US Defence Secretary Robert Gates yesterday declined to say if the international community was winning the war on terrorism but called on Asian countries to do more to tackle the underlying causes of the global phenomenon by tackling poverty and autocratic rule.

"I think we are still early in this contest," Gates told participants at the sixth Shangri-la Dialogue, an annual forum of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies where top security officials and defence ministers from 25 countries engage in two days of debate with academics.

"On the negative side of the ledger, I think we have not made enough progress in trying to address some of the root causes of terrorism in some of these societies, whether it is economic deprivation or despotism that leads to alienation," he said.

More "creative thinking" was needed to address the fundamental factors that breed extremism, he said. "One of the disturbing things about many of the terrorists that have been caught is that these are not ignorant, poor people," he said.

"These are educated people, often from professional families. So dealing with poverty and those issues is not going to eliminate the problem, but it certainly can reduce the pool of people prepared to give their lives for this cause."

The former Central Intelligence Agency chief said progress had been made in some areas, such as the elimination of the al-Qaeda haven in Afghanistan in late 2001. But Islamic extremists have managed since then to expand their recruiting grounds, he said.

The world has learned the hard way that allowing failed states to turn into terrorist sanctuaries has catastrophic consequences, he said.

"Whatever your views on how we got to this point in Iraq, it is clear that a failed state in that part of the world would destabilise the region and embolden violent extremists elsewhere. The effects of chaos in either Central or Southwest Asia will not recognise national, continental or regional boundaries," Gates said.

He also played down concerns about China's military build-up, signalling a shift to a more conciliatory stance than that held by his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who last year used the forum to criticise Beijing's military spending and lack of transparency.

However, Gates cautioned that "distrust and secrecy can lead to miscalculation and unnecessary confrontation".

Lt-General Zhang Qinsheng, the Peoples Liberation Army's military intelligence chief, said that China's spending was not a threat and that the increased budget was mainly for uniforms, training, salaries and pensions.

Don Pathan

The Nation

Singapore