It is nearly nine years since President Bush declared a global war on terror so it is fair to ask: how is it going? Well, the first point to make is that it is not called a war on terror anymore. It is the “global struggle against violent extremists”.

But whatever it is termed, the answer to how it is going is: very badly. Not only is there no end in sight—some military men talk of victory in 25 years—but Osama bin Laden, the man America vowed to get “dead or alive”, is as elusive as ever.

Britain and the United States claim that terrorism has grown into an international force that threatens all those who stand with the US. But wait a ?minute. This growth in terrorism has occurred during their colossal war against it, using all the military, political and intelligence powers at their disposal.

So as Saad al-Fagih, director of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, pointed out, “the logical conclusion must be that the so-called war ?on terror in its present form, is yielding precisely the opposite results to those intended.”

Further, as Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, charges, “War is itself terrorism… that taking away people and subjecting them to torture is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less.”

The main front in the war, now Afghanistan, remains a disaster. The British Army is taking casualties at a level not seen since the 1950s. The United Nations reported recently that Afghan civilian deaths doubled in 2009.

Two thirds of the British public believes that the war is unwinnable and all the troops should be brought home by Christmas. The hawks urge the Pentagon to put even more troops into the war, forgetting that General Westmoreland had a million soldiers in Vietnam but said he needed a million more in order to win.

At home there has been a shift in the public mood. Insiders are said to be telling President Obama he should follow the advice given to President Johnson in the middle of the Vietnam quagmire – “Declare victory and leave.”

And abroad the United States slides steadily downwards in the Anholt-GMI Nations Brand Index, the equivalent of a world popularity contest.

Some knowledgeable Americans recognise the danger. Robert Baer, a former top CIA officer, says: “Every time you kill a Muslim, whether it is an Israeli killing them or an American or a Brit, there is humiliation, anger, reaction and bombs go off somewhere.”

The unpalatable fact is that Britain and America are fighting an unwinnable war against an unidentifiable enemy. How can they fight terrorism when they cannot even agree what terrorism is?

That seems unlikely but either way what journalists should certainly be doing is reporting the views of terrorists so as to try to understand their motives. Would it not be more productive to try to understand what the terrorists want and what they would be prepared to accept to end their operations.

Instead acres of newsprint and hours of TV time have been devoted to condemning them as “evil”, a word which absolves us from thinking about the problem: if they are evil (born evil; grew up to be evil; taught to be evil? Which is it?), then it is useless to try to understand them.

But as David Clark, the former British Labour Party adviser points out, those who condemn terrorists as evil cannot answer the question: why is there more evil around today than there used to be? And they have nothing to contribute to the debate about what needs to happen next.

Published in The Khaleej Times.

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 13 August 2006

We have been conned for years over our airport security.

There is something wrong with the Government’s version of our stunning success in thwarting the planned terrorist attack on aircraft bound from Britain to the United States, bombings that would have “caused loss of life on an unprecedented scale”. We are told that, thanks to the brilliance of our anti-terrorist forces, we have avoided another 9/11. Apparently faced with a bombing attack on a number of transatlantic aircraft, “part of the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War” (our Home Secretary, John Reid’s, words), we have rounded up the “main players” just in time, and they are all in custody.

Their assets have been seized, they are being questioned, and, after a security alert at the highest level and enormous disruption at our airports, we are getting back to normal. But consider this. Instead of celebrating the undoubted skill and dedication of MI5 and the police, the Government should also admit that the affair has revealed that we have been conned for years over our airport security.

We had been led to believe that every possible precaution had been taken to prevent a terrorist carrying a bomb on to a plane in hand luggage. This turns out not to be true. Against the type of attack the group was allegedly plotting, we would have been defenceless.

Original ideas for terrorist outrages are hard to dream up. There is a limit to what is effective, headline-grabbing and yet feasible. Al-Qa’ida’s destruction of the twin towers in 2001, by turning civilian airliners into enormous missiles, set a standard that terrorists have been trying to replicate ever since.

They have been frustrated by new anti-hijacking security measures (armoured doors to the flight deck, the banning of sharp objects from hand luggage and passenger profiling). But did no anti-terrorist officer step into a terrorist’s mindset to think, “OK, I can’t hijack the aircraft and fly it into a building. But I can still turn a plane into a missile by blowing it up from the inside while it’s over a densely- populated area of London or New York”? Then the officer would have moved on to the problem of how to get the explosive on to the aircraft. The most effective explosive made from ingredients available to amateurs involves large quantities of agricultural fertiliser. This sort of bomb, once favoured by the IRA, could be quickly ruled out because it is bulky and is hardly the sort of substance one could explain to an airport security officer searching hand luggage.

But there are other explosives that can be made from ingredients available at any chemist’s shop. The amounts needed are comparatively small and can be disguised as cosmetics, drinks or medicine. Police say that this is what the group arrested on Wednesday and Thursday was planning to use, taking the ingredients on board separately and then mixing them in the aircraft’s toilet.

