London - British Foreign Secretary David Miliband Thursday criticized the US-inspired "war on terror" as a strategy that might have promoted terrorism.

In an article in the Guardian newspaper, Miliband said that categorizing the threat posed by hugely different groups as a simple battle of "good and evil may have done more harm than good."

Miliband's thinly-veiled swipe at outgoing US president George W Bush came ahead of a speech he is due to deliver Thursday in the reopened Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai which was at the centre of a November terrorist attack.

"Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good. The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common," he wrote.

The British government informally dropped the use of the controversial phrase several years ago. (dpa)