 Thank you very much, Paul. Hello. I'm very, very pleased to be here. I'm honored to be here among such a distinguished company. I'm also a proud parent of a second year student here, so I have a considerable attachment to SOAS. I'm very pleased at that introduction. I'm always very nervous about introductions, particularly since I once hosted an event where I had to introduce Alistair Campbell, and beforehand he grabbed me by the lapels and said, what the hell are you going to say about me? And I said, I'm going to keep it simple. I'm going to say you were Tony Blair's former press spokesman. He said, oh, that's all right. Then he came up to the podium and he said, I'm very relieved at that kind of introduction because last week I was in Leeds where they said, please welcome Alistair Campbell, the most evil man in Britain. Anyway, to business now. For the next hour and a half or so, we're going to discuss, debate and consider the legacy of the so-called War on Terror. We'll be drawing upon the research and the expertise of our distinguished panel. As a British diplomat friend of mine said, when he first heard the phrase war on terror being used by George W. Bush, he said, one can't help but think that declaring war on a tactic may be a mistake. Mr. Bush, as you will undoubtedly recall, made it clear that you're either with us or you are against us. And while Barack Obama doesn't share that Manohian approach and doesn't use the phrase war on terror, there have been some policy changes, but there also has been considerable continuity. Guantanamo still exists. Drone attacks take place. So the use of drones, as we will hear, has been particularly controversial. And we were discussing a little earlier. I was talking about being in Northern Ireland and starting my journalistic career there. And one of the clear lessons of the troubles in Northern Ireland was that you do not defeat what's called terrorism by killing one person that you think of as a terrorist and creating 100 others. And it seems a obvious lesson, really, but it seems to be also one that's rather difficult to learn. We'll be drawing on the expertise of two leading SOAS thinkers, Professor Gilbert Ashkar, who is, if you've been hearing, a professor of development studies in international relations and chair of the SOAS Center for Palestine Studies. Professor Ashkar's books include The Clash of Barbarisms, The Making of the New World Disorder, which has been translated into some 14 languages. We're also joined by Dr. Ashin Adib Magadam, who is reader in comparative politics and international relations and chair of the SOAS Center for Iranian Studies. And his most recent book on the Arab revolts and the Iranian Revolution, Power and Resistance Today, is the first comparative analysis of two central political events that have shaped our world and fact continue to shape our world, the Arab uprisings which began in Tunisia and the 1979 Iranian Revolution. We'll also open up the discussions to questions and opinions from the floor, but we are going to begin with a great friend of SOAS, a friend of mine too. I'm proud to say Professor Akbar Ahmad, who is, as you've heard, a SOAS alumnus, and he was formerly the Pakistan High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He is indeed a world-renowned scholar, as well as a diplomat. The BBC did say he's the world's leading authority on contemporary Islam, and as I can testify, the BBC rarely gets things wrong. You may want to dispute that, but we'll do that afterwards. Professor Ahmad's latest book published this year is The Thistle and the Drone. The subtitle is, How America's War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam. Drawing from 40 current case studies, Professor Ahmad argues that a decade on from the atrocities of 9-11, the US-led War on Terror has had a largely unrecognized, adverse effect. It has exacerbated the already broken relationship between central governments and the tribal societies on their periphery. Before we come to the main discussion, I'd like to first share another aspect of Professor Ahmad's work. He's also a playwright and a poet, and three of his plays have been staged in the Washington, D.C. area. So I'd like to begin with a reading of Professor Ahmad's poem at the Khaybar Pass, taken from his publication, suspended somewhere between a book of verse. At the Khaybar Pass, there's nothing spectacular or even dramatic in the climb or the mountains, but the air is almost tense in its silence, so insolently indifferent to me and my times. Here, all is awe and hush. Far beyond the pass, Kabul's and Samarkand's, all that the urban imagination conjures in nostalgia, the mainsprings of conquest, that flooded the fatlands this side of the pass, Delhi and Agra, the irresistible lakes of journey's end. The year strains to here, and almost does, the distant din of battle, the clang and clamour of men at war, steel ringing on steel, cries of death and victory of hooves galloping hard from war for the secret treasures of the Ganges, kingdoms rising as swiftly as the stroke of a scimitar and vanishing as swiftly. These putty-coloured mountains seem to suggest with supreme indolence, you who would stride and strut and swear, look on us and wonder. They say there was an empire once, and that recently, on which the sun never set. Today, its legacy is a toy train, some cement blocks in tidy heaps to stop German tanks, if you please, and some insignia and escutcheons scratched like military badges on the shoulders of wayside rocks. Fading and exotic memories of Gurkha and Sikh plump open-mouthed lizards sitting so still, they could be part of the regimental emblem. Like wind they came, like water they left. The thousands of soldiers, the thousands of years, passages long gone, long forgotten, in this catacomb of desire and history. Afridia and Shinwari, and before them old Tathara, watch from eagle eyes. O conqueror, gaze on these and wonder, O traveler, be warned and step softly. The hill seem to know, and the air whispers. This evanescent journey, this mad rush, will continue, will remain as desperate and as passionate as of yore, but to this end we must come. Silence beyond and silence behind. To this end, teasing imagination leads us and leaves us. Please, we welcome Professor Akbar Ahmed. Thank you, Gavin, for that very warm introduction. Thank you, Director Paul Webley, distinguished panel and distinguished audience. I do want to thank those guests, many friends I see in the audience who've come from out of town. I do want to single out one person, and that is Zeba Salman, who invited me many, many months ago and has been such a great host. This for me is really an extraordinary honor to come back and be at so as and address this occasion. About four decades ago, I had joined the Department of Anthropology and it gives me particular delight to point out that my supervisor, Professor Adrian Mayer, is in the audience. And what have I learned in anthropology was really due to his great diligence and supervision. And what I learned about tribes was social structures, leadership, code of honor, tribes living on borders, between borders, the interstices, tribes living along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And in some senses, that is the focus of this particular study, the thistle and the drone. So in a philosophic sense, I have come full circle. Or as Professor Mayer be tempted to say, Ahmed hasn't moved at all. He's on exactly the same spot where he was four decades ago. Well, when I went back to Pakistan, having got my PhD, I discovered that there was a great air of suspicion around the subject. People associated with British imperialism, with the colonial enterprise. Until I began to discover the sources of Muslim social science, Ibn Khaldud, who gave us the cyclical theory of society's tribe, state, rise and fall. Even before him, Al Baruni, a thousand years ago who wrote the classic on Indian society, Hindu society called Kitab al Hind, today considered a classic. And here I must acknowledge my friend Jonathan Bentel, who is director of the RAI, invited me to write a paper on Al Baruni as the first anthropologist. And you can imagine the storm that that created in the orthodox circles of anthropology. This book, of course, has drones in the title. But this is not a book about drones as such, drones feature, but it is not about drones. It also raises issues of the modern state, of citizenship, of how we need to relate to one another in any society, of the war on terror, of security, of defining terrorism. And above all, to me, perhaps the most important issue it raises, is how do you really deal with someone or some communities that don't speak your language, may not have the same skin color