Amazingly, it turns out that this had been done before. So not only did the anti-terrorist authorities fail to think like terrorists, they could not have taken sufficient note of the earlier event and the lessons it held.

In 1994, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a Pakistani linked to al-Qa’ida, carried the ingredients for a bomb on to a Philippine Airlines flight bound for the United States. They were in his hand luggage in innocuous-looking containers, including a bottle of contact lens solution. He mixed them together in the plane’s toilet, attached a timer, put the bomb beneath a passenger seat, and then got off the plane at the next refuelling stop.

Soon after take-off the bomb exploded, killing a Japanese businessman occupying the seat and tearing a two foot hole in the cabin floor, revealing the cargo hold beneath. But the fuselage of the plane remained intact and the pilot managed to land safely at Okinawa, with the Japanese the only casualty.

But Yousef’s success in getting a bomb through security and on to a plane highlighted serious security weaknesses. While all luggage that will go into a plane’s cargo hold is screened for explosives, few pieces of hand baggage are. They go through X-ray machines which can pick up the wires of a bomb’s detonator, but X-rays and metal detectors cannot show whether a bag contains explosives – or the ingredients for explosives.

The technology is there – “puffer machines” blow air over passengers and hand baggage to detect whether either have come into contact with explosives. But Peter DeFazio, a member of the US Congress Aviation Subcommittee, says, “We have done nothing at checkpoints to detect the kind of bomb that Yousef designed and which is available to be copied on the internet. That is just unconscionable.”

The unanswered question is whether it is possible to make a chemical bomb of the kind Yousef used that would be big enough to bring down a modern airliner. Experts say that it would depend on the location of the device. If it were to destroy structural elements of the plane, or its fuel lines, then it would crash. But most planes could survive if the bomb blew out only the aluminium sheeting of the fuselage.

How much of all this did our anti-terrorism forces know? They must have studied the Yousef case. But then why did they leave it until last Thursday to implement measures to prevent bomb ingredients being carried on to aircraft in passengers’ hand baggage? And then announce it in such a dramatic manner?

The most obvious reason is that they received last-minute intelligence that the plot was reaching a climax. And without knowing much more about the plotters’ background they were unable to assess how technically competent at bomb-making they might be.

For although the ingredients for a chemical bomb are reasonably easy to obtain, it turns out that successfully mixing them is much harder and more dangerous than it at first appeared. Some of the ingredients may be commercially available but they are too diluted to be of any use in a bomb. Others require chemical refining to purify them. The terrorist could end up blowing his fingers off or setting fire to himself but leaving the aircraft toilet intact. The authorities had to assume, however, that they were dealing with skilled bomb-makers.

As for the dramatic way the news was announced, there is more than just a sneaking suspicion that it suits governments to ramp up the terrorist threat because a sliver of fear makes its citizens easier to lead and control. They can always argue, as the Prime Minister has, that it would be irresponsible not to act on warnings or unverified information – even if these turn out to be wrong – because what if they turn out to be right? In short, we can expect more warnings, not fewer.

And yet we stubbornly refuse to be moved by them. On Thursday, no one panicked. Passengers at airports, interviewed about their reaction, showed a marked reluctance to cancel their flights. The stock market shivered but recovered. On Friday the pubs and restaurants were as crowded as ever. Why aren’t we more afraid? One answer is that, although the authorities seem confident that they have thwarted a well-organised and dangerous conspiracy, we have seen previous “threats” crumble away. Since 9/11 there have been more than 600 arrests in Britain to do with terrorism matters. Only 100 of these people were charged and fewer than 20 have so far been convicted. Rightly or wrongly, there is a feeling that the security services and the police, both with increased staffing levels and better funding, want to be seen to be doing their job. Raids and arrests generate good publicity.

A journalist once put it to Dame Stella Rimington, former director-general of MI5, that the threat of terrorism had been overcooked. Surprisingly, she agreed. “You are more likely to be run over by a bus,” she said.

“It’s difficult for me to say,” she continued, “because I’ve been out of it for 10 years. I’ve no doubt, though, from what people who do know say, that there are a large number of plots. But at the back of all this, I feel we are tending towards this sense that we must all be 100 per cent safe, and I suppose my feeling is that a better way of presenting it is to say the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and we have to make choices about how much of our civil liberties we want to give up.”

So what will happen next? It’s a safe bet that the era of easy, carry-on cabin baggage is over. Security checks will get tougher and check-in times longer. We might even have to contemplate CCTV cameras in airline toilets.

And, hopefully, our anti-terrorism forces will adopt one of the few pieces of good advice that the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has ever given. Once, when seeking to shake up the CIA, he called for a more intuitive approach to anti-terrorist intelligence. Our security services, he said, should “put themselves into the other guy’s shoes and think like him”.

Phillip Knightley is author of ‘The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century‘.

Published in The Daily Mail, 10 August 2006

There comes a time in every anti-terrorist operation for a decision dreaded by every officer involved: Is this the moment to strike? Ideally, an investigation should run as long as possible.

