Rachel Briggs (Demos), John Ralston Saul (author) and Peter Taylor (documentarist) on countering terrorism with multiculturalism
On 7th of July this year I was driving to London when I saw a big, motorway sign which effectively said ‘London is closed’. Then my mobile started ringing and I soon found out what had happened – not a power failure on the underground but bombs in London. It was one of those moments, a bit like the Kennedy assassination: you remember where you were when you heard the news.
I was horrified but I was not in the least surprised. It was a strange emotional moment combining horror and almost self-justification, because a year earlier I had made a television series and in the last bit of it the head of special operations at the Metropolitan Police said that, as regards the likelihood of an Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-related Islamist attack on London, it was not a question of if, but when.
Subsequently it became fashionable to say that the threat was exaggerated. I never subscribed to that view, and in the series which I finished making on the 6th July, the day before the bombings, I said as much in the opening commentary.
What next for anti-terrorism? Well first we have to define what the threat is. It’s all very well to say Al Qaeda this and Al Qaeda that, but Al Qaeda is a very different organisation from what it was at the time of 9/11. That was planned, organised and carried out by Al Qaeda’s command and control centre. But it’s too easy to attribute everything to Al Qaeda. There may be Al Qaeda connections but Al Qaeda has become a different organisation, a kind of big idea, and what we are faced with are various groupings of Jihadi cells who may or may not be connected in a linear sense to Al Qaeda’s command and control centre, yet they subscribe to Bin Laden’s philosophy of Global Jihad.
These cells are very difficult to identity and to penetrate. It is significant that the lead cells involved in London, Madrid, Casablanca, and Bali, all got under the intelligence radar. No one knew anything about them, because that’s the nature of the threat we now face.
Operations have been thwarted, I believe, and if we watch two, critical court cases in 2006, we will hear about Operation Crevice and Operation Rhyme and will see to what extent the intelligence services were able to prevent what they believe were planned attacks on London.
Given that the threat does exist – it should not be exaggerated but must be faced for what it is – what should we do? The key is intelligence, the single most important thing for those acting on our behalf to ensure our safety. Special Branch, MI5, MI6 have to get critical intelligence to identify cells and from within cells, to try to abort attacks. Getting this intelligence is very difficult, it is labour-intensive, much of it is based on telephone intercepts or bugging operations, usually in Pharsee or Arabic which needs to be translated – another labour-intensive job. The intelligence services do not have the capacity to do this at the necessary speed, so it is proving difficult.
Above and beyond intelligence, if you look at Northern Ireland which I covered for 30-odd years, it is critical in countering terrorism or political violence, to drain the water from the pond in which the alleged fish swim. In other words, you have to get the communities on your side, the side of the state, if the so-called terrorists are to be identified and defeated. The problem at the moment is that far from enlisting the support of Muslim communities in this country, and, in particular, communities of young Muslims, we are alienating them. In fighting ‘terrorism’, we have to win the battle for the hearts and minds of those communities who harbour so-called terrorists.
At the moment I don’t think we are doing this, for a whole range of reasons. One of the key reasons is the way that many Muslims and particularly young Muslims perceive British and American foreign policy – and they don’t make a distinction between the two because we are seen, rightly or wrongly, as George Bush’s poodle.
In combating terrorism we have to understand the nature of the terrorist and what motivates him or her to do extreme things like blow themselves up and other people in the process. Terrorism/political violence has got political origins, and traditionally what has driven the Jihadis is Palestine. That is still the case, but now there is also Kashmir, Chechnya, but above all Iraq. I have no doubt that Iraq is the single most important motivating, radicalising factor for young Muslims who are so disposed in this country, or the USA, or elsewhere. The supreme irony being that George Bush began his ‘war on terror’ by invading Iraq, alleging that Iraq was a highly placed supporter of Al Qaeda and that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) there. In fact there were no more Al Qaeda connections than there was WMD, but now Iraq is the recruiting ground for Al Qaeda and the Jihadis, the leader of the insurgency in Iraq is the official, local leader of Al Qaeda, so the war in Iraq, far from preventing terrorism, has served to foment it. These political issues, we need to address. I do not know what the solution is, but in Iraq we have made our own bed, and now we must lie in it.
