CRIME FOR POLITICAL MOTIVES

 

 

 

This section is based in part on previously published materials including a paper, How to lose the war on terror: Lessons of a 30 year war in Northern Ireland, delivered at the John Jay conference on crime and security

 

in San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 2008.

 

 

 

 

Boo. That is what terrorists seeks to achieve: fear out of all proportion to their actual capacity for harm. And aren’t we suckers for it. Ever since disaffected Palestinians began to hijack airplanes in the 1960s we’ve given them all the publicity they could hope for. They get leverage by breaking what we regard as the rules of civilised conduct, and though when caught they might seek the status of prisoners of war, they do not observe the rules of conventional war. By inescapable logic terrorists are thereby criminals, and of growing importance to policing. Terrorism is crime with a political motive.

 

 

And like conventional crime it covers a multitude of sins. It uses many of the same techniques, often enlists similar recruits, and can be tackled by several of the same solutions. It thereby has many object lessons for policing – not least the need to be pre-emptive. It is not enough to get convictions after the bombs have gone off.  But equally, those who tackle terrorism have a lot to learn from other forms of crime control.

 

 

The first is that situational measures are effective: we can make targets less juicy and less vulnerable. And although a defensive measure – like screening baggage – can be costly it is far better than shrugging fatalistically and waiting for the worst.

 

 

Second, whatever the provocation, stay  calm and professional.  In fact the more sickening the crimes, the more important it is to keep cool. That should hardly need saying. Yet, while we normally deplore lynch mob mentality, our emotions sometimes get the better of us when it comes to terrorism. When democracies are riled they are not very good at biding their time. We, the supposed liberal, thoughtful, lawful and democratic good guys, have often let blood rush to the head and the result is we have made things worse. The need for calm and professionalism applies to everyone: to politicians and the media who are tempted to capitalise on public outrage, and perhaps above all to the security forces who – as we shall see – often find it hard to control their own aggression. We can all easily get caught up in a vicious circle. Showing restraint does not mean letting the bad guys get away with it. Defeating terrorism demands consistency, determination and practiced skill. Those whom terrorism makes angry and impetuous would do well to study history.

 

 

On the other hand there is one feature of fighting terrorism that borrows more from war than from conventional crime fighting. If you can’t beat them completely then one day you will need to parley. Always bear that in mind.

 

 

This is stuff with which I was once all too familiar. In my late teens I went from my home in London to Queen’s University Belfast and watched in despair as social order in Northern Ireland progressively broke down. In fact I stumbled into journalism as a student by trying to attract attention to the Province before things got out of hand.  My early days as a radio reporter often meant scurrying from explosion to explosion, crunching over debris and broken glass to look for bodies, shivering at late-night cordons while soldiers I had come to know dismantled car bombs, watching wide-eyed as warehouses and factories went up in flames, negotiating barricades and on occasion running gauntlets of bricks and bottles. My flatmates once escorted me to the police station to report a death threat against me. Each morning as a matter of routine I checked underneath my car. At sunrise on a glorious summer day I and a colleague came across a man shot dead in a deserted street. One afternoon, off duty with a producer, I drove into the middle of a gun battle and ridiculously but terrifyingly we had to put our hands up. Once with another journalist our vehicle was flagged down by children one of whom, no more than fourteen years of age, stuck an absurdly large revolver through the window. A good friend was submachine-gunned and only by some miracle survived. Someone else I know well was rescued unconscious after a bomb blast that killed his twin brother and his uncle. In short, I am aware what terrorism means, I have seen first hand the conditions which can cause it to flourish, and watched with frustration as the authorities fanned the flames before stumbling upon how the fires could be extinguished. I have interviewed guerrilla leaders in their hideaways in Africa, and watched spellbound from a coastal road in Lebanon as silver jets streaked across the sea, bombed the city we had left an hour before and then wheeled round menacingly above our heads. None of this guarantees wisdom, but it does at least focus the mind on what terrorism means and how tacking it might have been done better.

 

 

I will mostly use examples from Northern Ireland not just because I know its history best but because it is a classic of what not to do and how to put things right. Northern Ireland is just a corner of a little island, it has fewer inhabitants than Houston, and its capacity for vitriol seemed baffling to everyone who didn’t live there (see box below). Yet it played out in microcosm a problem that is now recognized as global. And, importantly, it came up with an answer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Northern Ireland: a potted history

 

 

Other people’s conflicts often seem arcane – but less so when you get up close up, and Ireland is a good example. Ireland bears terrible scars which were never allowed to heal. Four centuries ago all the religious and nationalist passions of Europe were transported to the island and were distilled there. Ireland was where in the seventeenth century the battles between Protestantism and Catholicism were played out by the great powers. The Dutch, Spaniards, Scots, English, Germans, Danes – and the Irish themselves – fought for the soul of Christianity and for succession to the thrones of England and elsewhere.

 

 

The whole of Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom, and (though it might seem paradoxical today) most Irish supported the English king. After all, James II was stoutly Catholic. But Europe’s Protestants threw their weight behind a tenacious Dutch claimant to the British throne, William of Orange and, in sieges and battles still resented and celebrated in Ireland, the Orangemen finally prevailed. The Protestant victors enforced ruthless peace terms. Irish Catholicism was subjugated – far more so than elsewhere in the United Kingdom. And, whereas in the years and centuries that followed religious intolerance began to fade in other parts of Europe, in Ireland resentment simmered and sectarianism ran deep.

 

 

For centuries a largely Catholic Ireland was administered from London where Protestantism had become the State religion. Poverty was rife and many Irishmen and women felt forgotten or even subjugated, especially after the Great Famine in the 1840s and early 50s. Rule from England came to be seen as the cause of the country’s woes and over the years broad support for Irish independence grew. By the 1870s, after generations of unrest and occasional insurrections, even the English, Welsh and Scots were warming to Home Rule for Ireland. But Irish Protestants campaigned fiercely to protect the union, and independence measures were repeatedly blocked by the unelected House of Lords. Then in 1914, just as Home Rule seemed tantalisingly close, the first world war broke out putting constitutional reform on hold, leading to a bloody but abortive uprising.

 

 

Even when Britain finally agreed to Irish independence in the 1920s, Protestants in the province of Ulster in the north refused to join the largely Catholic south. The island was partitioned and six counties in the north-east of Ireland ostensibly stayed British.

 

 

I say ‘ostensibly’ because for practical purposes the province was self-governed. Effectively Northern Ireland Protestants had Home Rule of their own. That meant finally, after centuries of bickering, British politicians thought they had washed their hands of bothersome Ireland.