No officer, no matter how experienced, can tell for certain that every angle has been covered, every possibility for gathering intelligence has been exploited, and every fragment of evidence has been noted and catalogued. But these imperatives have to be balanced against the most important one of all – are the terrorists about to attack?

Those running the operation that resulted in the arrests of a group of 21 people faced this crucial decision on Wednesday night.

The group had been under investigation for several months by MI5, the police, and other agencies not yet named.

All believed that they had strong evidence that the group had been planning to attack at least ten aircraft en route to the United States, using explosives in hand luggage.

This would have caused deaths on “an unprecedented scale”, the Home Secretary said, and, according to police deputy commissioner Paul Stephenson, “it became essential we took action”.

What had suddenly happened? Why did the authorities turn the nation’s airports into “no-go” areas full of police and security guards and suggest, as the Home Secretary did, that Britain was facing as big a threat as the Second World War?

The obvious reason is that the alert level now has to be made public and enhanced security measures at airports and the cancellation of hundreds of flights made it impossible to keep this low-key.

But there is more to it than this. We have to consider how this group came to the attention of MI5 and the way, along with the police, it was running the operation. We can rule out any suggestion that MI5 stumbled on the group by accident.

Modern terrorists are sophisticated, and skilled at avoiding silly mistakes – like using mobile phones to contact each other.

They meet clandestinely and face-to-face and they are trained at avoiding even professional shadowers. So it is most likely that the group came to MI5’s attention through an informer – possibly the same one whose information led to the Forest Gate raid.

MI5 then put the key members of the group, or possibly the whole group, under electronic and visual surveillance.

John Reid hinted at this when he said that the authorities had to weigh the fact that closing down the group risked exposing sources against the need to protect public safety. There has been a suggestion that the operation was brought forward because U.S. intelligence agencies, which had been tipped off, did not have to patience to sit on the information.

Alternatively, on Wednesday night, something the group said or did made MI5 realise that if the police did not move immediately “there would be the risk of terrible consequences”. One thing could be that surveillance revealed the group had the devices it needed for its attacks on the planes.

To assess the risk we still face, we must know whether the authorities seized these devices in their raids. If they are still out there, then they are still a threat.

John Reid says that “the main players” are in custody. But what about any minor players-And what were the devices? If they were explosives, what sort were they and how come none of the detection devices at airports were capable of picking them up?

The authorities say that the group had devised an explosive made from a series of apparently innocuous ingredients. The plan was to carry them on board the aircraft disguised as shampoo, hair gel and cosmetics.

By themselves, such items would not attract the attention of the airport security guards.

Once on board the plane, the bomb ingredients could have been mixed in the toilet ready to be detonated. There is a sinister link here with the chemical weapon which the police searched for unsuccessfully during the Forest Gate raid. There the MI5 informer told of a “chemical bomb” made from ingredients that appeared harmless by themselves but which, when mixed with osmium tetroxide, turned into a weapon – the release of which could cause death by choking.

It seems likely that the idea of beating security checks by taking the ingredients on to a plane separately may have spread from one group to another.

We probably will not know until any case against the ‘players’ comes to court – or is dropped – whether the authorities were right to act when they did. But what is certain is that we can expect more warnings, not fewer.

In response, the public must strike the right balance: be calm yet vigilant, something we are rather good at.

Personally, I take comfort with this thought: if they know a terrorist attack is imminent, then why is our Prime Minister still on holiday in the West Indies?

Phillip Knightley is author of The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century.

Published in The Daily Mail, 6 June 2006

The anti-terrorist raid on a house in East London to search for a chemical bomb now appears to be just another botched operation: a suspect shot in murky circumstances, conflicting accounts and unanswered questions.

In fact, the real story of this raid is that infighting between MI5 and the police may have endangered the chance of a breakthrough in gathering anti-terrorist intelligence.

Information is the life-blood of a security service. Unlike the characters in novels or in the popular TV series Spooks, real-life MI5 officers rely on the sordid but well-tried techniques of the informer, the ‘grass’, the intercepted letter, the telephone tap and the bribe, all mixed in with a dash of blackmail and coercion.

The aim of every MI5 officer is to find and then recruit a penetration agent. This is particularly so with antiterrorist operations since 9/11, because no amount of training would enable a Western security officer to pass as a Muslim terrorist.

So what MI5 officers are always looking for is someone in a terrorist cell, someone close to the leaders and totally trusted by them. Such a recruit could be immensely valuable, and once he or she proved their worth could be kept in place for years, as was the case in Northern Ireland.

We can imagine the delight when MI5 appeared to have found and recruited a British Muslim prepared to work for it and inform on fellow Muslims who might be planning terrorist acts.

But problems arose when this agent reported to his MI5 handler that Abul Kahar Kalam, 23, and his brother Abul Koyair Kalam, 20, both British-born Muslims, were storing a tiny, homemade bomb at their home in Lansdown Road, Forest Gate.

