It's no accident that this country has not yet endured a Paris, Brussels or Nice. Britain's defences against terrorist attack depend not just on the watery buffer of the English Channel and our non-membership of Schengen - Europe's border-free area. Crucially they also rely on the way in which intelligence is now intimately shared between all the agencies: the Security Service (MI5), MI6, GCHQ - and the police. This is the key to keeping Britain safe - although it's by no means guaranteed.
I'm not convinced non-membership of Schengen has much to do with it. There are plenty of Schengen countries not experiencing terrorism from foreigners.
Effective intelligence-sharing in the UK didn't happen overnight - as the history of combating Irish and Islamist terrorism shows. In many years of covering the conflict in Northern Ireland, I lost count of the number of times I was assured that intelligence-sharing had never been closer and the IRA was on the run..
7/7 was a tragic wake-up call. In its aftermath, structures were put in place to ensure that intelligence was properly shared. The Security Service and local counter-terrorism police officers now work closely together and share all intelligence. The barriers are down. MI5's door is open. This shared intelligence is then passed upwards to the pinnacle of Britain's counter-terrorist pyramid where it's sifted and analysed by MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police at their weekly meetings in MI5's London headquarters.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36803542
Looks like Mother Theresa has instructed the BBC on what to say.
ReplyDeleteTerrorists liked "Four Lions", I guess.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure the UK is much safer than anywhere else, based on the interval between terrorist incidents. We may categorise any threat into one of four types, based on its backer:
ReplyDelete1. Nation states can use proxies, e.g. Russia in Ukraine.
2. Banned politically oriented groups - which might be political parties in a free context. e.g. Kurds in Turkey
3. Apocalyptic cults: ISIS in Syria, Libya etc.
4. Solo operators and madmen.
Effective state intelligence operations can attenuate some of these threats, mostly because the agents of the state can monitor communications. But against the fourth, there is no effective defence. Israel has learned this, to its dismay. The best which may be done is to mitigate the threat, once it appears - shoot the madman.
Ask any intelligence operation or political scientist - they do overlap - trust me on that: they'll tell the obvious truth, we've know this since the era of Bakunin: the goal of terrorism is to alienate citizens from their government. The terrorist strikes at the soft, pudgy defenceless belly of a free society, the government promptly over-reacts, some out-group is blamed - hey presto - the terrorist has achieved his goal.
The only known way to defeat terrorism at any level is to address the litany of grievance directly. If a government is seen to respond to grievance, address its root causes, listen to the aggrieved - whether or not anything is changed at a fundamental level, in law or in policy, the built-up tension can be reduced.
If the UK has addressed terrorism effectively, (and I have no way of knowing, nor would anyone ), if there's been a reduction in terrorist violence, it would seem to me the UK has learned from its tragic mistakes from The Troubles in Ireland. That hard-won wisdom took six centuries and more to sink in - but pain is a wonderfully effective teacher.
But we may say for a fact what it was not: from Cromwell to current times, the agents of the State, coordinated or not - were not the cause of any reduction in violence or attenuation of threat. Only when the terrorist understands his grievances are taken seriously will he come out of the shadows and throw down his weapon, as the Good Friday Peace Accords showed us.
Dan Weese The only known way to defeat terrorism at any level is to address the litany of grievance directly.
ReplyDeleteGot it in one. What a pity no government is trying this at the moment!
How would you address the "grievances" of IS ?
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor As with Ireland, the problem takes on religious overtones. The fundamental question lies at the core of Islam itself: the murder of Imam Ali at Karbala, 10 October 680 which created the Sunni/Shiite split. IS is only a superficial manifestation of Sunnism in its most extreme form, Wahhabism. This problem has appeared before, in many forms.
ReplyDeleteIt's easier to consider everything between Beirut through to Baghdad and from thence to Tehran as Ireland writ large. It's somewhat larger: the al-Wefaq Shiite party of Bahrain have just been declared illegal and its assets seized.
Ba'athism was a secular movement, a pan-Arab idea wherein religious differences could be subordinated to some Arabic-speaking identity. Syria's Bashar Assad is a Ba'athist, also an Alawite, a sorta-Shiite sect. With the wholesale dismantling of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Party, the grievance was created. Though IS is led by an apocalyptic caliph, the actual powers behind the caliphate are Saddam's old mukhabarat. The elected Shiite majority in Iraq turned Baghdad into Belfast. The parallels are exact, right down to the sectarian neighbourhoods, the paramilitary patrols, to understand Ireland is to understand Iraq - and now Syria.