 

 

How wrong they were.

 

 

Partition provoked a bloody civil war among Irish nationalists, some of whom resented any part of the island remaining nominally British, and a tiny band of IRA malcontents conspired to sabotage the settlement. It was a hopeless cause. Over the next forty years they caused occasional minor outrages but that only served to justify repressive measures in the newly self-governing north.

 

 

In fact it was repressive over-reaction by the unionists that eventually caused the downfall of the Protestant ascendancy there.

 

 

When I arrived in Belfast in the 1960s the IRA was little more than the broken dreams of a few old men and a handful of young Marxists (in fact when the first violence against Catholics broke out, Catholic graffiti read ‘IRA = I Ran Away’). But the provincial government still retained fierce emergency powers which overrode civil liberties. And Catholic-only schools enforced an all too real apartheid. Religious discrimination was almost as entrenched as racial intolerance in the American south[i].

 

 

In fact the parallel is apt. What happened in the US began to inspire students and middle class people across the province. In 1968, six months after Dr King’s assassination in Memphis, there was a civil rights march in Northern Ireland’s second city, Londonderry. It was an unnecessarily bloody police confrontation with that march which popped the cork out of the bottle and spawned terrorism which would come to feature in world headlines for 30 years.

 

 

Incidentally, as so often in terrorism, the truth behind the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland reveals all sorts of paradoxes.

 

 

The Protestants like to portray themselves as victims of IRA violence – but it was Protestants who planted the first bombs in the new wave of violence in the 1960s. It was Protestants who killed the first police officer and murdered the first British soldier. Hard-line Catholics like to portray the British as colonial oppressors – but the army marched in to the cheers of the Catholic communities and saved them from attack. The British like to think of themselves as honourable peacemakers, but they were ignorant and stupid, sometimes brutal too. The people in the south of Ireland like to think they played an admirable role – in fact they were often duplicitous and contemptuous of their neighbours and fellow-countrymen.[ii]

 

 

 

 

 

So what are the lessons?

 

 

First let me deal with the importance of situational approaches – those that alleviate a problem by changing  the circumstances people find themselves in, rather than trying to change people themselves. To my knowledge the phrase ‘situational crime prevention’ was never applied to British policy on Northern Ireland, and remedies were applied piecemeal with little overarching strategy. But they were fundamental to success. Indeed the ‘Peace Barrier’ – a wall that divides hardened Protestant and Catholic communities – still stands as a, literally, concrete reminder. Most other examples have been dismantled, but police stations became fortresses with bullet-proof look-out posts and high fences to catch mortar bombs. Belfast’s main airport was turned inside out so that passengers and baggage could be screened before entering the terminal. Security staff were hired to protect high risk buildings, bollards were placed at roadside margins to prevent car bombings, and Belfast’s shopping centre was protected by a so-called ‘ring of steel’ with vehicles and people being searched before they entered. After an IRA unit travelled to London and detonated a big truck bomb in the business district, a defensive cordon was put up in the City too, with chicanes and search points on every access road. All these measures were hugely successful, sometimes preventing violence altogether and generally obliging terrorists to shift to less important (and crucially less spectacular) targets. When attacks could not be thwarted the damage could be limited. For example, office buildings were kitted out with net curtains weighted at the floor to absorb blast and splinters from a bomb[iii].

 

 

These triumphs are seldom celebrated, but they were critical to something else that is rarely acclaimed. At any rate you will rarely hear people use the blunt term I use to describe it (and which I will explain shortly): an overwhelming British victory.

 

 

But that victory took thirty years, and the battle should not have happened in the first place. Had the British been smarter and less visceral, had they been better students of the UK’s difficult and often bloody disentanglement from Empire, then major violence could have been avoided. At very least the Troubles could have caused less grief and much less cost to the British taxpayer. So beyond the importance of situational design is a suite of warnings for the future.

 

 

There seems to be a natural progression through which we under-act, and then over-react, before finally seeking peace. In other words terrorism is often foreseeable, though unforeseen. Its brutality is frequently triumphant in the short and medium term, largely because it provokes precisely the sort of counter-violence that sustains it. As outrage follows outrage liberals become drowned out and radicals are succeeded by yet more extremists. In this charged atmosphere those who profess abhorrence of violence and claim democratic values are moved to endorse countermeasures which are sometimes close to those used by the terrorists themselves. The authorities thus ride a backlash of resentment, and because they do so they act just as the terrorists need them to do. The repressive response is all the terrorists need to whip up their supporters and to gain a wider semblance of legitimacy. At this stage the conflict can drag on for years until one side or other wins or compromise is reached.

 

 

Let me describe how this played out in Northern Ireland. As a young student from London, sharing none of the Belfast presumptions, I found a segregated society where, until they went to university, many of my fellow students who were Catholics had never knowingly met Protestants before, let alone socialised with them. I was taken aback by Draconian legislation, corrupt local politics, and what passed for a democracy where one party always ruled and where the only legislative success of the Opposition since the 1920s had been an amendment to the Wild Birds Act. It was a recipe for unrest – and I wrote to the newspapers at home in London warning that this place was a tinderbox and urging them to take a look for themselves.

 

 

I could not have been alone in trying to draw attention to the dangers, but now with the hindsight of a career in journalism I can see why such letters would have gone into the bin. If it was a story at all it was literally provincial – who cared about a little place few people in the rest of the United Kingdom knew anything about? It was effectively a foreign story, a dull one too, at a time when foreign news was unusually dramatic and abundant. There were soon to be riots in Paris, civil rights marches in America, uprisings within the Warsaw Bloc. Sending someone to dig up dirt in Northern Ireland would require too much work for something no one cared about. I have described in Chapter 10 how our free press is enslaved by the prevailing culture. It feels most comfortable when it shares a common news agenda. It aims to capitalise on the existing interests of its readers and viewers so that each country tends to get an eccentric, homogenous and above all, self-regarding, view of the world. The result of this insularity for Northern Ireland was simply terrible. As the province stumbled towards the abyss it met with stillness and silence among a sea of newsprint and a blizzard of news bulletins.

 

 

Which is why when Northern Ireland exploded the media were as dumbfounded and as ignorant as everyone else. And since politicians tend to follow the media’s preoccupations, they too were utterly unprepared for a storm that would engulf them through seven administrations.