He said he had seen the device, described it and drew a sketch of it from memory. It was small enough, he said, to be carried in a vest or jacket and he thought it contained cyanide.

The MI5 handler reported this to his superiors and it was passed up the

chain of command to the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. Then began the automatic checking for accuracy, reliability and feasibility to which any report from an agent is subjected.

The handler reported on his assessment of the agent’s reliability. Was it feasible that he was so trusted he would have been able to see the cyanide device? Yes, the handler said.

MI5’s scientific officers reported that the agent’s description of the bomb and his sketch showed no obvious flaws. Outside help was called in and experts from the Government’s biochemical centre at Porton Down said they could not dismiss the agent’s story out of hand.

This was the moment for difficult decisions. Ideally, MI5 would have liked to have tested its penetration agent over a longer period, to have gone back to him with a series of questions from the Porton Down experts, to wait to see what else he may report.

The stakes were high. If the agent’s information was correct then MI5 had a man at the heart of a terrorist group in London. It would have advance warning not only of possible attacks by this group but by others as well.

This could be a breakthrough in the war against terrorism in Britain for years to come.

But its agent had been unable to give even an estimate of when the device might be used.

There are indications that MI5 tried to find out more from other sources. Someone put the Lansdown Road house under surveillance. Locals recall suspicious cars parked at either end of the road, with bored men behind the wheel and a litter of empty coffee cups on the dashboard.

But surveillance produced nothing conclusive. Nor did a telephone tap. Time was ticking away. What if the terrorists exploded the chemical bomb in a Tube train or a pub or a disco while MI5 was still investigating how good its penetration agent’s information was?

The resulting public outcry would blow MI5 out of the water.

Finally, MI5 felt it had no choice. Dame Manningham-Buller informed the UK antiterror chief, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, of its agent and his information and at a meeting last Thursday, the matter was thrashed out.

Such meetings are always awkward. There is no love lost between the police and MI5. The police regard MI5 officers as arrogant and overpaid. They believe that they could do a much better job and do not hesitate to say so.

And they suspect both MI5 and MI6 of being in the governmentof-the-day’s pocket, of being prepared – as with the ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq – to bend their intelligence reports to suit their political masters.

MI5 regards the police as plodders and thief catchers, not up to the subtlety of counterterrorism work, and they resent the fact that for years they had to ask Special Branch to carry out arrests on MI5’s behalf, depriving them of the thrill of the ‘collar’.

In last week’s case, the police were reluctant to move too quickly.

If anything went wrong – as it appears to have done – they would carry the can, and after the fiasco of the shooting on the Tube of an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, following the July 7 terror attacks, they would suffer a further loss of public confidence.

But MI5 was now pressing for urgent action so as to cover its own back and, authorised at the highest level, last Friday’s operation went ahead.

There is evidence of how unhappy the police were in some of their public statements.

Asked about the raid, Peter Clarke could have said: “We believed that there was a clear and present danger of a terrorist attack in London. We raided the Lansdown Road house to arrest people we had reason to fear might be connected with the planning of such an attack.”

Instead, he said that MI5 had given the police ‘very specific’ allegations: “The intelligence was such that it demanded an intensive investigation and response. The purpose of the investigation, after ensuring public safety, is to prove or disprove the intelligence that we have received.

“This is always difficult, and sometimes the only way to do so is to mount an operation such as that which we carried out.”

This was, in effect, passing the buck back to MI5. It implied that the police were doing MI5’s job for them.

If MI5 could not be certain that its agent’s information was right or wrong, then the police would find out once and for all by raiding the house mentioned in the agent’s report.

The pity is that although the agent may have been wrong about the chemical bomb, he might have come up with further information in the future that would turn out to be spot on.

But it appears that not only is he now discredited, but that his cover might have been blown and he could be in danger.

All of which shows the magnitude of the task our intelligence services face – and how important it is that they work together rather than as rivals.

Phillip Knightley is the author of The Second Oldest Profession: Spies And Spying In The 20th Century.

Published in The Bulletin, 7 September 2005

It is four years since President Bush declared a global war on terror so it is fair to ask: how is it going? Well, the first point to make is that it is not a war on terror anymore. One of Washington’s sneakier tactics is that if a crucial policy begins to lose public support, you don’t change the policy, you just change its name and carry on. So it is no longer the war on terror. It is the “global struggle against violent extremists”.

But whatever it is now called, the answer to how it is going is: very badly. Not only is there no end in sight, but the al-Qaeda, leader Osama bin Laden, the man Bush vowed to get “dead or alive” is, despite a $25 million bounty on his head, as elusive as ever. Bush’s reaction to this inconvenient fact is to stop mentioning the man’s name, perhaps in the hope that we will eventually forget about him.

Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and John Howard agree that terrorism has been growing into an international force that threatens all those who stand with the US. But wait a minute. This growth in terrorism has occurred during the Coalition’s colossal war against it, using all the military, political and intelligence powers at its disposal.

