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Wisdom, not intelligence

By Khaled Diab

Britain needs political wisdom more than the intelligence services to prevent terrorism on its shores.

February 2008

al-Qaeda is working to set up a cell in Britain to target attacks against certain politicians, such as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, and to carry out other operations, according to revelations made on Tuesday’s Newsnight.

The programme reported that British intelligence services were investigating the claims but no one yet knows whether the call to arms posted on a password-protected website popular with ‘jihadists’ is genuine.

“You don’t ignore this sort of thing,” Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, told Jeremy Paxman. “It may not be a threat from an existing cell... but it does represent a move in the propaganda game.”

And we most certainly mustn’t. Whether or not this is really al-Qaeda or simply a dose of psychological warfare, the best way to eliminate the threat on British soil is not to tighten security, since any possible attackers are likely to be homegrown, but to strike at the root causes.

The biggest single and most spectacular act Britain can undertake to mitigate the terror threat would be to pull its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hawks would dismiss such a move as a sign of moral cowardice and “giving in to the terrorists”. The less ideological will see it for what it is: an expression of moral courage, an admission of a monumental error, and the yielding to justice and reason.

I am constantly astounded by those who claim that there is no causal link between the terror meted out by the Anglo-American war machine and anti-western terrorist activity. Even normally enlightened circles can be prone to viewing terrorism in an existential and historical vacuum – it is far easier on the conscience to deny any culpability in making the world more dangerous.

But al-Qaeda has no such hesitation. It uses western military action in Muslim countries as a rallying cry to recruit the young and disillusioned.

“In the case of the United Kingdom, the level of the threat in this country owes a lot to the government’s support for American wars,” security expert, Crispin Black, writes in today’s Cif.

Last June, Prospect Magazine, ran an interesting but rather shallow investigation into what motivated the young British bombers who took part in the July 2005 London attacks which left some 50 dead.

In his editorial to the edition, Prospect’s editor David Goodhart claimed that the investigation “decisively refutes the claim, often heard in the weeks after 7/7, that [one of the attackers, Mohammad Sidique] Khan had been a well-integrated British-Pakistani Muslim driven to angry despair by the war in Iraq.”

Instead, Goodhart almost exclusively blames the tension between first and second-generation British Muslims for Khan’s decision to kill himself and other innocent civilians. Meanwhile, Britain can rest its conscience because “the rest of us are largely bystanders in this generational conflict”.

While intergenerational conflict almost certainly plays a part in the radicalisation of a small minority of British Muslims, their socio-economic marginalisation also plays a crucial role. But these are only contributing factors when it comes to the few driven to violent action.

Few people give themselves to a cause for purely abstract or political reasons – scratch below the surface and there is invariably a personal motivation. From the suicide bomber who blows himself up because he can’t bear the indignity of unemployment and the daily humiliation of living under occupation, to the shunted lover who runs off and joins the French Foreign Legion, to the passionate anti-Aids campaigner who lost a loved one to that killer disease – in the right circumstances, the personal sublimates itself to the universal.