as you, who may even have a very different social structure. And this takes us back to the first time in history when we hear the word barbarian coming from the ancient Greeks. And the definition, if you recall, really is someone who speaks a different language, you can't understand that language, bar bar. And the barbarian is defined as barbarian, primitive, savage. And over time, that confrontation between the Athenians and the barbarians grew into a confrontation between Greece and Persia and over time between Europe and Asia and Christianity and Islam. And you can see how much of this, as it were, is in history and how it influences us even today. Because when 9-11 happened and commentators looked around and said, how do we make sense of this world? Well, there was a theory. And Professor Bernard Lewis, another famous scholar from Suez, had written about the clash of civilizations. It was a phrase, his phrase. And instantly, this became the meta narrative of our world. This was a clash of civilizations because for 2000 years, Europe, Christianity, the West has been in a clash with the East, particularly Islam. In this case, certainly Islam. Now, what this dangerously simplistic theory does is erase all differences, all identities into one global configuration, the other. So ethnicity, tribe, sect, religion, nationality are all erased in the definition of the other in the clash of civilizations. So the question was, certainly for me, after 9-11 sitting in Washington, DC, in the front rows of the drama, how do you approach the other? I was involved in interfaith dialogue with the bishops and the rabbis. I was involved with the think tanks, the international relations security issues. And yet I found myself going back again and again to anthropology, to the study of small societies, particularly the tribes. It allowed me to see communities as a whole, the economy, politics, religion, culture, rights to passage. It allowed me to fall back to cross-cultural studies. I look at one community here, one across the border, one on the next continent. Above all, it gave me some understanding of segmentary lineage systems, a specific kind of tribe within tribal societies. Tribes that are descended from a common ancestor related to one another, find themselves on the linear charter, have highly developed codes of honor, and we can recognize them and they have been documented. So the focus for me became tribal societies, segmentary lineage systems, and that became a key to enter the war on terror. And I also used history, journalism, and of course popular culture. Those of you who keep up with popular culture, I'm sure would have come across a film called Thor. If you haven't, it is about the Greek, the Norwegian, sorry, not Greek, but the Norwegian got Thor, who actually descends to this planet from some planet in the outer universe. Now, he's a tall, muscular, blue-eyed blonde. He lands somewhere in the Midwest in the United States, and the security personnel, also muscular, blue-eyed blonde who get hold of him, interrogate him. And I was fascinated as a student of tribal societies, Muslim particularly, tribal societies at their line of questioning. The first question they asked him was, where did you get your training? Pakistan? Afghanistan? Chechnya? And the film Thor, a popular film, and I must confess I was dragged there by my younger son, that suddenly gave me an insight how average people are looking at this problem. It has become so popular in culture that Muslim equals terrorism, particularly people from these societies. And we need to remember, going back to tribes, how profoundly tribal these societies remain. Entire countries, Saudi Arabia, named after a tribe. Waziristan, the area I was in charge of, named after the Wazir tribe. Balochistan, named after the Baloch tribes. Afghanistan, named after the Afghan or the Pashtun, that is the origin of the name. And now consider a fact. The drone strikes, the maximum drone strikes have taken place in precisely what we are identifying as segmentary linear systems. Pashtuns, Yemen, Somalia, the Kurds in East Turkey, now the Tuareg in West Africa. Immediate correlation. Now, if you take the title, the thistle and the drone, and look at these two symbols as metaphors for different kinds of society, you will see an immediate opposition, a binary opposition between tribal societies, the thistle. And the metaphor of course is borrowed from Leo Tolstoy's Haji Murad, representing tribes with their codes of honour, bravery, culture, not prepared to just give in so easily. And we know it's the symbol of Scotland. Scots again have this great tradition of independence and nobility and then awareness of themselves as a people, an independent, proud people. And the drone as a metaphor for the age of globalization. Sleek, unseen comes from nowhere, destroys your lives and disappears again. Advanced kill technology. And in this study, as my friend Gavin has pointed out, I have worked on 40 case studies ranging from those in Morocco up to the Caucasus mountains and including the groups in the southern Philippines, the Tausig, often called the Moros, which is a derogatory term for them. I do want to here acknowledge my wonderful American team, two of them I hear, Harrison and Frankie, who have been completely committed to this project and have contributed so significantly to it. Now, the 40 case studies identify four stages of growth and this is important to follow. For the first thousand years, these societies are left alone. So they're tribal, they're also Muslim and there's an easy balance between the two. There's a relationship very distant with the centre. They're left more or less to their own devices. Then the 18th and 19th centuries, they encounter colonialism, European colonialism and suddenly their lives change. Boundaries are imposed, rules are imposed, their elements of genocide. We have all the details from authoritative sources and suddenly there's a challenge to their identity and they look forward to the time they're independent or part of an independent nation, which is what begins to happen in the middle of the 20th century. So suddenly you have Muslim states emerging as independent post-Second World War modern states and this is where, in a very profound sense, tragedy begins because in spite of the hopes and the aspirations of these people on the periphery, the central government, Libya, Iraq, Syria, treats the people on the periphery as brutally, if not worse than the colonial past. Saddam and the Kurds, for example, you're going to call the use of mustard gas and then, of course, we have 9-11 and the post-9-11 world and the use of the drones and this is where the US now gets involved with these very societies. So here's the picture and these are 40 case studies, difficult to refute. Impoverished groups, low levels of literacy already neglected, women virtually no rights in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The literacy rate for women is virtually zero, no hospitals, no colleges, no roads and now the superpower plus the allies bombing them, the national army coming in and bombing them and Al-Qaeda, the suicide bombers playing havoc there also and I'll explain why and you can imagine what these societies are experiencing right now and yet, what is the current situation? After a decade, over a decade of the war on terror, with trillions of dollars spent, thousands of lives lost, are we really acknowledging that this paradigm has not worked? And take some of the elements emerging from this war on terror, the constant and distressing pressures that the American military faces with green on blue killings, the suicide rates reaching record proportions, something so high that I, if I was a general in the American army, I'd be really alarmed, something like 22 veterans of the army committing suicide and this is American army, not Pakistan Afghan army and the unnecessary killings of Americans, British guns that occur with discouraging frequency. Take the impact on major non-NATO allies like Pakistan, thousands of officers, citizens, civilians dead, something like 55,000 according to Pakistanis and high levels of anti-Americanism. Take the situation in Pakistan today where the new prime minister declares that the drones must stop and Imran Khan who you know as a cricketing hero now a major political figure in Pakistan declares that if he ever became prime minister the first order would be to the Pakistan Air Force to shoot down the drones. In that situation you have a drone strike. So the stage is set for a very dramatic high level confrontation between two allies who must work together in order for the American troop withdrawal to work with precision and some order and we have the spillover, the