So as Saad al-Fagih, director of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, points out: “The logical conclusion must be that the so-called war on terror in its present form, including the invasion of Iraq, is yielding precisely the opposite results to those intended.” Further, as Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, charges: “War is itself terrorism… that taking away people and subjecting them to torture is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less.”

The main front in the war, Iraq, remains a disaster. More than 1,800 US soldiers have been killed and nearly 14,000 wounded. The insurgents have shown extraordinary regenerative powers – the more of them the US forces kill, the greater supply of recruits. It is an uncomfortable fact that under Saddam Hussein suicide bombing in Iraq was almost unheard of, but since the US attack in 2003 there have been at least 400 suicide attacks.

The hawks urge an attack on Iran, the state responsible for sponsoring the insurgents in Iraq. But the Pentagon’s old boast that it could fight two wars simultaneously seems a little thin these days and Bush’s rhetoric about the axis of evil nations has, like Osama bin Laden, disappeared from his speeches. Some argue for more troops, forgetting that General Westmoreland had a million soldiers in Vietnam but said he needed a million more in order to win.

At home there has been a shift in the public mood. Support for the Washington’s handllng of Iraq has collapsed–only 34 per cent now approve of Bush’s policy and 61 per cent disapprove. Insiders are said to be telling Bush he should follow the advice given to President Johnson in the middle of the Vietnam quagmire–”Declare victory and leave.”

And abroad the United States slides steadily downwards in global public opinion, ranking eleventh in the Anholt-GMI Nations Brand Index, the equivalent of a world popularity contest (Australia is No. 1). “America is a cause for concern,” Anholt said. “Unless [the slide] it is stopped very soon, it could be irreversible. It is not just Iraq; America has produced unpopular foreign policy on and off for many years. People are coming to the conclusion that America is not a very nice place.”

Some knowledgeable Americans recognise the danger. Robert Baer, a former top CIA officer, believes that the Coalition intervention in Iraq was a disaster which has stimulated terrorism. “Every time you kill a Muslim, whether it is an Israeli killing them or an American or a Brit, there is humiliation, anger, reaction and bombs go off somewhere.” He sees no cause for optimism in an increasingly hostile world. “I’ve moved to Colorado and have a wood-burning stove.”

But at least America’s Homeland Security and the British police and security services are having some success in catching terrorists before they can mount attacks? Not really. According to a recent investigation by the Washington Post, fewer than ten per cent of the people prosecuted for terrorism in the United States were convicted of crimes relating to terrorism or national security. Of those, few had any connection to al-Qaeda, while the remaining ninety per cent were acquitted, orconvicted of lesser crimes like immigration violations or making false statements.

In Britain more than 700 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act since 9/11. But half have been released without charge and only 17 have been convicted. Only three of the convictions were connected to extremist Islamic groups. Either the terrorist groups on the scale the government claimed were not there to begin with, or the security services were unbelievably incompetent. The suicide bomb attacks in London on 7 July suggest the latter. The services had told the government just before the attacks that the risk of terrorism in the immediate future was low.

So after the failed bombings of 21 July, there were a spate of arrests and charges which gave the illusion that the authorities were on top of the problem. But the official investigation seems to have undergone some less publicised changes that have left important questions unanswered.

Theories and leads that were at first vigorously followed up quietly fizzled out and have been dropped. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitcan Police Commissioner, initilally told the media that the 21 July attacks had “some resonance” with the earlier bombings. Both were aimed at public transport in London, both involved young Muslim men with bags or packpacks laden with homemade explosives capable of causing “carnage”.

Investigators now admit that the two groups had important differences. The 7 July suicide bombers were of Pakistani descent and were efficient and deadly. The 21 July group were mainly of African origin and failed so miserably in their mission that there may even be some truth in their claim that their aim was to frighten rather than kill.

Most important of all, investigators now believe that the two groups were not linked. Nor is there any evidence of a connection with al-Qaeda, although the attackers might have taken their inspiration from it. In short, what was originally thought to be an attack planned by a mastermind in al-Qaeda, perhaps by Osama bin Laden himself, now looks more like being a spot of home-grown terrorism by a group of young Muslim men so angry with Britain and its policies they were prepared to sacrifice themselves and murder innocent civilians as a protest.

The security services, having learnt a lesson from the 21 July attacks–namely that you cannot be criticised for exaggerating the risk of terrorist attack–have been doing just that, aided by a fear-mongering media. A recent headline in a British newspaper read: BOMBERS PLAN LONDON SUICIDE TANKER ATTACKS: Alert as US warns of fuel blast tactic to cause mass casualties”.

The thrust of the story was that American intelligence chiefs had warned that al-Qaeda suicide bombers were plotting to hijack petrol tankers and drive them into petrol stations to cause a “mass casualty atrocity”. They warned that London could be hit to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11.

But after four columns of lurid detail, the final paragraph of the story read: “However a spokeswoman for the Department for Homeland Security said that the warning was uncorroborated, from a single, unreliable source, and did not single out London specifically.”