 

 

Amazingly the British civil service was equally naïve. They thought Britain’s turbulent relationships with Ireland had been sorted in the 1920s. The one mandarin with any formal responsibility also had a watching brief on the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man and felt more at home at his desk in the attic of the Home Office. He was content to file reports from the authorities, which in the case of Northern Ireland meant a provincial administration hopelessly out of touch with the modern world and prejudiced against a large proportion of its citizens. MI5 had no inkling of the brewing restlessness in Northern Ireland and no suspicion, even when the killings started, that this would become Britain’s biggest military engagement since the second world war. In the end the intelligence services redeemed themselves, building a network of agents from scratch so that by the end of the troubles the IRA and rival Protestant paramilitaries were riddled with informants. But it could all so easily have been averted.

 

 

The moral is that governments must not rely on the media for their intelligence, nor swallow the one-sided stories they get from friends in high places (which is what they did with the Protestant-only Establishment in Northern Ireland). Recent history is littered with examples of uprisings around the world that caught western intelligence by surprise. In almost every case too much trust was placed by free-world countries on unsavoury allies. There is no substitute for having good people on the ground. And those who fear a ‘surveillance society’ should bear the alternative in mind. We rarely get to hear about intelligence successes because when problems are averted they seldom make a lot of news. We see only the dramatic failures, and human society is so delightfully anarchic that even the best spooks can never pick out every threat. But within democracies intelligence gathering is at least as much a guarantee of freedom as it is a threat to it. In fact its blindness to Northern Ireland’s explosive instability cost more deaths than the attacks of 9/11[iv]^,[v].

 

 

Where intelligence can’t forestall a problem, its next role is to help us see things from the enemy’s point of view. For while the public can enjoy the luxury of abhorring terrorism, spy chiefs have to be rather more sophisticated. Especially if their adversaries are sophisticated too. And the more they learn about their quarry the more they are likely to develop a grudging respect – as quietly some MI5 people will concede, and as in a different context all six surviving leaders of Israel’s internal security outfit Shin Bet have publicly acknowledged[vi].

 

 

Not least they learn to avoid the fundamental attribution error (see Chapter 1). This is the false-thinking that makes us quick to blame others for things which, were we in their shoes, we might do ourselves. True, some terrorists are elitist and think they know better than the majority of their fellow-citizens (the so-called Real IRA is an example). For others, once violence has become engrained, they can be motivated simply by revenge. Some jihadists, like those with al Qaeda, feel so humiliated and violated by alien cultures that they seek to exterminate apostates. But whatever their cause we can entrench their self-righteousness if we foolishly play into it. Which is essentially what most terrorists try to goad us to do. If they can provoke us into over-reaction then their prospects are transformed. The authorities look more like oppressors and the rebels seem more like the repressed. They weaken our moral authority, they garner sympathy as the underdog, and they gain more and more support. The aim of asymmetrical war is to make the tail wag the dog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is terrorism?

 

 

For something that has becoming a defining part of contemporary life you might have thought that terrorism was a new phenomenon, or that – at least in democracies – we could agree what we mean. But terrorism is as old as any other form of crime; and the concept of a terrorist is as elusive as trying to define a criminal – many and perhaps most of us could probably be recruited if circumstances were reversed.

 

 

Terrorism isn’t new

 

 

Contrary to many people’s suppositions, terrorism is probably as old as humanity itself – and has contributed to our vocabulary for at least a thousand years. Certainly the Romans were none too happy with the Zealots, the Jewish rebels who in 68 BC seized the Masada fortress, killed everyone inside when they surrendered, and then took to assassinating anyone who collaborated with the Roman occupation. The word assassin itself comes from the Hashshashin, a secret sect of Muslim fanatics who spent the eleventh and twelfth centuries snuffing out political opponents. The expression terrorism itself gained popular currency at the end of the eighteenth century, not least when the French Revolution descended into la Grande Terreur. The nineteenth century saw various anarchist attacks and the birth of the IRA, then known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or Fenians. In Russia there were the Nihilists who tried to provoke revolution through blackmail and murder, followed by Lenin and Trotsky who invoked terror on an industrial scale[vii]. America has long experienced domestic terrorism, not least with the Ku Klux Klan who killed thousands with impunity in southern states between the 1860s and the 1960s[viii]. In 1910 trades unionists blew up the Los Angeles Times in a labour dispute killing 21, and in 1920 a horse-drawn wagon packed with dynamite was detonated on Wall Street killing 38 and causing $2m worth of damage – it was probably the work of anarchists and arguable has the dubious honour of being the world’s first car bomb. Seven years later an aggrieved farmer who blamed his woes on a local school-building tax became the first suicide car bomber, blowing up Bath School in Michigan killing 45 – mostly children – in the process.

 

 

After the second world war western Europe discovered new Nihilists, the estranged middle-class hot-heads like the somewhat pathetic Angry Brigade[ix] or more fearsome Baader Meinhof Gang[x],with their disaffected US equivalents like the Weathermen, the Symbionese Liberation Army or the Black Panthers, and later fanatics attracted to violence against abortion or experiments involving animals[xi]. Some forms of terrorism now have global reach, but apart from that do not let anyone convince us that we are dealing with something new.

 

 

Even the methods are basically old, mutating as in any crime along with technology and ingenuity. Letter bombs date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And for all the shock of 9/11, airline hijackings started in 1931 when Peruvian revolutionaries quaintly demanded a lift from Arequipa to Lima. We tend to forget that most subsequent skyjackings were by desperate refuges, often fleeing communism for the west. It was only a matter of time before planes would be commandeered as bargaining chips, and 1969 saw the first spate of seizures by Arab nationalists trying to force Israel to release Palestinian prisoners[xii]. The next adaptation was in 1994: the first attempt to use a civil airliner as a flying bomb. In a sadly overlooked portent of what was to happen seven years later at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, an armed Islamic group seized an Air France Airbus in Algeria, murdered three passengers and planned to crash the aircraft into the Eiffel Tower. Happily they were tricked into landing at Marseilles and were killed in a gunfight by French commandos. A cruder idea, again foreshadowing later conspiracies, was the bomb left on Pan Am flight 103 which exploded in the sky over Scotland in 1988 killing all 259 on board and 11 residents of the town of Lockerbie[xiii].

 

 

And every new invention offers new opportunities. You can already find online instructions on how to cook up toxins, build a variety of bombs or 3Dprint a handgun. Like all crime, terrorism evolves as circumstances do. 

