — given it has been less than two months since the Mumbai terror attacks — became an occasion, for Mr Miliband, for domestic grandstanding and ideological posturing that only left his Indian hosts convinced of Whitehall’s marginal status in international politics. It is no secret that New Delhi doesn’t take British diplomacy seriously anymore — bereft as it is of strategic content, and increasingly dominated by postmodernist concerns, by an overstressing of “soft” issues ranging from animal rights to climate change. Mr Miliband obviously believes his Foreign Office’s own spin. He told a television channel that the Mumbai terrorists had breached “international decency and common sense”, as if they were otherwise honourable schoolboys. He insisted Pakistani state agencies had no hand in planning the commando-style terror operation. He expressed faith in the Pakistani legal system and said it was competent enough to try and bring to justice terrorists. If it were not already clear that the British Foreign Secretary and the rest of world were living on different planets, Mr Miliband told an audience at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal Hotel that the “war on terror” was a misnomer and that Islamist terrorist groups had “disparate” motivations. Referring to Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, he pointed to Kashmir, an issue he had urged India to “resolve” in an article earlier in the week in his favourite newspaper, the Guardian.
Mr Miliband either knows very little or doesn’t have faith in intelligence dossiers available with his own Government. In arguing there is no global jihad, but there are only several, localised mini-jihads, he ignores the increasing and proven interoperability, and global ambitions, of the terror groups. LeT is a case in point. In targeting Americans, Britons and Israelis/Jews in Mumbai it was sending a message far beyond Kashmir. As early as 2004, Australian intelligence officials were busting LeT sleeper cells in Sydney, French police was investigating LeT links of terror suspects arrested in Paris, and Indonesian officials said homegrown Jemaah Islamiyah extremists had established a cell in Karachi and trained with LeT. The examples can go on. They can wake up a man who is sleeping but not, one supposes, Mr Miliband, who is resolutely awake.
It is probable the British Foreign Secretary’s actions in India had extraneous calculations. Mr Miliband represents the Left-wing fringe of the Labour Party. While an unlikely wartime diplomat, he sees himself as a potential successor to his party leader, Mr Gordon Brown. Taken together with his Guardian article, his remarks in India may have attempted to second guess the regime change in Washington, DC, flowing from a perception — or misperception — that the Barack Obama presidency is set to repudiate its predecessor’s terror strategy. That aside, by batting for Pakistan, Mr Miliband was perhaps hoping to amass enough political capital to ensure Islamabad would help with the “Brit-Pak” problem — the danger posed by unknown numbers of sleeper cells in British Pakistani communities. It is a line of thinking that fantasises Britain can somehow be sequestered from a worldwide conflict. As a tactic, it is not new; Neville Chamberlain tried a variation in Munich in 1938. All that remains is for Mr Miliband to brandish an umbrella in public.
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