Boston bombings, this terrible tragedy in London and as a father, as a grandfather, my granddaughter Meena Houthi is here in the audience, I am very concerned because no way is safe, no place is safe and these terrorists do not distinguish, they do not say he's a Muslim, he's not a Muslim, he's this color or that color, they will commit the acts of violence to make a point and I'll get to that and he tried to explain why they're doing this. They're doing this really going back to our tribal studies because of their mutated distorted understanding of the code of honor. Let me comment on the code of honor. Every one of these tribes, 40 of them has a particular code and a name often the same name as the tribe. Among the Pukhtun it's called Pukhtunwali or Pashtunwali. It emphasizes honor, hospitality, courage and also revenge. There's a famous saying among the Pukhtun, I took revenge after 100 years and I took it too quickly. So this notion of revenge is very important and this study clearly established that so many of the acts of groups like the Taliban in Pakistan, the strain in Pakistan, commit these atrocities, these violent acts I would say of almost insanity, shooting a 10-year-old boy in front of his father, blowing up a busload of women, then following them to a hospital and when they commit this act they give a statement and they say we did this deliberately so you know the pain we are going through. The day the drone strike took place a few days ago, a few days later the Taliban killed 10 foreign tourists in Pakistan saying this is in revenge for that strike. So again you can see cause and effect almost with mathematical precision and again I maintain that this violence must be stopped. It must be effectively checked. It cannot be left to just continue the state of drift in which we are in right now. Now going back to tribal society what is going to stop it? What will check it? Drones? They haven't worked. Central government invasions sending in the army that hasn't worked. Migrating out? Well huge sections of these tribal populations are living as destitute refugees in the bigger cities. Destitute. So an already impoverished community is being now destroyed. The reason is that these societies have three pillars of authority and here I want you to follow this. This is crucial to this talk. The first pillar is the tribal elder. This is the man who is linked with the tribe itself going back to the common ancestor. The tribal elders form the Jirga, the council of elders. They mediate disputes. They contain violence and over the last thousand years by and large they have. Then you have the mullah, the religious figure in charge of the madrasa and the mosque and then you have the central government representative. In the case of Pakistan the political agent, the civil administration represented by the political agent backed by the military paramilitary organizations. Now each pillar and I want you to listen to this carefully. Each pillar has been deliberately targeted and destroyed by the Taliban. And ask yourself why would they do this? Why aren't they attacking the Americans? Because if you destroy the structure of a society there is no resistance and they know that they will not be stopped by drone strikes from outside or the Pakistani army from outside. Because the more the violence, the more recruits they have, the more the anger against the violence. What can check them is that internal structure and that has been demolished. Tribal elders in Waziristan, the place I knew, something like 400 tribal elders have been killed, deliberately killed and that for tribal society. Tribal societies have small populations. 400 killed means an entire society is decapitated, just killed. It's finished, it doesn't have a head. Religious figures blown up in their mosques, these figures act as people who mediate between warring clans, they are the target. And then the political agent with all his authority cannot visit these agencies. He'll be shot, he'll be kidnapped. So you see the pillars of authority have shaken and there is no check to them from internal, within the structure. And all this begins in 2004 in Waziristan. That is when the drones begin, that is when the Pakistan army launches a full-scale invasion followed by another invasion followed by another invasion. And today you have a situation in Waziristan where something like three and a half thousand people there have been killed as a result of the drones. Now for every one individual killed, the intended quote-unquote bad guy, you may have 30 who are totally innocent women children and you'll have 3000 who then will be furious and angry and ready to join a queue for suicide bombing. And the consequences will be on completely innocent women, children, school children, anyone who they can get hold of who represents the authority of the central government. Where is this violence coming from? If you were to accept the clash of civilizations, as most people do, if you're a journalist looking for answers you would say Islam. And if that's the case that you run off and look at the Quran and say verse so and so explains why there's violence in Islam and therefore by definition all Muslims are potentially violent or capable of being violent. That is a hugely flawed argument, hugely flawed. Because in every verse that advocates standing up for your rights or defending your community, the next verse is to make peace. It is repeated again and again that God prefers peace over war again and again. There's no doubt about this. And take a look at some tribal elements in this discussion. Wali Khan the son of the legendary frontier Gandhi was asked about his identity and he said, I have been a Pashtun for 6,000 years, a Muslim for 1300 years and a Pakistani and this was about 1970s, a Pakistani for 25 years. Three categories of identity. He's laid them out for you. The 911 hijackers consider this. 18 of the 19 hijackers were Yemeni tribesmen. 10 of them were from the tribes of the Asir province of Saudi Arabia. The Asir province is completely Yemeni. It was annexed by Saudi Arabia as recently as the 1930s. Bin Laden, tribal background, Yemeni and his key official said that 90, 95% of Al-Qaeda was Yemeni. It's again tribal, tribal, tribal. Read the rhetoric of Bin Laden. Follow his poetry. It's full of references to tribal raids and warrior and courage and revenge and swords and spears. And the last two houses in which he lived, Ghamdi house in Afghanistan named after a tribe, Yemeni tribe, clan, and Waziristan in Abbottabad again reflect a tribal affiliation. If he was such an Islamic scholar he would have surely called these last two houses Makkah house and Madinah house. So we have some clues and Bin Laden is throwing them around for us. Alas we have not picked them up. Now my contention is if the problem is coming and lies in the tribal code then the solution lies in the tribal code. This is precisely the basis on which I as an administrator conducted my interactions with those tribes and very often faced very similar challenges to faced by Americans, the British and so on today except I worked entirely within the tribal structure as did my predecessors in Pakistan and before during the British times. What is happening today is that relations between the center and the periphery have deteriorated to a relationship of point, count point, attack, counter attack, peace treaties, collapse of treaties. And this cycle of violence is not stopping. It's happening throughout these societies. There is no consistent long-term plan over the last decade to bring stability and peace and there is an absolute desperate need to have an effective just neutral civil administration and work within the traditional tribal structures. Let me conclude by pointing out that this relationship the center periphery has again been overlooked because again if you're looking at it as a clash of civilizations you're seeing the west fighting Islam. In fact take a look at these societies. It really is a clash between the center and the periphery. The problems of Waziristan are not the problems of Washington or London. They are the problems of Islamabad. Waziristan is in the tribal areas of Pakistan. It is up to Pakistan to control those areas. And if you take a look at the other nations, Muslim nations, you'll see similar situations. Turkey with the Kurds, Pakistan I've just given you with the Baloch and the tribal areas and so on. And also non-Muslim nations with Muslim peripheries. China, Uighur, Russia, Caucasus, same center periphery going back 200 years. But it is more interesting. Take a look at non-Muslim center, non-Muslim periphery. Sri Lanka, Tamils, non-Muslims. Center, non-Muslim. India, Naxalites and Adivasis, non-Muslim, non-Muslim. So this clearly indicates that number one the center periphery confrontation predates 9-11. And number two we need to seriously look at it in order to try to resolve this particular period of history. Finally, while it's important for us to analyze this clinically and dispassionately, I have come to the conclusion that we need to really transcend our disciplines that we learn in departments like the excellent one here at Soares in anthropology. We really need to dig deeper into our own spiritual basis. We need to try to understand who we are as a world civilization. Where are we going as a world civilization? We need to explore our own common spiritual traditions. I am very inspired by sayings from the past, Jesus saying love one another. Blessed are the peacemakers. By the Sufis and their message of Sulekul, Sulekul means peace with all or the Jewish sages and their concept of tikkun olam to heal a fractured world. And to me, at least in these case studies I've given, the world is fractured and it needs healing. So please join me in healing a fractured world. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I think we can all agree that this is an extraordinarily important as well as potentially provocative study. I want to bring in our other colleagues in a moment. Just wanted to ask one question on that. How has this research gone down in the United States, given that you're more than familiar with the arguments, which is throwing strikes do work and it saves American lives because they're not put at risk? Well, Gavin, this is an interesting question because my team and myself are very committed to helping the United States really to win this war on terror because it has to be won. Or we're all going to be involved in a sort of quicksand situation. So I was wondering this question because of the title. It seems almost that you're just condemning the United States. On the contrary, we are pointing out with great diligence and scholarship that the United States does have a lot to give on the world stage. The vision of the founding fathers, the educational programs, the aid I myself studied at Burn Hall up in the north of Pakistan and Forman Christian College in Lahore, which is a very popular educational institution in Lahore even today. Now, how the Americans respond to something like this is clear because so far they've heard the arguments for drones and all the technological arguments why it's so efficient and why it's such an efficient killing machine. They did not really hear the argument connecting it to the people who had the receiving end. So you hear what happens when the drones go off and keep us safe in America. What you don't hear is what it does to people over there. And I was really surprised at some of the reactions. The Pentagon invited me twice to give them it's a very prestigious forum there. General McChrystal spoke just before the time I spoke and we've had people like Colonel Wilkerson who was the former Chief of Staff of Secretary Colin Powell saying that this is the best book and the only book etc etc. So we've got that response. On the other hand, again as a scholar it must be fair, we've also had some scathing criticism and as my team we discussed these reviews because we are serious about getting the word out. It's clear they haven't read the book. They've just seen the title. There's this anti-American, this author is called Ahmed so it's got to be anti-American and you get some really scathing. One comment was from a so-called expert that this is unbelievable drivel. It's so bad that my cat didn't like it. So I didn't know what to make of that. So we've got both ranges. I don't know how seriously we should take that kind of response. Okay, let me bring in the others. Professor Ashka, that argument, that central argument, that central government control is being weakened, that part of the point of the war on terror is supposed to be to help stop the drift towards failed states or failing regions and states and those three pillars that we talked about of tribal society being undermined. I just wondered what your thoughts were. Yeah, absolutely. I was prepared precisely to make some comments on Professor Ahmed's book and let me first say that I'm very happy to be part of this community meeting and especially with sharing the panel with Professor Ahmed. I should say that I found the book well first of all a very pleasant reading because Professor Ahmed is an excellent writer as even a poet so this can be reflected, is reflected in the book so it's a very captivating read and at the same time a very original combination because of your having two hats in this book, one the anthropologist and the other one the let's say maybe not the politician but the expert in international relations, let's put it this way and there's this well rather original combination of these two aspects in the book and actually reflected even in the title of the book, the binary title here, this is referring to the anthropological dimension of the book and of course the throne, all of us know what it is about and I should say that one of the surprising aspects for me for the book was to read it as almost a praise of clanism, of tribalism. I should say that the staunch modernist that I am was not completely convinced on this aspect of things but it was very much refreshing, very stimulating. On the other hand you have a very powerful indictment of the present policies of the Obama administration, typified by the throne in this very intensive use of the throne and I should say that while reading the book I mean I was reminded of a picture of during the last visit by the first visit as president by Barack Obama to Berlin, there was someone holding a big banner or something that with Martin Luther King with the caption I have a dream and Barack Obama was the caption I have a drone. I think that was a very nice summary of a major difference between the two men and indeed I mean when you look at it and I should say really that Professor Ahmad's book really helps even understanding to what extent this is terrible, I mean this use of drones and the effect of it even beyond what you may imagine but you see it also as a particularly coerced use of overwhelming force as an illustration of what a famous commentator of military affairs in the United States called immediately after the first gun for the post heroic war. This war strikes from a distance and now it strikes from you know a kind of mini planes without even pilots and you have this very clearly exposed in the book and this is part of also of a general pattern which I mean one should say that Israel resorted too extensively in the occupied territories and which was called with some kind of euphemism as extrajudicial executions and which are actually plainly assassinations because you are here killing people taking the decision to kill people without of course any judiciary process without even the ability of being 100% sure that you're killing the right person if ever this person deserves from whatever legal point of view or to the justice point of view to be killed and in that sense indeed I mean I share Professor Ahmad's very critical stance on the clash of civilization kind of thesis and actually I myself devoted a book to that which you mentioned gave in which came out 12 years ago actually immediately after 9 11 which was called the clash of barbarisms and in which I explained that civilizations and the proper sense of the term cannot clash if you take the full sense of civilizations civilized yeah and that what we what we are witnessing is actually a clash of barbarisms or let's say barbaric perversions within civilizations and this of course is very or let's say is rather obvious at least in the West when you say that Al Qaeda is a perversion of of Islam or Islamic civilization or it should be it's let's say it's politically correct to say that way even though many people as Professor Ahmad say would just refuse even to make that distinction but my my contention is that this I mean what we see also from the American side or from the Western side developing for many years now is also a perversion of Western civilizations and of all the values of perversion of Western civilization and if we take civilization the strong word strong meaning of the term which means refers to the the civitas the Latins the police of the Greek it's basically the rule of law it's basically you know a state based on you know civilized relations which has based on rules and counterposed to the state of nature to the law of the jungle and what we have been seeing on the on the warlord level is very much the law of the jungle being applied by the by the strongest which is always I mean to the benefit of the