Other radicalising influences are issues like the Stockwell shooting. This was a tragic accident which came about because of failures in intelligence and in communications, but the way the shooting is represented by those who seek to radicalise, is that there was a shoot-to-kill policy and that any young Muslim is fair game. I have spoken to young Muslims who abhor what happened on 7/7, but they feel vulnerable and think that what happened in Stockwell may happen to them, that they are being watched when they get on the tube, especially if wearing a rucksack. So the intensity of the anger and suspicion on the part some sections of the Muslim community, must not be underestimated. And when it comes to the legislation designed to combat terrorism, that legislation can have negative effects on the same section of the Muslim population.
I don’t subscribe to the view that the government has been at sixes and sevens since 7/7. Tackling this problem is extraordinarily difficult, and the government has made mistakes, but from the legislation which recently came before the House and the amendments to clauses relating to 90 day detention and glorification of terrorism, it is clear there has been an informed, high-level debate among those who represent us in the Parliament, in the same way that there has been an intense debate among our communities.
In conclusion, the threat is real and it continues; how we counter it is a matter for all of us, because we are a democratic society and we are being put to the test perhaps as never before.
Peter Taylor is an award-winning television documentarist, best-known for programmes on ‘Provos and Loyalists’ and Al Qaeda.
I see terrorism as one of a number of elements in the movement towards irregular warfare. It has been growing in its modern form for the last 200 years, and today irregular warfare is mainstream warfare, and what we think of as mainstream warfare, which probably accounts for 95 per cent of the budgets, is now marginal warfare.
In the United States irregular warfare is scarcely taught. Officer cadet schools and staff colleges scarcely teach it at all. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and such places, the captains and lieutenants on the front line have had hardly any training in how to handle it. In fact the strategy for irregular warfare is being made up on the ground, at the level of major or lieutenant-colonel and below. This is quite astonishing and is denied in most official schools because those schools are devoted to – and I’ll put this in the most cynical manner – justifying the budget, which is spent on a different kind of equipment and strategy.
In addition, the old idea of the class-structured army in which private and corporals are seen as following orders at the bottom of the chain, simply does not work because the people at the front line dealing with all this are the privates, corporals, lieutenants and captains; and if they make a mistake it can change the entire course of events. The high risk level is not with the generals, but at the level of private, corporal, sergeant, lieutenant and captain. We have not adapted our armed forces to deal with this reality.
The denial of how mainstream irregular warfare has become, is based on our obsession with what we call professionalism, with technology, with managing crises top-down. You can track over the last century those intelligent breakouts for dealing effectively with irregular warfare, but within a few years they are crushed and we go back to the mainstream approaches.
It is interesting to look at language because the language used tells us something about what we are doing. If you look at the ‘war on crime’ that was declared a few years ago, this subsequently became a ‘war on drugs’, using identical language structure and argument, but as that failed and the situation became normalised, we now have a ‘war on terror.’ I am not saying that these events did not take place, I am just commenting on the way we talk about them and the effect that has on how we deal with them. It is quite astonishing to see the similarities in a number of countries in the way these three things have been argued, and the way the language is used. There is sequential failure, sequential normalisation, static theory trying to deal with fluid reality.
The strategy of terrorism is not to win a war, but to tempt the opponent into losing. It’s a siren call. Whatever you think of events in Iraq, it should be said that Mr Bush’s tactics were precisely Mr Bin Laden’s strategy. To give a more precise example, in the poppy growing areas of Afghanistan, the American Drugs Enforcement Agency is pushing very hard to spray, against the wishes of the Afghan government and most other governments involved there. Everybody else agrees that it would be a great way to recruit for whatever terrorist organisations there might be, but there is so little flexibility in the mentality that they cannot figure out how else to do it.
The aim of terrorism is to provoke fear. It coincides with the old Western populist tradition, which is making a comeback, and it also matches beautifully with the frustration of our enormous managerial class which we think is leading but is very confused about the difference between management and leadership. Fear has always been a very effective tool for frustrated managers inside management structures, and they are finding it very handy today to accentuate fear – not that the risks aren’t real; but they themselves are coming at it through fear because it suits their inability to know how to lead: a happy meeting of a Manichean nightmare. Overstatement, over-reaction, panic, is of course the worst thing one can possibly do, in spite of the fact that the risks are real.