 

 

Terrorism isn’t all that different

 

 

Note how diverse terrorism is. We use the same word to describe an isolated act by an angry individual or an insurgency backed by nation states. It can mean small-scale sabotage to military combat and can embrace a bewildering variety of causes.[xiv] It is hardly surprising it is so hard to define.

 

 

This hasn’t stopped lots of people, and lots of government agencies, trying to come up with a definition, but every one of their attempts is full of holes.

 

 

Targeting civilians
Terrorism plainly can’t be singled out for violence against civilians^[xv] since that would exclude most acts which are routinely denounced as terrorism such as shooting soldiers, bombing army bases or attacking military targets like the USS Cole^[xvi]. In any case all wars kill civilians – and not just through collateral damage. Throughout history there has been slaughter of the innocents: whole tribes were wiped out, grand cities destroyed, entire peoples subjugated. Terrorists don’t come near the bloody record of conventional conflicts such as World War Two. The Nazi advance through Russia laid waste to everyone and everything. At Dresden the RAF destroyed one of the greatest and most culturally important cities of Europe. (After D-Day the allies also wiped out entire French villages rather than surrender them to the Germans.) In the infamous Rape of Nanking when Japanese troops conquered the city they slaughtered more than a quarter of a million of its inhabitants. Civilians were the principle targets at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – where again roughly a quarter of a million died. ‘It shortened the war,’ we say, and I’m sure it did. But let’s not delude ourselves: terror was the aim, and non-combatants were the pawns.

 

 

 

Using terror

 

Nor is using terror as a weapon in any way exclusive, or even distinctive. Frightening people is par for the course in conflict. It is why the Maori do the haka, why infantrymen scream during a charge, why tribesman daubed themselves with war paint and why colonial British troops enlarged their presence with crimson uniforms and bearskins. Scare tactics are frequently directed at civilians too, which is why the Luftwaffe put sirens on its Stuka dive bombers, why we broadcast propaganda and why the world now bristles with some 20,000 active nuclear weapons.

 

 

 

Using violence

 

In fact terrorist acts aren’t always violent. The whole enterprise is typically underpinned by bank robbery, racketeering, smuggling, forgery and a catalogue of other, what one might call ordinary, crimes. Nor do they always aim to cause terror – bombs can be planted in remote locations just to make a point^[xvii].

 

 

 

David v Goliath

 

Terrorism is not the same thing as asymmetric warfare either, since that would embrace every fight in which one side was bigger or better equipped than the other. In any case hit and run tactics can grow seamlessly into full-scale military exchanges, as with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or Hezbollah in Lebanon.

 

 

 

Unofficial

 

And though terrorism is sometimes defined as ‘unofficial, freelance subversion involving non-State players’, quite a bit of it is government-inspired, as with the Libyan-directed downing of PanAm Flight 103 at Lockerbie^[xviii]. One of the bloodiest and most deplorable examples of terrorism, Renamo, was sponsored by Rhodesia and South Africa^[xix]. British forces have also been involved in unofficial terrorism. I suspect that at least 20 and perhaps as many as 100 murders in Northern Ireland in the early 1990s involved collusion between Protestant extremists and serving police officers and soldiers. These included some of the most notorious episodes such as the Miami Showband massacre of 1975 and the shooting of a Catholic police officer, Joe Campbell, in 1977. Indeed, the security forces may well have colluded in the most murderous day of the Troubles. In May 1974 a series of car bombs went off south of the border in Dublin and Monaghan leaving 33 dead and almost 300 injured. The terrible episode gave the Republic of Ireland a taste of what was happening in the north. Blame was laid on northern Protestant fanatics, though there have been persistent rumours that unofficial help was provided by disillusioned intelligence officers. Whatever the motives the outrage seems to have been effective. People in the Republic of Ireland who had supported what the IRA were doing outside their borders suddenly went quiet, and attitudes to terrorism in the south would never be quite the same again. Successive Dublin governments started to work for a rapprochement with the British.

 

 

 

Underhand conspiracy

 

The US, which once defined terrorism as using clandestine agents^[xx],  is itself a world leader in covert operations. Not content with engineering many coups, including the Anglo-American Operation Ajax which overthrew democracy in Iran in 1953, it has armed and trained guerrilla armies round the world, like the Contras in Nicaragua. It inspired the mujahedeen  in Afghanistan which, having caused grievous problems to the Soviets, morphed into the Taleban.

 

 

 

Anti-democratic

 

Above all, terrorism is not necessarily anti-democratic. Most anti-colonial movements like Kenya’s Mau Mau or South Africa’s ANC were overthrowing undemocratic regimes or were keen to establish their own free democratic nation states.^[xxi] Hamas sees destabilising Israel as the only way to win Palestinian freedom. Hezbollah considers suicide bombers as its equivalent to Israel’s drones or F16s. In fact many extremists regard themselves as righting a democratic deficit. Thus Chechen, Kurdish or Basque secessionists argue that they are excluded from winning fairly at the ballot because, so long as they are part of Russia, Turkey or Spain, they will always be minorities. (A similar logic propels the zealous anti-abortionists and anti-vivisectionists who terrorised doctors and researchers; they regarded democracy as rigged because foetuses and laboratory animals are excluded from the franchise.)

 

 

 

Terrorists aren’t all that different

 

 

I argued in Chapter 1 that to think crime is caused by criminals is tautological – rather like saying traffic is caused by motorists. The question is: why do people choose to go by car? Some are petrol heads and others hate driving, but most of us choose our mode of transport because of what’s convenient or what we can afford.  Circumstance dictates our behaviour more than our predispositions. Much the same appears to be true of what recruits a wide range of people into politically-driven crime.

 

 

 

Take the devastating explosion in Oklahoma City in 1995[xxii], the hundreds of people shot or blown up by Basque separatists[xxiii], or the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway[xxiv]. All share the element of violence, but there is not much in common between the perpetrators. Timothy McVeigh was a one-off, an obsessive loner. ETA always considered itself an army, albeit a clandestine one operating out of uniform like members of special forces or operatives for the CIA. AUM Shinrikyo was a doomsday cult whose reasons for causing mayhem were as bizarre as most of their beliefs.