most powerful as we have been seeing with this proliferation of of of blatant violations of any sense of international law invasions drawn killings Guantanamo you mentioned that gave in etc I mean there are permanent violations not to mention Abu Ghraib and the rest we are seeing this barbaric perversion of Western civilization at work there and this is what what what we are doing in this kind of dialectics it's kind of interaction between two barbarisms each one feeding the other and I would say the most powerful is the the the the guiltiest in in this regard because they have the the power to change this kind of of relation and so where I would have let's say a different point of view with that of professor Ahmad is when he comes to his last chapter which he calls how to win the war on terror well on the one hand I wouldn't even locate myself within this formula the war on terror which is very much loaded but I am sure professor Ahmad agrees with that but I'm looking here at the the let's say kind of policy prescription the the Waziristan model that you mentioned I think this makes sense of course for a legitimate rule but the first question to ask is who is applying this model who is who is asked to deal with tribes is it a legitimate rule or is it an illegitimate rule where a foreign occupation or a despotic kind of regime if if we don't ask this question then we are giving recipes for it when it comes to the United States for for imperial power and these are recipes and what should say that this country applied for instance in Iraq after the first world war very much played the divide and rule kind of game with the the tribes and the United States itself in in after 2006 in Iraq resorted to these same kind of policies of buying the tribes through the elders and all that through money $300 per per man and creating large they called an awakening sahwats kind of tribal suppletives of the the US army but all that just increased if you want the contributed to to planting the seeds of what it has become and totally you know I mean tragic society Iraq Iraq is in a very very tragic situation so I think that in my view the most basic question but I'm sure on this we can't disagree is that the real antidote to terror in whatever form of terror state terror or non-state terror non-government energy terror and non-governmental terror is I would say the rule of law is against civilization and and here the responsibility is mostly and above all that of the most powerful and in that regard Professor Ahmad quoted the Kennedy in his in his book I have my reservations about Kennedy as a model but there's definitely another American president which we can refer to Franklin Roosevelt and his vision which went far beyond anything Kennedy I said and which was embodied in the UN Charter and the very conception of the UN and here is the only circle the only basis of international legality that we have and if we don't apply this we'll never get out of the professor thank you very much yeah Gavin I can pick up your your question of the nation state and the corporate periphery theme that that professor Ahmed talked about it's indeed an interesting question I think one of the things that has been we're witnessing in the past decade or so is the erosion of of the nation state as we knew it I mean this is in many ways a relic of modernity right introduced through the violence of colonialism to the region in a region as Professor Ahmed rightly said people were really living beyond borders right a region whether it is western Asia or south Asia that is pregnant with civilizations ethnicities where people got used to live without the concept of rigid space in mind and that goes back to exactly what Professor Ahmed said about about tribes who are also used to live beyond borders and what we're seeing certainly in west Asia as as you're there also indicated is the erosion of these nation states there is no concept of a homogeneous nation in that in that area so you have wars within states within nations in Iraq and Syria in you know the Kurdish problem that Professor Ahmed talked about and within Pakistan Afghanistan because there are simply no consensus about what it means for instance to be afghan to be pakistani even right there are competing identities that always impinge on that but we have the problem here as well with the scots right you mentioned the scots as a leave us out of it we've had enough trouble so you know it's not it's not entirely confined to that region i'm saying that this this is in many ways part of the problem of the nation state as it appeared in in modernity and people are are struggling with that but let me pick up the point of of spaces and people living beyond and uh beyond spaces it's interesting there's an interesting paradox here because drone warfare really is meant to make the enemy invisible right and open up new spaces for us to you know target or assassinate or whatever um it makes essentially every single citizen of a country a potential target this is what technology has has turned into these days um so these drones really claim in many ways those invisible spaces that those very tribes claim for their for their livelihood so that that's the strange paradox here though we have the drones on the one side claiming and targeting those spaces that the very tribes claim for themselves and indeed it came out in the in the in the poem at the at the at the beginning beautifully um where you had really i mean my immediate reaction was it turned the khaybar path into something entirely invisible a theater of war into something invisible that was the beauty of it and i think the beauty of books in general that deal with with those enemies that we don't see and professor ahmed mentioned 3500 what are their names you know who are they we don't we don't even have in terms of of organization one of the strengths of of western civilization has always been to to enumerate and things and we don't even have their names we don't have their identity so the beauty of books um such as this is really that it gives an identity to the enemy minimizing the claims to to dehumanize the enemy and that goes back of course to the whole notion of the of the barbarian threatening us you know our civilized police from the outside um that was always a strategy to dehumanize the enemy in order to mobilize the nation or the civilization uh against against that enemy so i mean these are these are some of the some of the themes so maybe something about the the what i would call the dialectics of of violence in the in this whole um discourse of the war on terror um it really created self-fulfilling prophecies i mean for everyone studying maybe politics this is this quite interesting was an idea right a speech writer came up with the idea i think it was david from but you would know better i think it was him it was from wasn't it it was from yeah thank you was it from did he confess well i mean they wrote the the book with richard pearl where they i think it was called the fight against evil whether whether essentially said the war on terror is the war against you know who and that was in parenthesis of course muslim so you know they because they're politically correct they couldn't say it but um so it it developed out of the mind of a speech writer and then it turned into a speech by the president into a salient norm with institutions and budgets attached to it and then it created a self-fulfilling prophecy because it was then appropriated by other people as well so suddenly he had prudent talking about the war on terror against the chattens you had you know chinese politicians talking about the war on terror in western china against the uber's in zinjiang province or indeed i heard the turkish finance minister talking about terrorists on taxim square that this is a war so you know this is what happens with with with ideas this is the kind of the genealogy of ideas and this is how politics then works and this is then going back to the to the conclusion how we deal with international relations i've always said that rhetoric words are at the heart of it right that you know that you have to be responsible when you're in power and that you use responsibly responsible rhetoric and unfortunately with the bush administration we didn't we didn't have that i think obama is by far more um should i say intellectually capable to to frame things in a different way but you know he certainly has a different rhetoric and i believe personally that had it at least had has lent itself to a different form of of engagement hasn't solved certainly the problems that we're dealing with but it has opened up spaces for diplomatic engagement i shall leave it at that i think it's good to have a dialogue