His full article is reproduced below, and is also available here.

Expect the Unexpected

The day after Britain’s National Strategic Defence and Security Review was released on 18 October, the Guardian alleged that a British Al Qaeda sympathiser living in Derby had volunteered to help with a terrorist attack in Denmark. Among his targets were the offices of the newspaper which had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. A second British man had also allegedly offered to provide financial support for the attack.

In August 2009, the two men were visited by David Headley, a Pakistani-born US citizen, who had previously been involved with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the South Asian Islamist terrorist group, who were behind the Mumbai attacks of 2008. At some point, it was reported, Headley became ‘mentally distanced’ from Lashkar and increasingly attracted to the global jihadist agenda of Al Qaeda. He established links with Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior Pakistani militant close to the Al Qaeda leadership, who provided $1,500 dollars for a surveillance trip to Denmark.

The Guardian report was a stark reminder of the international and amorphous nature of the threat from Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism. According to terrorism analysts, such ‘self-generating’ and internationalised forms of terrorism are the latest stage of evolution in the threat.

Under sustained pressure from NATO forces in Afghanistan and US drone attacks in Pakistan, Al Qaeda has increasingly franchised out its operations, taking advantage of a wider international ‘network’. Talismanic figures still provide ideological direction, but the operational hierarchy has been dispensed with in favour of a de-centralised system of inter-connected nodes.

One feature of this is the ideological and operational support offered to regionally-orientated jihadist groups such as Lashkar in South Asia and Al Shabaab in Somalia. The other is the radicalisation of foot soldiers in the West, prepared to undertake their own operations: the ‘self-starting’ cell or the ‘lone-wolf’ prepared to carry out their own operations. As described in the government’s new Strategic Defence and Security Review, ‘Senior Al Qaeda figures have urged Muslims in the West to conduct attacks without training or direction from established groups. Such lone terrorists are inherently unpredictable and their plots are difficult to detect.’

Overall, the 39-page review offers a useful synthesis of threats to national security, which are broken down into three tiers. International jihadist terrorism — including the targeting of British citizens and interests — has been identified as a ‘tier one’ threat, along with the return of Irish republican terrorism, represented by such groups as the Real IRA and Continuity IRA. ‘Tier two’ threat include the risk of an insurgency or civil war in a failed state creating conditions conducive to terrorists who aim to attack Britain. Among the ‘tier three’ threats are conventional military attacks on the British mainland and a Chernobyl-style nuclear power plant meltdown.

This is not the last word on the UK’s government’s security strategy, so much as an indication of where it sees priorities. It should be noted, for example, that the government is already conducting a separate review, specifically examining counter-terrorism legislation, following which controversies over issues such as the use of control orders are likely to re-emerge. That said, some observations are worth making about the nature of the review process itself, particularly as the whole notion of a national security strategy is one that is relatively new to the UK.

The first is that while terrorist groups evolve, they rarely do so along lines that the state can predict, as their whole strategy depends upon their unpredictability. Due to rapid changes in communication technology, the progression of potential terrorists from radicalisation to acts of violence is harder to track then ever. As the head of Interpol recently put it: ‘The advent of the Internet has made the process of radicalization easier to achieve and the process of combating it that much more difficult, because many of the behaviours associated with it are not in and of themselves criminal … the threat is global; it is virtual; and it is on our doorstep.’

For example, the influence of jihadist preachers such as Anwar al-Awlaki, the formerly US-based cleric thought now to be hiding in Yemen, whose sermons are readily available on sites such as YouTube, has been a recurrent factor in some of the most prominent recent terrorist plots in the West — such as the attempted bombings of Times Square and the Christmas Day flight to Detroit, or the shootings at the Fort Hood US military base last year. As the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, has noted, al-Awlaki ‘encourages his followers to think about mounting small-scale attacks that can cause widespread fear without always trying to stage a September 11-style ‘spectacular’ which risks alerting the authorities’.