I am sure I am telling you nothing you don't know - yet you did ask. To undercut IS litany of grievance, I would re-institute the old Ottoman concepts of the vilayet and the millet, which short-circuited religious grievance. By giving the Sunni-majority area of Iraq the same sort of quasi-independence now seen in the Kurdish areas of Iraq and increasingly Syria, giving them a de-facto Sunni regime, the apocalyptic cult could be undercut, socially and politically.
Rhys Taylor Since I have no idea why they think they should behave like that, it's tricky. Has anyone asked them?
ReplyDeleteChris Blackmore Heh. It's my contention the nation state as a concept is losing relevance. Nations, as the old truism goes, have no friends, only allies of convenience - and those only because they share some common cause, usually a common enemy - and that may change tomorrow.
ReplyDeletePerversely, where republican democracy exposes these fervent minorities to the consequences of elections, the religious nutters and suchlike are shown to be merely a noisy minority with little popular support. It's when they're repressed that they become dangerous. Human society can no longer tolerate the fundamental anarchy of hundreds of these ridiculous nameplates at the United Nations, miserably misruled by cannibal dictators and Bearded Prophet Types, their beards flecked with spittle as they use that pulpit to preach their hatreds.
I cannot say what will replace the nation state. This much I know, Brexit will be the test case for what NOT to do. Those whom the gods would destroy, to them do they grant wishes. And may the Tories roast over the fire they lit, in a cleft stick of their own making.
Chris Blackmore Actually, yes. But it was a long time ago. When the USA / UK had just overthrown Saddam's regime, a US general named Jay Garner.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Garner
and a British general named Major General Timothy Cross, CBE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cross
were making prudent reports, in hindsight entirely accurate reports, laying all this out, though a child could have understood the problem.
Garner famously walked through Ramadi in his cloth cap, telling the local people "We will leave Iraq when you want us to leave. When should we leave?" The Sunnis, terrified of the consequences of Shiites coming to power, yelled back at Garner "La! La! No! Don't leave, not yet!"
Bush43 and Rumsfeld, (Poodle Blair was of no import in those decisions) - in one of the greatest stroke of political ineptitude in history, would not listen to either of these wise generals, and installed L Paul Bremer, who immediately reduced Iraq to anarchy by the dissolution of the Ba'athist government.
Dan Weese
ReplyDeleteI am sure I am telling you nothing you don't know
On the contrary, that was an interesting read and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Rhys Taylor (sadly) Whilst I was preaching this sermon in the run-up to the Iraq War (Part the Second) I was not believed. It has been my curse, my fate, to have seen it all unfold as I predicted. Once I served in the US Army, as a translator. I correctly predicted the downfall of the USSR in 1983: they were always more afraid of the West than we ever were of them. I often wonder, in moments of despair, if I might have made a difference, had I remained in uniform.
ReplyDeleteAh well. My personal griefs are my own and my perfect prediction record was only a recapitulation of history. I have no news, only the retelling of old quarrels. This pretty much sums me up: an old song by Genesis, Time Table.
https://youtu.be/ZVkS0dPq2ig
Dan Weese It rather reminds me of being in Ceylon, in 1963, and being told "When we said 'British go home!' we didn't mean it".
ReplyDeleteI wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
ReplyDeleteDan Weese I'm not going to question your career choices, unless you're not a diplomat or elected official already.
Martin Kühne Heh. I got a gut full of government service. I fell into software contracting, then a career in consulting. I specialise to failure now. It's rather like those Stanley Kubrick films, (who was aping Shakespeare), where I gingerly wade into the flaming rubble of the aftermath....
ReplyDeleteI can't really tell you about grievances in the Greater Middle East, but in France, disenfranchisement comes from the integration engine having broken down, public education falling apart at an alarming rate leaving people with little hope for a better life or even cultural and spiritual impoverishment leaving many in (often unconscious) search of alternatives, whatever they may be - along with the whole system seemingly slowly rotting away.
ReplyDeleteAdd to that a general feeling that things will only get worse and whoever can rise to power in the current system will be too corrupt and incompetent to actually fix it, and you obtain the kind of angry despair where some will grasp at anything but that. I think that's actually what has the biggest impact.
To be frank, whatever feelings this caused, surprise wasn't really one of them.
As for the French antiterorrism services cumbersome layers and lack of communication, those are known flaws and the biggest subject in the political debate at the moment.
The problem is, the last two governments tried to reform the services to adapt it to the current situation, but in typical French Public Service fashion, they made it overly complicated and inefficient. And now they try to fix it in the only way they know, by throwing reforms at it and see what sticks.
There is a big political pressure to get it right (at some point), and individual elements proved to be extremely competent and experienced (terrorism is hardly a new problem in France), so hopefully it will end up in a working state one day.