 

 

Having a chip on one’s shoulder, and having a role in a cult or revolution can make one dizzily self-righteous[xxv]. As the writer Michael Burleigh puts it, ‘Ideology is like a detonator that enables a pre-existing chemical mix to explode.^[xxvi]’ But there is no such a thing as a typical terrorist any more than dishonest or angry people are distinct from the rest of us. Some are violent people in search of justification for their cruelty. Some are suggestible who get carried along. Some are needy and yearn for a sense of certainty and belonging. Some are naïve, some are out for revenge, some are drunk on nationalism or religious fervour, and some are ordinary people whose peacetime morality is trumped by immersion in conflict. Occasionally we can muster sufficient empathy to understand – perhaps a Palestinian whose parents have been killed and whose neighbours’ homes have been bombed or bulldozed. Others are more perplexing, like the Englishmen who planned to blow up ten transatlantic jets in 2006 or the four suicide bombers in London the previous year who murdered 52 people on 7/7. They choose to kill commuters, holidaymakers and cabin crews and so naturally we think of them as monsters. Yet when Britons have been identified as would-be mass murderers people who knew them tend to express shock; they had seemed such nice young men, ‘normal’ and even charming. Many come from comfortable and loving backgrounds and have far less cause to be ‘alienated’ than many frustrated disabled people, or young men who are taunted for their sexuality or colour or bullied for other reasons.

 

 

You or I might see all terrorists as terrible fanatics; but are they always that different from you or me? How would we act if we were Chechen, Kurdish or Basque, or lived in the West Bank?  They and their supporters think they are reasonable and we are not.

 

 

I am not proposing some sort of moral equivocation. There is a tragic irony that, ‘terrorism has usually not targeted the worst but rather the best type of regimes in the world’[xxvii]. Instead I am arguing, as Sun Tzu advised in The Art of War, 2,300 years ago: know your enemy.

 

 

This is important because, even more than with conventional crime, we get distracted by demonising the offenders. And our visceral reactions are not the best way to defend ourselves. The single most important lesson for counter-terrorism in democracies is: don’t get mad, get even. But, as I said at the start it’s a lesson we rarely seem able to apply.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So we must be careful not to get carried away with lazy indignation. Any crime is only as bad as the law it breaks is good, and political crime is only as wrong as the authority it seeks to undermine is right. When shorn of distinctiveness that deserves exclusive condemnation, the label ‘terrorism’ turns out to be no more than a pejorative description – and one that is riddled with hypocrisy. Consider its first widespread use in its modern sense in 1947 to describe Jewish tactics against the British in Palestine.

 

 

Do I need to point up that paradox? The State of Israel, which today claims so passionately to be the prime target of terrorism and which expresses such moral outrage against terror campaigns, was forged with the help of Irgun and the Stern Gang. Some of the founders of Israel, including future prime ministers like Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin, set off bombs in Arab markets, violently subverted  a League of Nations mandate, murdered the UN representative Count Folke Bernadotte, attacked the British during the war against Hitler and blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing over 90 people. And from their ranks came the guys who put to death well over 100 Arabs, mostly old men, women and children, in the notorious Deir Yassin massacre[xxviii]. When treason succeeds none (at least of Israel’s allies) dare call it treason.

 

 

Here too I should declare an interest. My grandfather helped found the State of Israel. He was a signatory to its declaration of independence and was its first and longest-serving minister of justice. But he was on the losing side of the struggle between hawks and doves. Since his death in 1978 Israel has been torn between those who want to settle with the Palestinians and those who want to settle on Palestinian land.  In the intervening years his fellow-countrymen have killed at least ten times more Arabs than Arab terrorists have killed Jews. Most of this was through officially sanctioned clashes that we shall look at in a moment. But Zionist extremists have car bombed Palestine mayors and murdered Arab students.[xxix] A gang of zealots was caught putting bombs on Arab buses and trying to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the most holy Muslim shrine in Jerusalem. Such was their political support that their sentences were commuted. In fact tolerance of Jewish violence against Arabs is such that Israel’s counter-terrorist chiefs have publicly acknowledged that they regard Jewish terrorism as a threat to Israel’s stability comparable to attacks by Palestinians.[xxx]

 

 

Of course it’s not just the Israelis who are rampant hypocrites. We all are. In truth terrorism is what others do, never what we do. Perhaps that is its most defining characteristic. That’s why America sees Islamic fundamentalists as the Axis of Evil, and why they in turn see America as the Great Satan. We need to get away from the notion that terrorism is unfair. So is air or naval superiority. We need to accept that we have heroes who are terrorists in other people’s eyes, like resistance movements in World War Two. And we need to admit that our attitudes change when terrorists win.^[xxxi]

 

 

Moreover, as happened in the Republic of Ireland when bombs went off in Dublin and Monaghan, our attitudes change when terrorism affects us personally, rather than someone far away. Being British, I’m acutely aware of how many Americans, with a nod and a wink from the US government, gave money – millions of dollars – to the IRA which used their cash to kill and main British citizens. Are our definitions of terrorism so flexible? Are our morals so shallow and our memories so short? Apparently they are.

 

 

It really is true that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. So let’s get off our high horse and be more dispassionate and more intelligent about defeating it.

 

 

Which brings us back to the importance of refusing to be provoked.

 

 

Where did the moral advantage lie in the days and weeks after 9/11? Unequivocally with the United States. Where did it lie in the aftermath of America’s response? A great power wounded by a terrorist incident sought vengeance – a crusade, no less. Whatever moral imperative there was to take out Saddam Hussein, whatever the hazy evidence that he had weapons of mass destruction, even America’s friends interpreted the invasion as a revenge for the twin towers. The war took the lives of at least 150,000 Iraqis (and still counting)[xxxii], killed over 4,000 American and British military personnel, and cost perhaps $3 trillion to US and British taxpayers. But much more importantly the invasion of Iraq did nothing to extinguish Islamic fundamentalism or anti-US extremism.

 

 

Or look at Israel’s bloody lashing out against the Palestinians[xxxiii]. As I say, the asymmetry in that conflict is that at least ten Arabs die for every Jew. And time after time the reprisals are counterproductive. Shelling from Lebanon into the north of Israel led to a calamitous invasion killing 17,000 Arabs and 700 Israelis. A second Israeli incursion killed about 1,500 Arabs two-thirds of them civilians, and cost a further 200 Israeli lives. The kidnap of two Israeli soldiers caused another reflexive foray which killed hundreds – and so it goes on. When rocket attacks killed four Israelis they killed more than 400 in retaliation in the Gaza strip, and then invaded causing widespread civilian casualties which brought the Arab death toll to well over two thousand. Each outrage against Israel provokes a more lethal response. Has it worked? Is Israel now safer than at the start of this vengeful spiral? Have Arab militants been silenced? Has popular sentiment in the nations surrounding Israel been won over to the Jewish cause? On the contrary. Nationalist Palestinians were pushed aside by the more militant PLO, and in the Gaza Strip they too were outflanked by Hamas. In case Hamas showed signs of conceding, poised at their flanks to exploit any weakness, there were even more radical movements such as Fatah al-Islam. Meanwhile moderate Arab leaders have faced a rising tide of extremism, and countries like Syria and Iran have bristled with more and more animosity to Israel, with the potential for annihilation.