The police and the armed forces have to respond with enormous professionalism and precision, but there is only so much you can do with technology. We really don’t know how to make sense of the gigantic amount of information we gather. For better of worse, London is a world leader for highly sophisticated cameras in the streets. They were used to react rapidly to the bombings but as you know they have other implications for individualism and democracy. So when you slip into the idea that you can deal with this problem through technology, I think you risk the balance going the wrong way, fear settling in, and not coming to terms with the fact that we cannot filter this information in time to deal with everything that’s coming. We’ll catch some things, but not all; because, as with the drugs trade, you can spend two years breaking up a little organisation, and it takes 24 hours to put up a new one.
There has been a lot of discussion along the lines that, if root causes are so important, how come the terrorist leaders are so often middle and upper middle class? The answer is that for 200 years irregular warfare has consistently been led by the middle and upper middle class. There is nothing shocking or contradictory about that. Go back to 1848 and you’ll see the divisions in families. You’ll see that irregular warfare has always been the approach of highly sophisticated leaders, who look at power becoming more technologically and organisationally inflected, and who move in the exact opposite direction. The more the power, the state, moves in the direction of the technology and the big structures, the more irregular warfare will move in the other direction – and it can move indefinitely, which is part of the test for democracy.
Usually what works is the ability to widen the focus. The police and the armed forces have to move into the narrow, but society has to move to a broader focus. My impression is that when Ireland went into Europe, it changed the focus and enabled the technical stuff to start working. You can see the same thing in Paris and London in the nineteenth century, where there were continually violent streets, terrorism on an almost permanent basis, and these things went away as a result of regulation, wages, sewers, education and so on.
There is a lot of room to re-think the way in which immigration policies work in many countries. Even in some of the most open countries, there is an approach which says we’ll let them in and we’ll even let them be citizens, but we’ll leave them alone; as opposed to a much more, positive, egalitarian and inclusive approach to immigration and citizenship. The aim of the more positive approach is to minimise the atmosphere of alienation which will produce the kind of middle class suicide bombings that might happen otherwise. It is difficult to do and you’re not going to succeed 100 per cent, but I think you can see there is a great deal of work to do in that positive, inclusive area.
Finally, there is a problem in our approach to education, particularly education about myth. The United States has had a myth which says ‘do it our way’. But since Hurricane Katrina, for 15 years or so it will not be possible to say ‘do it our way and you will do well.’ Katrina is an enormous setback for their ability to project themselves abroad. In our schools, whatever we say we have not moved out of the nineteenth century. We do not even teach Mediterranean civilisation, let alone Islam or Buddhism. I’m not talking about pandering to immigrants as someone against what I say might say of it, but a more open, inclusive and a more realistic way of how the world works.
Education seems like a soft approach but it is not. We are in profound denial about who we are. Most of what we say about ourselves is high empire, nineteenth century stuff, endless references to Greece and Rome, all done as if the Mediterranean only had one side to it, and forgetting that Aristotle to a great extent came to us through Islam. It is a denial of how the world has really worked. Now I see ‘great book’ courses coming back – the same old stuff that was read in about 1870, without any reaching out. If we did reach out, we would shock ourselves into thinking about ourselves in a different way. I’m not sure that every outcome would be likeable, but I think there would be a real debate in our society about what we believe about ourselves, and what we believe about the rest of the world. It’s that basic thing, can you imagine the Other? And I think that we cannot imagine the Other, and that’s why we are leading ourselves in deeper and deeper.
John Ralston Saul is the author of The Collapse of Globalism and the Re-Invention of the World, and Voltaire’s Bastards: the dictatorship of reason in the West.
When four young men blew up themselves and 52 other people in London their act of terror sent shock waves across the capital. We had been expecting the worst; at a Demos event just weeks earlier a senior representative from the Security Service warned that London remained a key target, and there were also growing concerns of a suicide attack after two Britons were involved in a similar unsuccessful plot in Israel.
