The geography of terror

But a suddenly needful Britain may also be beginning to pay the price for a range of heedless, subservient or self-defeating overseas policies that extend beyond Baghdad to Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Chechnya and back to Bosnia.

After a circumstantial Pakistan connection emerged in the wake of the July 7 attacks, General Pervez Musharraf, the country’s unelected president, ordered a wave of arrests of Islamist militants. But the crackdown has yielded no confirmed suspects so far and has meanwhile provoked a nationalist backlash.

General Musharraf’s lack of a democratic mandate has been winked at in Washington and London in return for his support for the 2001 Afghanistan invasion and Washington’s “global war on terror”. Britain backed a Commonwealth decision last year to end Pakistan’s post-1999 coup suspension and Mr Blair invited him to Downing Street last December. But the weakness of Gen Musharraf’s position was underscored last week when he acknowledged that his previous efforts to proscribe jihadist groups had been ineffective.

An estimated two-thirds of Pakistan’s 30,000 religious schools or madrasas, the focus of recent media attention, have ignored his January 2002 edict that they submit to government regulation to prevent extremist teaching. These failures did not prevent him from joining the Saudi government in urging Mr Blair to put his own house in order and move against “Londonistan’s” Islamist exiles.

Excerpted from a column by Simon Tisdall in ‘The Guardian’, July 26