about these issues with the with the people here as well indeed and i think i think we've got a microphone up there i don't know whether anybody would like to be the first to ask a question yes sir um we can get the microphone to you professor akbar i mean it is good to listen to you once again mushtaq al shari chairman third word solidarity uh you know we are working for peace tolerance and justice in the world i think it is good to know to your explanation on tribal and global global versus tribal but i think the word terrorism by itself is a new phenomenon after 9 11 it used to be called freedom fighters and i think it is very important to understand it that the terrorism in ireland in spain in many part of the world have been going on for many many decades and i think it is very important to say that you cannot fight the terrorism without fighting the root causes of terrorism and i think professor achar has just mentioned that one of the root causes of terrorism whether it is a tribal or otherwise which you have mentioned it is palestine is one of the other injustices and double standard by the western world on foreign policy is another one there are united nation resolution being put on stature books for past 60 70 years not implemented when it is in their interest it is implemented with days even invading the country i think it is very important to just say something on that that root causes are also very important with understanding the terrorism which is new and totally 10 12 years old thank you let me bring in professor thank you let me respond to my friend lashari first and thank you for the work you do in creating bridges in fact this is the third part of a trilogy the first book journey into islam resulted after an extended trip into the muslim world again with my young american team and in that book we looked at how muslims are seeing the west and the main problems and all these problems you're talking about came in that book reflecting popular muslim opinion muslim opinion in cities in bazaars on university campuses the second book was journey into america again i took my sabbatical i took my nine months and traveled throughout the united states 75 cities we went to 100 mosques which is a very detailed study of contemporary muslim society in the united states and there we looked at how americans were looking at muslims and all the ideas they had stereotypes fears and so on now this book lashari sabh focuses exclusively on the tribal areas and tribal societies so i'm leaving out the earlier discussion which already has been mentioned do you need to remember that which means read the other two books now in terms of uh my distinguished colleagues some very interesting points have been raised and i very briefly gathered with your permission because these are serious points the issue of law and justice is at the heart of tribal society please do not underestimate it just because these people are illiterate in a formal sense they don't have the education say their counterpart would have in a city the notion of justice the notion of law is vital in fact the entire society functions around what they understand as law which is tribal law and to my mind mr jinnah the founder of pakistan extraordinary man of the law he emphasized human rights women's rights minority rights the rule of law of course that didn't quite work out for pakistan but that was his vision and for the tribal areas he emphasized the same thing law and justice and two tribes fighting with each other will go to war or stop fighting if they're guaranteed justice between them it's a vital why because go back to the three pillars i talked about these tribal societies are all intensely egalitarian like the scots each one believes he's as good as the next man and they're not going to accept anyone super imposing an authority certainly backed by the outside so in the ideal they would want egalitarianism to be practiced the point about using the concept of war on terror and winning the war on terror as an anthropologist i'm simply reflecting what the normative term is for what's going on this is what the term is this is what's used by the media and i'm flipping it around i'm standing it on its head i'm saying this is a war how do you win this war this is how you win the war i'm not agreeing to the term again in the previous two books we have spent a lot of time debating the use of these terms in terms of your point about tribal societies and and they're really being voiceless this is a very important point i want to emphasize that i in no way am an advocate in the sense i don't come from those tribal societies i do not represent them i have not taken any money from them or any favors i'm motivated purely by the fact that i am in the knowledge of human suffering on a very large scale and i cannot on all consciousness allow myself silence i do not have that luxury that is why i'm speaking out at sometimes at great cost to myself but i will point out when i interacted i represented the central government now this meant that i had the privilege of having both perspectives and i found in this warrant error that these people are actually voiceless you are not going to see a wazir or a masood on the bbc you're not going to be hearing an interview you will hear experts talking about them you'll hear experts saying how much they love being hit by the drone i've heard this myself i have given i've heard pakistani saying this the tribesmen love the drone how do they love the which community would want to be destroyed because we love the drone it's not some cute and cuddly thing coming from overseas because it may bring a visa or something to us it is it is death and destruction you know this is such an important but it's being made now when this book came out again as an anthropologist the test is how do the people you're writing about respond not so much the critics who may like it or not like it for all kinds of reasons but the people you're describing that is the test are you depicting them accurately and i was gratified and thrilled to get endorsement after endorsement after endorsement a baloch writer from balochistan actual baloch wrote that after a decade and this is in the dawn you can google him his name is malik siraj he said after a decade for the first time the voiceless people of the periphery have found a voice because i'm simply reflecting their opinion i'm not creating an opinion so i'm not romanticizing or saying they're perfect they're wonderful people we should be like them i'm in fact pointing out the problems of treatment of women the treatment of minorities the sense of internness all this has to change their leaders have to bring their communities into the 21st century but surely we must not end up by destroying entire communities and my final point here is that really to ultimately find answers it is the central government very much involved it is the periphery very much involved it is the west very much involved so you're looking at a triangle this relationship is not bilateral it is a triangle and that triangle has become a war of terror triangle of terror and this is where the west becomes crucial this is where gavin figures like you become crucial because if you don't get involved in the debate and discussion the other two points are not going to be discussed and they're overlooked in the debate in the west where the debate is very different is restricted but this is a global problem and the triangle of terror is a global triangle affecting hundreds or millions of people okay let's have some more questions from the floor there's a gentleman there there's a lady at the front who's got a microphone yes go ahead hi thank you for a very interesting talk and my apologies for arriving late my name is john paul i'm from the hammer centre for the study of terrorism and political violence in st andrew's sorry that's a mouthful and i have a couple of points and interesting questions to ask firstly yeah now let's go stick with the questions um there's i'm going to sound critical here but i'll have to keep it simple um where do you stand on ishad manji's views that the situation about islam as and its relationship to terrorists and the origins of terrorism is more complex than you present i'm very much a friend of uh of muslims in islam and and what we might call very badly the moderates um but i think the situation is much more complex and islam as a religion is not heterogeneous um its views on war and peace are not as simple as you seem to have portrayed in your talk or at least the part i caught um and i think that's part of the complexity of the problem we we look at and the other thing is this concept of centres and peripheries is again i think an over simplification