 

 

Israel and its supporters should empathise with this hardening of attitudes since it has long been happening to them too. Allies of Israel who expect higher standards of their friends are dismissed as enemies for making unhelpful comments. Jewish dissenters are frequently derided as traitors or self-hating Jews. Truth is not the first casualty of war; rational debate is. Israeli anger is as understandable as it is counterproductive. The country has been threatened with extinction. Arab statesmanship has rarely been courageously far-sighted, the PLO leadership has been ruinous for its own people and its own cause, and Hamas never showed the slightest  interest in any settlement which did not wipe Israel from the map, and by implication Judaism too. But what powers much of the anger and drives decent Arabs into the arms of fanatics is that Israel has presented such a brutal face. The one thing that really has made Israel safer – apart from highly specific intelligence and well-targeted, brilliantly executed special operations – has been its most conspicuous example of situational prevention. Whatever the rights and wrongs of building a 450 mile long fence between West Bank Arab and Jew, the reduction in cross-border attacks was dramatic and sustained.

 

 

Not that history shows the British can claim to keep a cooler head. In Dublin there was a small rebellion against British rule in 1916 at the height of World War One. It was generally seen as a stab in the back. After all, some 200,000 Irishmen had volunteered to join the British Army in the Belgian trenches. So there was little sympathy when the ringleaders of the Easter Uprising were caught and shown to have conspired with the German enemy[xxxiv]. But they were shot (one of them tied to a chair because of his injuries). Traitors one day, martyrs the next. In the next few years the British made things worse. They recruited de-mobbed soldiers called Auxiliaries or ‘Black and Tans’ who, instead of pacifying Ireland, were often ill-disciplined, repressive and engaged in unofficial reprisals, alienating almost everyone and fuelling resentment[xxxv]. Having, it seems, learned nothing, Britain made a similarly self-defeating blunder in 1971 with another intended crackdown on IRA violence. A crude policy of internment turned almost the entire Catholic population against the British – and took world opinion with it. Internment transformed a difficult problem into a crisis and unleashed violence on a vastly larger scale[xxxvi].

 

 

Typically we react emotionally to terrorism react excessively, lose the high ground, and hand our enemies a gift.

 

 

 

 

Look behind you

 

 

Marooned in Tenerife in the Canary Islands by the first world war, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler passed his time playing puzzles, one of which he called the Umweg test. This is how it works. Put a live chicken in a coop which is open at the back but with food placed temptingly in front beyond the wire. The bird may flap and scratch but the only way the creature can reach its lunch is if its frantic movements lead it by chance to find a way out of the enclosure. Now try the same with a dog or chimpanzee – or child. It will look at the options, assess them, and turn its back on its objective to take the long way round. Umweg is the German word for detour, and the task requires reasoning and restraint. Köhler considered it tantamount to consciousness, the ability to reconstruct the world in mental form so we can work through our options and test the consequences before we act. Chickens can’t. Flies can’t. Humans can – so long as we don’t get fixated.

This may seem far removed from fighting terrorism, but the principle is pretty similar. Terrorists cannot win through superior force and so they aim to make us flap and scratch. If only we could be smart enough to turn our backs, bide our time and outmanoeuvre them.  

 

 

Every time a politician proposes a response to terrorism we should ask if it passes the Umweg test.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But it is not just policy that is often too hot-headed – it is the people we hire to do the dirty work on our behalf. We and our leaders tend to underestimate the harsh realities of conflict.

 

 

Chapter 7 explores just how easily violence gets out of hand. People always try to write off cruelties as an exception, but to do so is a stunning indictment of our gullibility. As the Stanford experiment in 1971 proved graphically, rough treatment is par for the course. When three decades later the scandal broke at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad the brutality was quickly blamed on errant individuals. But literally hundreds of examples of abuse emerged. Not many of these incidents get photographed and fewer still are posted on the web, but if you put young people into conflict and give them power over prisoners, terrible things will happen unless there are rigorous controls. At first we feel duty bound to support ‘our brave men and women who risk their lives on our behalf’. Then we blame individuals rather than systemic poor management. We never blame ourselves for our naivety.

 

 

Yet we see excesses by our enemies as never less than systemic.

 

 

Let’s go back to Ireland almost a century ago. On Bloody Sunday in November 1920 the Royal Irish Constabulary and auxiliaries reacted to the IRA assassination of eight British agents and five other people by going on the rampage, opening fire in Dublin’s main football stadium, killing a player and two children in the crowd along with eleven other spectators. Shortly afterwards two prisoners in Dublin Castle were ‘shot while trying to escape’. The savagery severely undermined Britain’s reputation in the world, provoked revulsion in Ireland, distracted attention from the IRA’s murders and helped swell support for rebel cause. But the government conspired to bury the truth. When official inquires castigated the police, the reports were suppressed and stayed secret for 80 years.

 

 

There was another Bloody Sunday in 1972: this time British troops fired on civil rights marchers, shooting twenty-six, fourteen of whom died. None of the demonstrators was armed, though for over three decades the British authorities persuaded themselves otherwise. Again and again ministers and even journalists covered up and prevaricated rather than blame their own troops[xxxvii]. Such was the mood of anger provoked by the IRA that it became almost impossible to report on military excesses. Broadcasters were muzzled and free reporting was seriously constrained[xxxviii]. The soldiers themselves rationalized what was going on. When once, as a reporter for the BBC, I asked a commander why a detainee had been badly beaten up he told me the man had been hit by a swinging door[xxxix]. I think he actually believed it.

 

 

We have seen with examples like Mai Lai how conflict leads – in fact demands – reducing our concept of the enemy from people like us to dangerous and detestable targets. We know how countless experiments like those of Stanley Milgram show how ordinary people – even academics – become vile and bestial in circumstances soldiers and guards are placed in. We understand beyond room for much debate that humanity and inhumanity are two sides of the same coin; that combatants become desensitised; that vengeance is as much default behaviour as is kindness; institutions cover up misdeeds; and that those misdeeds sabotage our objectives.