What was particularly difficult to comprehend, though, was the fact that the attack was masterminded and executed by four seemingly well integrated and ‘normal’ young English lads. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the alleged ringleader, had even dreamed of emigrating to the US one day according to a recent BBC radio documentary.
In the intervening months we have asked two questions over and over again: how could this have happened? And how can we stop it happening again?
In May 2004 the Home Office and Foreign Office prepared a confidential report for Cabinet warning that a small minority of young Muslims were susceptible to radicalisation. At a recent Demos conference with senior representatives from the Security Service, police, government departments and Muslim communities, there was consensus that tensions have been mounting for up to 15 years. One participant commented: ‘There is a cocktail of ingredients at play – foreign policy, perceived or real Islamophobia, poor attainment, lack of participation and representation, identity and a collapse of leadership within certain communities. Right now they have come together and created the potential for tension, such as we saw in the riots in Oldham and Burnley and more recently in the London bombing.’
As is so often the case, the London bombers did not themselves embody these characteristics. Academic Marc Sageman’s study of 150–200 known Al Qaeda terrorists found that 75 per cent were upper or middle class, over 60 per cent had some form of college education, the majority were relatively unreligious as children and most were in skilled or professional jobs. But the social, economic, cultural, political and religious setting created the seedbed from which their sense of anger and frustration grew. It also provides justification and tacit support from some corners of Muslim communities.
The police and Security Service talk about the ‘three tiers’ of terrorists; what Rumsfeldian scholars might call the ‘known knowns’ (those with clear and largely known links to Al Qaeda), the ‘known unknowns’ (those not known individually to the authorities, but who are linked to the network) and the ‘unknown unknowns’ (who have the potential to turn to radicalism, but are currently leading normal lives).
Many of our counter-terrorism policies and practices are well-suited to dealing with the first and to some extent second tiers. But they are at best ineffective – at worst detrimental – at dealing with the third. A recently leaked report by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee confirms that the Security Service had Mohammad Sidique Khan under surveillance but reassigned their officers. He was not, after all, the ‘clean skin’ we had thought. Perhaps, then, the authorities could have prevented 7/7 with more intelligence and more security?
On the one hand the answer is, of course, yes. Had the Security Service kept Khan under surveillance they might have seen the plot emerging and been able to intervene. A handful of terrorism cases coming to court this year suggest the state is having some success on this front.
Lasting security will not be achieved by piling on more and more security, though.
As long as the wider social, economic, cultural, and political drivers persist there will be a steady stream of young men willing to take their place. There will also be tacit support from parts of Muslim communities. It is these factors that explain why one of the 21/7 bombers found refuge in three safe houses before he was caught, and a sizeable minority of Muslims surveyed have expressed sympathy with the motivations of the bombers.
More security measures risk deepening the gulf between the state and Muslim communities. In its 2004 report the Home Affairs Select Committee found that ‘community relations have deteriorated… International terrorism and the response to it have contributed towards this deterioration, particularly in relations between the majority community and the Muslim community.’ Some of the crude security measures, such as stop and search, might reassure the majority white population, but they heighten the sense of alienation that fuels the violence they are designed to stop.
Security is not something that is done to you or for you; it is something that individuals and communities have to own and participate in. The police, Security Service, and other parts of the state will only be successful if they work in partnership with Muslim communities. The growing gulf between them, the lack of trust and understanding, and the paucity of relationships is therefore not just cause for concern in terms of community relations, but puts all of our security at risk. The current state of play means that genuine partnership is still some way off – but there really is no alternative.
Rachel Briggs is running the Demos research project, ‘Towards a community-based approach to counter-terrorism’. She is Head of Demos’ Global Security Programme and editor of the collection, The Unlikely Counter-Terrorists.
© 2004·06
Without wanting to sound heartless, and as shocking as these attacks were, their effects on myself and my life were tiny
Welcome to this issue
Contents of this issue
Editor’s letter
Academic
Debate
Entertainment
Essays
Journalism
Feedback
Multiculturalism and Counter-Terrorism
The Place of Faith in a Multicultural Society
Who Will Build The Thames Gateway?
The New East End
Olympics Effects
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