54 Report of the Eminent Jurists Panel on terrorism, counter-terrorism and human rights military operations. As noted, while the US no longer considers itself at war with all terrorist groups, it has identified its adversary as “al-Qaeda and associated groups”. The dominant view seems to be that al-Qaeda is a loosely connected network rather than a single transnational organisation.94 However, even if al-Qaeda were considered to be a cohesive and well-ordered collective that shared common strategies and tactics, it is still difficult to conceive of it as a unitary armed force and, as such, a party to the conflict. The inclusion of indeterminate “associated groups” makes it even more difficult to identify the parties to the conflict and impossible to characterise them. There is little evidence to suggest that various terrorist attacks, including those in Bali, Morocco, Algeria, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Mumbai or New York were committed by a single organised armed group. As the ICRC has put it, “much of the ongoing violence … that is usually described as “terrorist” is perpetrated by loosely organised groups (networks), or individuals that, at best, share a common ideology…[i]t is doubtful whether these groups and network can be characterised as a ‘party’ to a conflict within the meaning of IHL.” 95 Both practically and legally, there is no identifiable party to the conflict with which negotiation, defeat or surrender can occur. The second criterion requires a certain scale and intensity of armed conflict which would go beyond sporadic acts with long interstices: this criterion is also not met. Apart from the armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq (which the outgoing US administration claims are part of the wider “war on terror”), there has been very little “fighting” in this putative “war on terror”. The idea that there is a global conflict can only possibly be sustained, at best, by assimilating various US allies as parties to the conflict i.e. the UK, Spain, Indonesia and others who have been the target of attacks by al-Qaeda and “associated groups”. The Panel, however, received no information indicating that any of these States consider themselves to be engaged in an armed conflict with these groups. On the contrary, the post September 11 terrorist bombings in London, Madrid and Bali were not treated as acts of war, but as criminal acts, and the authorities applied law enforcement, not military, means to address them. Strictly speaking, international law does not necessarily place clear temporal limitations on armed conflict. Nonetheless, war without a foreseeable end would not sit comfortably with the purposes and objectives of the United Nations Charter. Moreover, the notion of a “global battlefield” also cannot logically be the locus for an armed conflict. If it were, the entire world would potentially be a battlefield, with a State able to launch attacks on an armed group anywhere, in contravention of Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter.96 94 Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda : The True Story of Radical Islam, Rev. edn.; London: Penguin, 2004. 95 ICRC, “International humanitarian law and terrorism: questions and answers”, 5 May 2004, available at http://www.icrc.org/. 96 This has, however, been the logic underlying the US programme of rendition and secret detention, in respect of which people were arrested as far afield as Bosnia and the Gambia, and designated as “enemy combatants”. The “war” analogy also was called upon to allow the authorities to arrest suspects in the USA under normal criminal law, and then to re-designate them as “unlawful enemy combatants”, thereby denying them