because if we look at pakistan um it is a centre not of a stable state but it is also a route of terrorism against other states and other centres of authority um it is this route of terrorism against its own as you've rightly pointed out of its own tribal areas but again a form of terrorism that is of not kind of an american super state form but the army for example is a state within a state and the role of the isi in that right sorry to cut you off but i think you've made your point clearly yes um john thank you for those questions uh the first one i didn't quite get are you suggesting that ishaad manji's saying we should interpret islam in a different way i'm not sure i'm getting your question sorry she's a muslim canadian right and she says that there's a crisis of identity in islam at the moment could i just interrupt there because i've interviewed her and asked her for before she wrote that which muslim countries that she visited is a canadian muslim and she told me none so i'm not quite sure she's a great expert ishaad manji i wouldn't actually quote john paul anyway let's please read please read a lot of scholarship actually john please read akba s mad and drop the others and and you'll be fine the second one i don't really understand you go to centre periphery pakistan pakistan my friend i've been in the field pakistan has had a very poor record of treating the periphery in 1971 its poor record led to the breakup of the country and in its mind islamabad although minority in terms of population very much thought it was the centre dealing with the periphery and sent in the army no dialogue sent in the army and in some senses it's making the same mistake in balochistan i would say it's the classic centre periphery situation whether it's a strong centre weak centre the pattern is there it's the pattern we are trying to dig out and in terms of simplification uh john gaven said you cannot speak more than 25 five minutes or you'll get a drone so i had to be very careful again read the book and you'll be happy you have lots of details lots of details thank you very much uh who else do we have somebody down there yes the gentleman there and there's a lady at the front if we can get down here please david scarpa how dangerous is it to draw red lines david in what context are you talking about well david uh fortunately he has drawn the red line but as you see from his record president obama uh he tends to be flexible about the red line keeps moving so luckily it isn't like bush who actually means that this is a red line if across it i'm coming that's one one observation secondly again on a very different scale much more limited but i found in my tribal dealing dealings and i was commissioner of three divisions in balochistan and several agencies in the tribal areas that you cannot really have red lines if you want your objective if you want your man as it were in one case a very famous man i wanted he had he was kidnapping pakistan army officials and crossed into afghanistan you have to be very patient you have to really play chess you cannot play baseball you can't go bank slam and come out of it you've got to be very very patient you've got to build up your case you've got to build up a network of tribal allies who then begin to act to put pressure on the guy and then get him when you want him on your terms and therefore red lines become counterproductive productive and that's what you see in history you see these great figures of history who are very successful generals after the war when they able to negotiate with the enemy not by drawing red lines but by crossing red lines alexander the great my favorite example he's conquered afghanistan persia he comes into india and he fights that terrible battle on the jhelum river with king porous the king of india and it is devastating for the greek army already already tired exhausted loss of men and lives and fed up of the wars they want to go home and they want king porous to be punished red line they said this man has cost us so heavily he must be humiliated and tortured and crucified and so on and alexander calls him in court in chains and he asks king porous how do you want to be treated and david the famous answer is like a king now here's alexander he could have said blast him torture him how cheeky in fact alexander says so you shall come and sit next to me and in an instant david no red lines he converts his main enemy in in india into his main ally he says not only will you represent me but i'm going to increase your kingdom and suddenly his flank as he's withdrawing remember he's withdrawing his troops is guarded right now the united states slash britain and nato troops are planning to withdraw next year this is when you need the strongest allies in the region because if you have turmoil you'll have problems for them so again i hope that people are appreciating that we are giving arguments and suggestions for a more stable world and a more peaceful one thank you lady i just wanted to ask has has there been in history um any times uh when like the law and justice that you have you have told us about existed or has that always been an ideal and the idea of this law and justice isn't it relative and how could these points be met so that both sides are happy with them i think that's a very good question because it's a question that challenges all of us certainly for me looking for an ideal in society where do we find it what example you know people ask me all right you're talking about islam and muslims and i have to give answers all right show me one society in the world with a genuine working islamic model and i can't where can i give an example from but what i can say is that there are certain periods in history there's certain individuals in history living up to this idea whether in the west or the east take the west you mentioned benjamin franklin and so on roosevelt go back to the founding fathers of the united states and the incredible people now we know that there's slavery and the women have no rights etc etc but take their vision of justice and their vision of law and please read washington read jefferson read benjamin franklin and you'll be amazed this is remember is the late 18th century and look what's happening in the 18th century you have a king here in britain you've got oriental despots in the rest of the world and here you have jefferson absolutely swearing by the law no deviation or no compromise and the discussion on torture is fascinating washington is fine founding a state and he's in the middle of a battle where he may lose that state he's not winning all the battles you know he's in fact at a point where there may be no united states he may not be able to win that one and they capture some british soldiers and these american soldiers say these people have been torturing us we are going to do the same to them here you have a question of law justice how do you treat the enemy do you torture don't you torture washington in the middle of a war for the survival of his country says no we must maintain the high moral ground we cannot be like the enemy no i think that's incredible that's in the 18th century so in the 21st century what happened to us are we abandoning a vision which we had and practice in the 18th century and now we are coming to at all justifications how to break the law so i see this really as an ideal in human society where we must constantly remind ourselves and aspire to and people have people have constantly in history aspire take a shoka take gandhi i'm talking of south asian examples gandhi who at the height of the writing against the muslims 1947 1948 actually goes into those areas and begins a fast unto death and he doesn't condemn anyone he says i have failed and he begins a fast at that age a very frail man not in good health and the writing stops now here's a man with a vision you have a shoka the famous shoka the indian ruler again in the war of kalinga famous war a hundred thousand people are killed he's victorious he's won the war but he asks himself what sort of a victory is this i've killed a hundred thousand people he renounces war he renounces violence he becomes a buddhist so you have examples of inhuman history which inspire us and we must share them and we must cherish them thank you i think we also add Nelson Mandela who's in our thoughts today as well let me see who else we can get there's a gentleman at the front and one at the back gentleman here and one at the back thanks very much Dr. Ahmed you gave a very brilliant faces with such extraordinary lucidity i i actually wanted to ask one thing you mentioned that there are islamic center muslim center and muslim parafri and there's non-muslim center and muslim parafri and then there are