The unpalatable fact is that the Coalition is fighting an unwinnable war against an unidentifiable enemy. How can the USA, Britain and Australia fight terrorism when they cannot even agree what terrorism is? A definition is hopeless, says Professor Richard Rubenstein, of the Centre for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. “Terrorism is just violence you don’t like.”

This failure to to define terrorism and terrorist can be used to legitimise military action because it portrays the challenge as such a loosely-defined threat that it will never disappear. British author Phil Rees, in his controversial book, “Dining With Terrorists”, writes, “By being unable to explain exactly who is a terrorist, the ‘war on terror’ can mutate into a war against any ideology that challenges America and her allies. Terror can become a code for opponents who question the status quo and a catch-all for ideologies as diverse as Islamic militancy, emerging nationalism, or anti-globalization.” In short, we are in danger of accepting the confused idea of an endless conflict against an undefined enemy.

Perhaps one reason why the Coalition countries are wary of defining “terrorism” and “terrorist” is that any workable definition would sweep them into the net, too. Most definitions would include the statement that one factor that is common to terrorists is that they attack civilians. But Rees points out that the USA and Israel are bigger killers of civilians than their terrorist foes. So why don’t journalists describe them as terrorists, too? “If we don’t want to describe Britain and America as terrorist nations, then the only principled alternative is to purge the word from the lexicon of journalism.”

That seems unlikely but either way what journalists should certainly be doing is reporting the views of terrorists so as to try to understand their motives. Yes, this will bring charges that to do so legitimises violence and suggests a moral equivalence between terrorism and those who combat it. As the Mayor of New York, Rudolf Guiliani, said after 9/11, “Those who practise terrorism lose the right to have their cause understood. We’re right. They’re wrong. It’s as simple as that.” Is it? Isn’t it better that the public should be informed about the causes of violence and be allowed to decide for themselves who is right and who is wrong? Would it not be more productive to try to understand what the terrorists want and what they would be prepared to accept to end their operations.

Instead acres of newsprint and hours of TV time have been devoted to condemning them as “evil”, a word which absolves us from thinking about the problem: if they are evil (born evil; grew up to be evil; taught to be evil? Which is it?) then it is useless to try to understand them.

But as David Clark, the former British Labour Party adviser points out, those who condemn terrorists as evil cannot answer the question: why is there more evil around today than there used to be? And they have nothing to contribute to the debate about what needs to happen next.

Yet there is ample evidence that terrorism is a political phenomenon and that the solution should be a political one. Advocates of the “keep killing them until they give up” approach argue that any attempt to understand or negotiate with terrorists encourages further violence. But in the Malayan insurgency, the IRA insurgency and the Basque group ETA’s demand for an independent state in Spain, the terrorism was ended by compromise–the authorities granted reforms that were justified and the terrorists abandoned their more extreme demands.

We already know some of today’s terrorists’ demands. Osama bin Laden has said he wanted American troops out of Muslim holy places and a just settlement of the Palestine question. Pakistan’s counter-terrorist officers say that when they question terrorists about their motives, “They always refer to Palestine and the exploitation of Muslims in different parts of the world. Pakistan’s President Musharraf says that if these problems were addressed it would make a visible and immediate difference.

If he is right, this means that freedom from terrorist attack in America, Britain and Australia is specifically dependent on what happens next in Iraq and Palestine–a chilling thought which, as the war on terrorism drags on, our leaders show no signs of addressing.

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 8 August 2004

For a nation on a heightened state of alert, we’re remarkably calm. Should we be?

There are no tanks at Heathrow – yet. There is no ring of troops around London’s financial district – yet. But Britain is on a “heightened” state of alert as police at Paddington Green station continue to question terrorist suspects arrested at gunpoint in raids across the country earlier in the week.

Across the Atlantic, the Americans are on “orange” (the second highest) alert as the Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, said new intelligence suggested that al Qaeda planned car or truck bomb attacks on the Citicorp building, the New York Stock Exchange, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank buildings in Washington. American banks in London could also be targets.

American intelligence and defence officials told CNN television that “overhead surveillance” images showed troubling signs of renewed activity at suspected al Qaeda training camps near the Afghan-Pakistani border. Pakistani intelligence interrogators are reported to have obtained “chilling detail” of threats to targets in American and Britain.

But hang on a minute. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has not cut short his holiday and hurried back from the West Indies. And Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who lost the Democratic president nomination to John Kerry, says the terrorist alert is “a political ploy by the Bush administration.”

Two of the 13 terrorist suspects held in London have already been released without charge and if past performance is anything to go by, more will soon follow. On Friday night pubs in the City – the very place people were meant to be at best, apprehensive, at worst, trembling with fear – were jammed as everyone enjoyed an end-of-the-week drink in the summer sunshine. Yesterday, Portobello Road was crowded with American and European tourists.

If the terrorist threat is real and imminent why aren’t we frightened? (If you think we are, turn now to the person alongside you and ask: “At this very moment are you frightened by the terrorist threat?”) The hardest task for the innocent citizen is to assess the real level of risk, although the way we are coping suggests that many of us have done so instinctively. Insurance companies may have included new clauses in policies absolving themselves from any pay-outs because of terrorist activity. But this is the insurance industry behaving as most of us expect it to – trying to avoid paying out on anything at all.