 

 

The word terrorist invites us to dehumanise our enemies as they dehumanise us: like zombies in a computer game. But we do so at our peril. We need to drain the swamp of support for their violence, not flood it with more resentment against us. We need to win hearts and minds – and not just genuflex in that direction but really do it. Once violence has momentum it relies on what one of Northern Ireland’s leading terrorists called ‘whataboutery’: he and his colleagues rationalised their own barbarity by referring to excesses by their enemies, as in ‘what about what they did’[xl]. We need to comprehend how brutality dismays the middle ground, feeds the enemy, and can leave a bitter political legacy. Our crude acts can hurt us for a long time to come.

 

 

And it can poison things for generations. We should bear in mind the legacy of Hussein Onyango Obama who was tortured by British soldiers in Kenya in the early 1950s as a suspected Mau Mau terrorist[xli]. Experiences like that helped to sour Kenyan relationships with Britain when the country won its independence, but in Mr Obama’s case it would be surprising if some of his bitterness did not rub off on his grandson who, half a century later, became Britain’s most important ally and the most powerful man on earth. Behaving better than our adversaries has to be at the core of the training and control of every combatant, every police officer, everyone who’s on our side. It should even be a clearly-stated objective that any action on our part which helps the enemy recruit supporters, is unacceptable – indeed, tantamount to an act of treason.

 

 

Each defence minister and commanding officer should hang a placard above his desk which reads, “I am responsible for any brutality, official or individual – the buck stops here!”

 

 

 

 

Torture

 

 

Sadly ill-treatment is sometimes authorised and part of official policy – torture was used by most of the European powers in their colonial wars right up to the end of empire in the 1960s. Since then physical and psychological torments like sleep deprivation and half-drowning prisoners (euphemistically called ‘waterboarding’) have been used extensively by many intelligence services including the CIA. They were routine at Guantanamo. Although the US Supreme Court has ruled such excesses to be unconstitutional four of the nine judges supported it, as did the then presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Torture had widespread support among the general public, egged on by a cult TV series 24 whose hero saved America on a daily basis using torture and other forms of violence^[xlii]. What sort of message does that send to our enemies? How can we show the world we have the moral high ground when we roll in the same dirt as our opponents? This is not just about being civilised; it is about winning.

 

 

 ‘Never strike a man,’ said Robin ‘Tin-Eye’ Stephens, the commander of Britain’s wartime interrogation centre. ‘It is unintelligent for the spy will give an answer to please.’ Stephens was no dripping liberal. He was notably right-wing and even ‘a bit mad’. More importantly he was spectacularly successful in turning German spies into double-agents. As President Obama later observed, if the UK disparaged torture, ‘when the entire British – all of the British people – were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat,’ there is no place for it in tackling sporadic terrorism[xliii].

 

 

Disdain for human rights – wholesale arrests, prisoner abuse, torture and even death squads – can work just fine for tyrannies whose legitimacy is based on repression. They sit uncomfortably with democracy and are diametrically at odds with hopes to pacify and rule through consent. Stories of maltreatment act as a recruiting sergeant for the enemy and sully reputations among friends. It has scarcely helped countries like Israel and the US to be associated with callous behaviours that help define totalitarians and psychopaths.

 

 

Once at a meeting on anti-terrorism in the US I sat next to an Israeli counterinsurgency expert who had no qualms about using torture. He cited the classic ticking time-bomb scenario whereby hurting one person is justified because it saves the lives of others. This is Sophistry of course. Torture can sometimes extract important information – I have never bought the line that it can’t – but it is very, very rarely applied out of desperate fear for the immediate safety of one’s colleagues. The ticking bomb analogy is the stuff of fiction which in real life can easily get stretched to cover almost any perceived intelligence advantage.

 

 

Tormenting prisoners should always be illegal even if in some extreme circumstances it might mitigate or even thwart a crime. If a member of the security forces thinks in extremis it is justified he must be prepared to answer for his actions to the law[xliv].

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe every civilian and military chief should also keep a contingency plan in their top drawer to remind them that countering terrorism needs intelligence and finesse, not a clodhopping army. When British troops marched onto the streets of Northern Ireland they were quickly out of their depth. They had been trained to fight the Eastern Bloc in a formal military campaign, not police the streets and take tea with the locals; nor how to deal with the change of heart as the peacekeepers overstayed their welcome and became an army of occupation[xlv]. You could respond to the Soviets with artillery and machine guns, but how do you react to youths pelting you with insults, stones and petrol bombs?

 

 

The Americans learned nothing from this and went into Iraq equally unprepared. They were even cruder. They imposed their own untutored assumptions, riding roughshod over local sensitivities and dismantled critical parts of the infrastructure. They made enemies of the very people they had come to set free^[xlvi]. They regarded their own, American, lives as more valuable than those of the citizens they were there to serve. It was the inverse of policing, where officers are expected to take high personal risks in protection of the community. There were shocking scenes where soldiers shot wildly at cars killing whole families rather than risk a suicide bombing. The results were predictable: as in Northern Ireland the saviours became seen as imperialists. Only after two years of making enemies did the US high command learn that you have to make friends and forge alliances. And when you make mistakes you must say so quickly and apologise[xlvii].

 

 

But you also need sufficient troops to do the task you give them. You cannot do beneficial business with the enemy until they are convinced you have the strength to beat them or at least to keep them at bay. Also, if you want to win over the middle ground, locals need to see the army is defending them – rather than simply protecting itself. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of lean soldiery proved to be disastrous and it took a surge of 20,000 extra American forces to regain the initiative in Baghdad. Further south in Basra the British also lost control, and in their case they never had enough steadfastness to retake it. They committed only a third the 27,000 peacekeeping troops they had poured into Northern Ireland, apparently confusing civility with complacency. Being nice is all very well provided that you don’t forget your basic task, which is to impose order. UK commanders had lectured their US counterparts on the virtues of ‘soft-hatted’ latter-day Northern Ireland-style policing, and were then effectively defeated by militias. It was the same in Afghanistan. Britain tried to police Helmand Province with fewer than 6,000 troops. You can’t win wars on the cheap and you cannot negotiate from weakness. You need to keep military and political control[xlviii].

 

 

Only then can you do business. And if you don’t find accommodation quickly – as we’ve seen through history – the moderates become drowned out and are overtaken by extremists and the extremists by fanatics. Violence can even take on a life of its own so that the religious or political causes that sustain it can become peripheral or even hard to identify. Northern Ireland protests began with genteel protests and moderate politicians like Gerry Fitt and John Hume who only asked for civil rights. But when they failed and their followers were beaten down moderation was swept away by a resurgent IRA. Similarly the conservative Protestants were pushed aside by ultra-conservatives, until the language of unionism was indistinguishable from the arch-bombast of them all, the Reverend Ian Paisley.