Recognising this trend, Al Qaeda has become increasingly proficient in the use of the English language and in tailoring its message to the experience of Muslims in the Western world. Jihadist messages are accessible to anyone with a laptop and the inclination to find out more about them. On 12 October 2010, the organisation released the second edition of Inspire, its slickly produced on-line English language magazine, which is produced in the Arabian Peninsula. The language of the magazine is couched in the idioms of the West and so-called ‘MTV generation’, with quotes from The Late Show with David Letterman.

The magazine also offers ‘open source jihad’: ‘A resource manual for those who loathe the tyrants; includes bomb making techniques, security measures, guerrilla tactics, weapons training, and all other jihad related activities.’ While the National Strategic Defence and Security Review recognises this problem, there are no obvious answers for how to deal with it.

The second observation is that the distinction that the Security Review makes between ‘tier one’ threats, including a terrorist attack on British soil, and those in ‘tier two’ (‘major instability, insurgency or civil war overseas which creates an environment that terrorists can exploit to threaten the UK’) is not so clear-cut in practice. The latter is an acknowledgement of the problem posed by lawless areas in places such as Yemen, Somalia or northwest Pakistan, which have been identified as training bases for international jihadists seeking to attack Britain and the West. Yet, while the self-taught jihadist is the hardest to keep track of, the fact is that those terrorists who have been most effective in carrying out operations have usually had some training in overseas camps or as part of insurgencies being fought elsewhere.

Stung by the experience of Afghanistan, of course, Britain may not have the capacity or willingness to contemplate military incursions or interventions into such areas in the near future. As a consequence, then, one of the unspoken realities which the document glosses over is that the UK is increasingly reliant on high-tech and lethal US military hardware — particularly un-manned drones — for the successful implementation of its counter-terrorism strategy. It is no coincidence that recent terror alerts in Europe have been preceded or swiftly followed by drone attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan.

There is a wider strategic implication here about the relationship with the United States, a country which shares many of the same concerns and many of the same enemies. With Britain’s capacity to deploy forces on the ground likely to be diminished in the future, some senior American military figures have asked what contribution its main ally will be able to make to such shared operations in the future, beyond the sharing of intelligence. One answer is that Britain’s special forces — which have been highly valued by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan — will be protected under the cuts. But it would seem that their future utility will depend on circumstances which allow them to be deployed in the absence of substantial military support from other UK forces.

The third observation to make is that there are some threats to our national security which simply cannot be negotiated away. One passage in the Security Review suggests that ‘It is easier to disrupt terrorist capability than to remove terrorists’ underlying motivation, but we must still work to stop people from becoming terrorists in the first place.’

Politics matters, of course, and where possible, the ‘root causes’ of terrorism should be addressed. But the unavoidable fact is that many of our enemies remain implacable and irreconcilable, whatever subtle adjustments we might make in our foreign policy or counter-terrorism legislation. It is often forgotten that Mohammed Siddique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 plots, was briefly under surveillance by MI5 in January 2001, eight months before the attacks of 9/11 and before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were even being discussed.

The re-emergence of dissident Irish republican activity in Northern Ireland as a ‘tier one’ threat to security also raises some important political questions. Just as the British state negotiated with the IRA, some believe it is time to bring their errant cousins in the Real IRA or Continuity IRA to the table. In reality, the whole raison d’etre of these groups is that negotiations and politics polluted the struggle for Irish unity in the past. And is the government prepared to capsize a political settlement which took so many years to construct in Northern Ireland, in the name of bringing in a tiny coterie of extremists who are opposed to its very existence?

Finally, as government tightens its belt, it is worth remembering that any successful national security strategy has to have a high degree of wastage built into it. It has been estimated that, at any one-time, the security services are monitoring around 2,000 individuals thought to have the potential to involve themselves in Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism in the UK. In the months before the 7/7 attacks, Mohammed Siddique Khan once again appeared on the MI5 radar, only to disappear again because resources had to be deployed to monitor others who were thought to be a greater threat.

Such decisions are made every day on the ground, and they are even harder to get right on the macro-level. While the government would be remiss not to construct a strategy for national security, it must also be prepared for the possibility that it might have to go back to the drawing board in the near future, whatever the cost.