But the evidence is clear. The biggest risk you face when you leave your house this afternoon is not from terrorists but from using your car. Road accidents are the nation’s biggest killer. Smoking kills more people than terrorists. You are more likely to be killed by a member of your family than by a terrorist. And on and on it goes.

So why does our government do its best to keep us worried about terrorism? After all, it has been around for centuries, flourishing, then waning then flourishing again, often in a different form. When the Bolsheviks set up their government after the 1917 Revolution, they listed the departments they would need – department of the army, department of agriculture, department of terrorism. We have always coped. We got through the Irish troubles without being afraid all the time.

But governments, although they will not admit it, believe that a bit of fear in the community makes for an country that is easier to control, easier to govern.

They can always argue, as the Prime Minister did in the Commons, that it would be irresponsible not to act on warnings of terrorism – even if they turn out to be wrong – because what if they turn out to be right? In the United States, the American intelligence community has just emerged from a televised grilling by Congress over its humiliating failure to notice the warning signs of 9/11 and is now determined not to repeat that mistake. In short, we can expect more warnings, not fewer.

And yet we stubbornly refuse to be moved by them. Why is this? One answer is that we have seen previous “threats” crumble away. Since 9/11 there have been 600 arrests in Britain to do with terrorism matters. Of these 600 only 100 were charged and even with new, harsh legislation that human rights campaigners label undemocratic, only 14 were eventually convicted.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the intelligence services, the security services and the police – all with increased staffing levels and better funding since 9/11 – want to be seen to be doing their job. Lots of raids and arrests generate good publicity. Who remembers when months later the suspects have all been released.

But this does not mean that we should allow our government to stampede us into accepting greater restrictions on our liberty and democratic processes in the name of protecting us. If that happens, then the terrorists have won.

As Terry Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at the University of Manchester, has pointed out the risk is that “in a curious duo of strangers and brothers, your enemy conquers by persuading you to turn yourself into a monstrous mirror image of himself”.

Perhaps one answer to striking the right balance between being wary and alert and being fearful all the time would be better intelligence about the terrorist threat. This will not be easy. Western intelligence services are still in transition from their Cold War role to their anti-terrorist role. It takes many years to switch roles, recruit and test new agents and build up a reliable picture of what your enemy may be planning.

When the US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was seeking to shake up the CIA, politicise it and turn it into just another government department whose job it would be to help implement administration policy, he called for a more intuitive, or feminine if you like, approach to intelligence. He described it as “trying to put yourself into the other guy’s shoes and thinking like him”.

If the Rumsfeld theory were to be applied to Osama bin Laden, or whoever runs al Qaeda these days, our intelligence chiefs should be asking: if I were him what would I do next? I want something spectacular before the Presidential election that will terrorise the West, generate acres of publicity, and bring new recruits flocking to my cause. How about blowing up another prominent building in London or New York? No, now too difficult and anyway, been there, done that.

And our intelligence chiefs should then note that one of the most successful terrorist ploys in Iraq has been selective kidnapping and threat of execution unless certain demands are met. This forced the Turks to stop running supply trucks for the American army, a severe blow. It forced the Philippines government to withdraw its troops early, a bad example.

So what if terrorists kidnapped a British or an American politician and threatened to execute him or her unless certain demands were met? That would certainly ensure enormous media coverage. But the American government would reiterate its unbreakable rule of not yielding to terrorist threats.

Whether this would apply if the kidnapped person was someone prominent is less certain. What if the terrorists kidnapped deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, or the American national security adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice? What if they kidnapped a member of President Bush’s own family? This is not as impossible as it may sound. His daughter Jenna, holidayed this summer in trendy Tarifa in southern Spain, just a few kilometres across the water from Morocco.

All right, this is only only unfounded speculation, calculated to alarm. But so is speculation from the security services community that the QE2, Heathrow airport, the London Underground and Manchester United Football ground are possible terrorist targets.

Let’s get on with enjoying our lives and leave it to the terrorist doom-mongers to wallow in their own fear.

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 27 October 2002

Moscow, Washington, Bali: we live in terror. But are we becoming wimps?

If you go to the opera you risk being taken hostage. If you go on holiday you might be blown up. If you stop for petrol you could be shot by a sniper. Open a letter – does it contain anthrax? What’s going on these days? Where will the next outrage be? People feel a sense of unease and a loss of innocence. Safer and happier times, they believe, are now gone for ever. But is life really more dangerous, or are we becoming wimps?

At the height of the Cold War, even the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union had one good word to say about the Communists. They were hot on law and order. Moscow was one of the safest cities in the world, especially for foreign visitors. There were no muggers, there was no street crime, and there was great civic pride. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did the truth emerge: Moscow was actually one of the world’s more dangerous cities. Visitors thought it was safe because the Communist authorities simply suppressed the crime statistics that showed otherwise. It was all a matter of perception. People perceived Moscow to be safe, therefore it was.

