America, Britain need to be tough

Whether the United States has been right in not succumbing to ransom demands by terrorists — unlike the leading Europeans that have coughed up hefty sums — can be debated.

But there can be no question that President Barack Obama got it right when he resumed the bombing of the positions of the Al Qaeda breakaway group the Islamic State (IS) in northern Iraq immediately after the Islamist gang beheaded a freelance American photojournalist, James Foley, this week, and warned the US President that more such murders in cold blood of captured Americans would follow if the bombing did not stop.

Will this give the IS pause? Will reprisal beheadings follow? The answer is we don’t know. But if the air attacks on the positions of the Islamist thugs continued, its followers may just worry their tactics are not right.

Islamists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Arab world have routinely resorted to captive-taking for ransom, which experts believe is a crucial source of earning for them. The mob that killed Foley, a courageous man who was captured in Libya as well when on assignment, is thought to be holding three other Americans, one of whom is also a journalist.

Probably the US stance of not paying ransoms to terrorists is meant to choke them of funds. But what Washington does not understand is that its actions and policies have shored up extremists, though that is not the intention.

In the case of the IS, it is evident that America’s serious mistake in providing huge political support and weapons to opponents of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad (although not the heavy gear they demanded), many of whom like the al-Nusra group were hard-core violent Islamists, fed those who would become the IS.

In a volatile region, it was dangerous to give arms and diplomatic and political support even to so-called moderates, who actually had no leg to stand on, as was proved before long.

Indeed, US policy towards terrorists has not been uniform and tough. When America was attacked on September 11, the world rallied to its cause.

But in some instances, including those concerning this country, the US dawdled and played politics in dealing with terrorism because the terrorists were nurtured by the Pakistan military establishment — even those that killed another American journalist, Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl.

It appears as many as 400 Britons have rushed to the cause of the Islamists in Iraq and Syria, and the evil-doer who killed Foley was apparently British. This has serious implications for British security, as Prime Minister David Cameron has acknowledged. If the US and the UK are tough with governments whose elements back extremism and terrorism, the world would be a safer place.