non-muslim center and non-muslim parafri and in these cases when we look at it that most of those non-muslim parafris seem to keep those violence localized is that the islam the ingredient which transformed these local peripheral and central issues into global issue a good question because we thought a lot about it you know when you have 40 cases is you're looking at the globe take the tamil tigers now the violence wasn't localized if you remember it crossed into india it actually took the life of a prime minister Rajiv Gandhi so these local movements very quickly become international and we are living in the age of globalization we have the media we have transport we have communications it's very easy to convert that as an ally in your cause why the muslims get involved globally it's simply because after 9 11 we have the united states being involved the western allies being involved and becomes a global war and because of this understanding this frame that we are stuck in this clash of civilizations and it's not the only narrative but it is a very important meta narrative if you like we are stuck with it and unless we can get out of it and unless the scholars and the intellectuals in the west begin to say that this is empty it's not led us to anything it doesn't explain anything it's like the war on terror it's meaningless we will not end this violence because in the meantime all the factors and causes of the violence are continuing so if the drones are stopped today in waziristan the violence will continue because you still have the army you still have the suicide bombers you still have tribal rivalries so you've got to create structures that stop this and those structures must include justice and law without that those societies cannot function the problem is and john polly i'm coming back to islam that every muslim carries in their mind a map of what an ideal society is and justice and law are absolutely vital for a muslim and he looks at the world today and he says i do not get justice and i do not get the law and he has no confidence in the structure of government and he already is coming to this world with a lot of anger and a lot of resentment and all you need is that flash and you have something terrible happening and you see this happening again and again and again our leaders our community leaders our social leaders in the muslim community and that's why the work of people like lashari becomes so vital they must be constantly one step ahead of the community or we'll see unfortunately more tragic situations in the future thank you i think we've got time for just just one more question it's from the front i wonder if i can put a joint question to arshina and yielberg we talked about the drones for obvious reasons today but i wonder if we can have the reaction to renditions particularly yielberg's reference to clash of barbarism and how within that framework he sees the awful practice of renditions and and also arshin talked about violence of the drones leading to a crisis of or loss of identity if a citizen comes from a country where the authorities are involved in awful acts of abduction and torture uh beyond their you know territories the enemy effectively becomes nameless i mean you can't if you have a feeling that you can be abducted in any airport anywhere you are blindfolded by people you don't have no idea who they are and for months and years they will be debate as to who was present or who was attending your interrogation when you were blindfolded you didn't even know which territory you were on i just want to invite your reflections on the impact of renditions on identity of the victims juba um yeah thank you uh well you know rendition is is not really new i mean people believe that this is something of the very last few years uh actually i dealt with rendition in my the book i mentioned which was published immediately after 9 11 and that was based on new york times articles about rendition which preceded 9 11 so it's it's not a new policy that's one of the means of circumventing the law and this i mean practicing you know uh violations of of legal norms of your civilizational norms by extra extraterritoriality it's didi how to say that the i mean guantanamo may be stand as a metaphor for that it's a total violation of all human rights any any conception of knowing people just held like that for for eternally in in prison but it is possible to do so because it is out of the territory and the same goes with the the uh you know extra judicial killings assassinations and all that so we have a whole set of of of hypocrisy which makes the very claim by western powers of representing international legality or abiding by international completely you know discredited in the eyes of of of the average citizen in the global house not to i mean actually in even in the eyes of many citizens in in our own countries here i mean in in the west itself and it just sees this opportunity to to to say that for the person who as far as understood mentioned that uh quoting ishad menji that uh that there is some content in islam which is you know which makes it prone to violence or this kind of views i mean this can only come from people who have never read the bible because the bible is a terribly violent book may mean there are i mean the very i mean without the term but the very idea of genocide is we found in the bible so what i mean this is completely unhistorical kind of reading which which believes that because you have a certain uh you know a narration in in history that this is the source of of the present uh and actual uh uh conduct of of those building these religions this is definitely not the case this is not definitely not the reason and i mean i think professor ahmed himself caught in his book uh at some point i mean the very different landscape you would have in islamic lands in the 50s and 60s and all that this image of of of peace i was reading recently the narration by a british woman who that was in the 50s i think went through biking to india or something like that and she was describing how how how hospitable all the countries the islamic countries through which she's gone where so i mean this just points to the fact that if we are to to to find the roots of what's happening today it's not they are definitely not in religion hashin you know i i really won't reply to to to that because i mean it's it's wrong on so many levels you don't you don't get but you but you're quoting her so you know this yeah but you don't find answers you don't guys let's leave him alone let's see john fall alone i think you don't find answers to these phenomena in in religious books these are political phenomena so if you you know if you study political science you will find the answers in politics hold on hold on we've dealt enough with ashi ishin madji thank you very much no more thank you about the issue of of rendition um i think what really happened at some stage is that um political elites in the united states came to the conclusion that as a as a democracy with a vibrant civil society it is very necessary to conduct a new type of war when you create these these areas of lawlessness where people are essentially invisible as you rightly said and this is exactly how you can conduct a war these days to create these these states of exemption um in order to to essentially fight a war without legal repercussion without any issue of of of identity appearing without actual victims and this is also how you can how you can sell a war now there is huge literature on the the legal implications of this i mean the the very term combattant was created in order to have a term that goes beyond any kind of legal framework that we have i should say i mean my my colleague laleigh hallily just wrote a book about that and you know it's a brilliant book and it covers all the aspects but really for me it's also a new way of of democracies waging wars that can be sold to a very very skeptical skeptical public in the age of non ideology where we can't kind of legitimate our our wars are brought through ideology i think at some stage political leads um came to the conclusion this is the only way okay we're going to leave it there i want to thank our distinguished panel and especially professor ahmet uh just as you were talking there it struck me that we have become technologically considerably more advanced than we have been over the past few hundred years but morally perhaps we may have progressed the if my american history is correct in 1863 lincoln signed into law the leber code forbidding torture within the u.s. army that was in 1863 when his country could have fallen apart so thank you very much and particularly thank you to professor ackman for making us think thank you