But can the reverse apply? Do we now mistakenly see danger everywhere? The truth is that in the very aspects of our life that seem to cause us the most unease, safety has improved immeasurably. Most of our forebears did not live long enough to be worried about the things we worry about because they suffered early deaths from industrial accidents, poverty and disease. Is it that we now know more about what is happening around us?

Some say yes, even those journalists in part- responsible for reporting on events that stir our fears. Take the American sniper story. The journalist Matthew Engel, who lives in sniper territory, admits that he has twitched a little while walking in the open. “Nevertheless, this week has been a classic case of an ongoing truth: that newspapers distort the facts, that TV news distorts the facts utterly, and the 24-hour non-stop-news distorts the facts utterly, totally and completely. We don’t mean to do it, guv. We don’t lie. But the parameters under which we operate just ensure that we mislead.”

Engel points out that the area in which the sniper operated had a population of about four million. Thus, if the sniper had shot someone every day for the next year, the chances were still 10,000 to one in your favour. This fact was lost in a welter of news about random death, and speculation about the sniper’s identity and motives.

It is a dilemma for the media that remains unsolved. It can hardly ignore terrorist acts, even though to do so would defeat one of the terrorists’ main aims: publicity for their cause and an advertisement for new recruits. But the way terrorists’ acts are presented – a drama with each episode crafted like a thriller and the lack of a proper assessment of the real risk – causes alarm, concern and faulty perceptions.

Out there in the rest of the world there has been a perception over the past, say 25 years, that in Britain we went around terrified of IRA bombs, race riots, car hi-jackers, train crashes, rapists and child murderers. In fact, most of us were getting on with the reality of our everyday lives. The fact is that more people die on our roads every year than were killed during the entire history of the Irish troubles. More people were killed in one recent car pile-up in the fog in Wisconsin than by the sniper, but we didn’t see that on the news. As the Qantas pilot told his passengers as he approached Sydney airport: “Folks, the safest part of your journey is over. The most dangerous is about to begin. Drive carefully.”

People have an amazing ability to cope with the direst of threats by finding comfort in the banal. On that night, 40 years ago this weekend, when President Kennedy was waiting for the Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev to decide whether there was going to be a nuclear holocaust over the Cuban missile crisis, how did Kennedy spend what could have been his last hours on this earth? He watched Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. If you look closely at the television footage of many violent incidents you will almost certainly see in the background behind the burning cars or off to the side from the stone-throwing youths, someone going about their business, bringing home the bread, hanging out the washing. Life goes on.

The point of terrorism is to interrupt this normality, to convey the impression that evil is everywhere, that it is capable of striking us at our most vulnerable point. The aim of a terrorist act is to produce a public reaction disproportionate to the actual injury caused. The sad truth is that because of the modern hunger for excitement, such a reaction can almost be guaranteed. The Chechen terrorists in Moscow need not have killed anyone to have grabbed the world’s attention. The dramatic nature of their initial act ensured that. Once the world was watching and listening, the Chechens were able to put their case, and people begun to ask: “Well, what is Russia doing in Chechnya? Why is the war still going on?”

Governments have a divided attitude to terrorism. Some leaders feel that a little fear out there in the streets is not necessarily a bad thing. It can help enforce discipline, keep citizens alert and patriotic and, when properly directed, it makes governing an easier task. Intelligence services certainly believe that every country needs a monster to confront. For the West, communism filled the role admirably for many years. Its demise left services such as the CIA, FBI, MI6 and MI5 floundering until terrorism came up on their screens, as George W Bush put it. He knew there was an enemy out there somewhere for America to confront, but until al-Qa’ida came along he did not know who it was. On the other hand, terrorists attract attention.

This is why governments hate terrorist acts. No matter what they do, they cannot win. The acts attract attention, they can change public opinion, and they can influence government policy. This is why Mrs Thatcher wanted to deny the IRA the “oxygen of publicity” – a difficult thing to do in a democracy. And it’s why many a government would like to resolve terrorist situations away from the glare of television. And, like the police in many a kidnapping case, it’s why they want to reveal the outcome only when it was all over. Instead they offer a devil’s contract: “You want to be safe from terrorism? We can probably manage that. But to do so you will probably have to surrender a lot of those civil liberties you keep going on about.”

The writer Susan Sontag says she would not be surprised to see martial law in the United States if there were to be another terrorist attack, because many of those Americans used to feeling safe would be prepared to trade their liberty in order to feel safe again.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, says freedom is not absolute, and there has to be a balance between freedom and security. But who strikes that balance? And if, in the end, to defend ourselves against terrorism, we have to change our way of life so radically that it becomes unrecognisable from what it once was, doesn’t that mean that the terrorists have won? We can only take care, while recognising what the real risks are. And if you don’t smoke, don’t get into a road accident, and someone you know doesn’t kill you, you’ll probably make it to a happy old age.