TV 3’s The Nation  on 15 and 16 November screened significant interviews, with the PM,  Att. Gen Chris Finlayson, and defense expert Dr David Kilcullen.  As a panellist I wanted to ask supplementary questions more than to comment despite perceptive interviewing from Paddy Gower and Lisa Owen. Each interview could have prompted an entire hour’s discussion.

Serious people will want more on Kilcullen’s repeated references to steps needed instead of the containment  policy implicit in the western ‘no boots on the ground’ policy that depends on drones and air support for Kurds. John Key was asked about the ‘green on blue’ attack risk while we train the local fighters our strategy will depend on, but did not pretend there were as many answers as there are questions.

Some of  Kilcullen’s explanations are here, in the Australian of 1 November.

“This conflict will not be over quickly or cleanly. On the contrary: it is, and will be, a multi-generational struggle against an implacable enemy, and the violence we’re dealing with in the Middle East and Africa is not some unfortunate aberration — it’s the new normal.”

Kilcullen highlights the risks from our internal responses (if the West fails to destroy the caliphate’s appeal to its own citizens):

“…if we fail to face the threat where it is today — primarily overseas — we’ll suffer the consequences at home. This isn’t to rehash some Cold War domino theory in which we “fight them there or we’ll fight them here”. It’s just to recognise the reality that a purely isolationist, defensive, policing strategy — protecting ourselves at home rather than seeking to defeat terrorism abroad — ultimately means the end of society as we know it. Mass surveillance, secret police, a national-security state, guards on every gate, a garrison society: that’s what a “defensive” strategy actually entails.”

He seems to be warning against the current mealy-mouthed approach to Islam within our countries, pretending that the conservative Islamic leaders, their schools and their doctrine are part of the solution, instead of recognising that they are fuel for the problem:

“Western governments have been their own worst enemies here: the tendency to treat Muslim communities as a special case, to think that “mainstream” society can deal with “the Muslim community” (whatever that is) only through self-appointed, often conservative, authoritarian elders and notables, is to deny people the individual freedoms that belong to them, by right, as members of our society while absolving them from the responsibilities that go with those freedoms.

It’s to set up an unelected, often illiberal intermediary between our wider society and the idealistic, motivated young people who deserve — and from whom society has a right to expect— the same rights and responsibilities as anyone else. So the right strategy for dealing with 11/3/2014 The West’s failed counter-terrorism strategy requires a complete rethink domestic radicalisation is more freedom, not less — but with it must come more individual accountability.

We badly need more discussion of this, facing up to the lie that Islam is a religion of peace. It is no more peaceful than the religion that drove the Crusaders. The Protestant division between church and state,  and secularisation after the Enlightenment defeated the Popes, has eventually leached out that religious power in most of the West.

There has been no Islamic equivalent. I want to know how Dr Kilcullen would foster a similar change among the young people of pious Islam. It has a closed culture and kills apostates precisely to avoid that risk.