Gerard Baker was at his best in Friday's Times. The newspaper's US editor made the case that we are winning the war on terror. He highlighted (1) declining violence in Iraq; (2) the military defeat of the Taliban; (3) the fact that al-Qaeda are on the run; and (4) the sickening of Muslim opinion towards violence and terrorism. Now would be precisely the wrong time to retreat - a position he mocks in his piece:
"The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great French soldier's dictum: “Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let's retreat!”
But, as Baker's article implies, the correct way of judging the progress of the war on terror is not now with seven years ago but between now and what might have been if, for example, the Taliban had been left in control of Afghanistan or Saddam had won his game of dare with the US/ UK/ UN. Here are Gerry Baker's key words on Afghanistan:
"Until the US-led invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was the cockpit of ascendant Islamist terrorism. Consider the bigger picture. Between 1998 and 2005 there were five big terrorist attacks against Western targets - the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan's status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda.
In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight. Its ability to train jihadists has been severely compromised; its financial networks have been ripped apart. Thousands of its activists and enablers have been killed. It's true that Osama bin Laden's forces have been regrouping in the border areas of Pakistan but their ability to orchestrate mass terrorism there is severely attenuated. And there are encouraging signs that Pakistanis are starting to take to the offensive against them.
Next time you hear someone say that the war in Afghanistan is an exercise in futility ask them this: do they seriously think that if the US and its allies had not ousted the Taleban and sustained an offensive against them for six years that there would have been no more terrorist attacks in the West? What characterised Islamist terrorism before the Afghan war was increasing sophistication, boldness and terrifying efficiency. What has characterised the terrorist attacks in the past few years has been their crudeness, insignificance and a faintly comical ineptitude (remember Glasgow airport?)"
The cost of the war on terror has, of course, been huge. For too many families it has been far too much. Only today we lost another British soldier in Afghanistan today. But the cost hasn't been in vain.