 

 

Yet Northern Ireland also shows how, in the end, compromise is king. And two decades later its example was followed by an even more extraordinary rapprochement. After more than 50 years of open warfare in Colombia, the Farc rebel group was welcomed into government. Farc were hard-line Marxist-Lennist revolutionaries and their methods were even more brutal than those of the IRA. Along with widespread extortion they indulged in drugs trading and widespread kidnapping for ransom. Their continual outrages provoked an even more violent response from government troops and paramilitaries. The death toll from the conflict was put at 220,000. But by 2012 Farc was losing ground – and it proved a crucial opportunity. As in Northern Ireland, the government seized the moment and opened peace talks. Despite huge opposition to a deal with terrorists, four years later the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, used a pen made from a bullet to sign a formal treaty. The Farc commander, despised by millions of Colombians, asked for forgiveness, and in exchange secured a role in local government, seats in parliament and legitimacy to contest elections.

 

Of course sometimes you don’t need to make concessions. Minor terrorist threats can be tracked down and convicted, as with theSymbionese Liberation Army[xlix]. Larger conflicts are often ended by the authorities securing complete victory, as with the British defeat of communists in Malaya in the 1950s or India’s crushing of Sikh extremists in the 1980s. In fact military counter-terrorist campaigns are often more successful than they are given credit for. But don’t bank on victory. Whereas in conventional warfare an army can be routed and its leaders can be forced into complete surrender, in terrorism the enemy is organized in clandestine cells rather than open military formations. There are almost always pockets of resistance and it is hard to coerce all the rebels to sign up to an armistice. Accordingly hostilities can drag on and on, with the authorities maintaining the upper hand but never removing the threat. The British have had more experience than most, holding their own in Kenya, Cyprus, Aden and other quarters of their crumbling empire after the second world war. But back home in the United Kingdom, as more and more body bags arrived, people questioned whether it was worth it.

 

 

And that is the danger – erosion of public and political support – much more so than that guerrilla forces vanquish a professional army. War-weariness is what usually ends terrorist campaigns. In time the language of conflict becomes less acrimonious, there are secret and tentative feelers for peace and, usually after a number of false dawns, one side or another quietly backs down.

 

 

Occasionally it is the rebels themselves who give up most. This was the pattern with ETA in Spain, where violent excesses by Marxist separatists have, over four decades, eroded their social and political foundations. And this is what happened in Northern Ireland too.

 

 

Such reconciliation can only be achieved when tough and tender measures work in unison, when terrorists face military stalemate and when moderates reassert themselves and seize the opportunities for peace. In Northern Ireland the intelligence services built up discreet long-term relationships with the least hot-headed of the IRA and used these back-channels to foster trust and woo the moderates, eventually isolating the worst extremists. Inevitably the process is uncomfortable. It is difficult to understand the sort of people whose philosophies seem alien and cruel, and concessions are difficult for everyone to swallow – imagine the US accepting any compromise with al-Qaeda; or Israel allowing Hamas to claim any sort of victory. But look at Northern Ireland. It is at least relatively calm now after thirty years of mayhem. And look at the solution that, eventually, triumphed.

 

 

The Provisional IRA likes to think it won – and a lot of Protestants agree, many of whom fulminated against the peace accord. But that was why the settlement was so ingenious. Instead of getting something for nothing the IRA got nothing for something. Almost no-one seems to say so, and perhaps that is just as well but, as I have already pointed out, the IRA was comprehensively defeated. In fact they abandoned every single one of the policies on which they ever fought. They demanded a united Ireland. But it’s still partitioned. A socialist republic. But it’s as capitalist as anywhere. No truck with British institutions. But their former chief of staff became joint First Minister of the Crown[l]. Everyone swallowed a bit of pride, but the moral is: if you can’t beat them, entice them to join you.

 

 

It might not last in Northern Ireland – the impression that the IRA triumphed has perhaps been overdone and some Protestants are seething. But 400 years of bitterness were never going to be eradicated quickly. At least the low-grade civil war has stopped.

 

Of course it’s best to avoid mistrust and severance in the first place. One of the important lessons of Northern Ireland is that sedition is often home grown. It develops in recesses where mainstream journalists and politicians rarely visit or care about. Two months after the London tube bombings of 2005, Trevor Phillips, then chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, warned that different groups of Britons were, ‘becoming strangers to each other’ adding, famously, that, ‘we are sleepwalking our way to segregation’. Much the same had been said four years previously after riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, when the Cantle report warned that some ethnic groups were leading ‘parallel lives’. It remains true. It remains dangerous. And as Ted Cantle observed, segregated schools in England were in danger of entrenching divisions for future generations as they had done in Northern Ireland. Westminster politicians should think again about their reckless promotion of faith schools, and create a measured strategy to tackle the dangerous apartheid that is a day to day reality in many British towns and cities.

 

Terrorism does, though, have a silver lining. It has turned our attention to security and it has changed our emphasis, if not our instincts, from punishment to prevention. Companies and universities everywhere are striving to come up with new products to improve security. Academics have created text books with practical advice for policing terrorism based on lessons from other forms of crime[li]. Government agencies have had their heads banged together and been required to coordinate intelligence and focus. Policing, at least for a time, won new resources. All these things feed back into a sharper response to ordinary crime.

 

 

Terrorism is out of the bottle and won’t ever be put back. Our interconnected world and porous communities have done for asymmetrical warfare what removing store counters did for shoplifting. And the dangers grow year by year. In the last century, for the first time ever, one species, Homo sapiens, had our planet’s whole survival in its hands. A nuclear holocaust could have wiped out life. It didn’t happen because of collective decision-making: true weapons of mass destruction were exclusively in the hands of governments. In the twenty-first century we might not be so lucky. As technology becomes more potent, more miniature, more democratised, power on an unprecedented scale will be available to individuals. A single drunk, inspired, mad or angry person might have the capacity to wreak more harm than could have been achieved collectively by millions of his ancestors. We are in for a precarious struggle.

 

 

We need to keep a broad consensus, seek out dissent, and snuff out violence early. When things look like getting out of hand we need to be resolute but keep cool in the face of provocation. We need to be systematic about situational defences. And we must always recognise that one day we may need to parley.