The 9/11 Wars (51 page)

The Saudi programme, which had started in mid 2007, was part of a wide range of similar strategies in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Egypt and Yemen.
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General Stone’s programmes with Iraqi detainees had in part been based on what the Saudis were beginning to do with their own imprisoned militants.
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Though few such initiatives were on the scale or had the resources of the multi-million-dollar effort showcased at the al-Thamama centre, all were part of a range of new approaches by governments and intelligence agencies to extremist violence that were beginning to show results by around 2007 and 2008. No one was claiming they were a panacea to the problem of extremist violence – while committed to the reintegration of some, Saudi authorities were also building a series of purpose-built prisons with capacity for 6,400 militants who they believed too dangerous to release under any circumstances – but such strategies were nonetheless evidence that governments were willing to try new approaches and security services were looking at the problem in new ways. Nothing demonstrated this more than a secret conference of intelligence services including the British MI6, French DST and DGSE, German BKA, the Australians, the major American ‘three-letter’ agencies, the Saudis, Algerian and Egyptian
mukhabarat
and even the Pakistani ISI. They met in March 2008 in a Middle Eastern capital to spend three days discussing radicalization and to compare the research programmes many of them had launched to understand the phenomenon of Islamic militancy following the intensification of the 9/11 Wars between 2003 and 2005. One after another senior officers stood to give presentations in which, instead of talking about ‘al-Qaeda’, they focused on the process by which individuals became extremists. The British discussed the relationship between employment and educational level – overqualified people doing menial jobs was one risk factor – and spoke of ‘vulnerable institutions’ such as prisons or schools. The French emphasized second-generation identity crises. The Egyptians blamed the internet. The Australians underlined how internal competition for credibility and kudos within radical groups led to ‘serial splitting’ with more and more extreme sub-groups being formed as the process of radicalization advanced. The Saudis produced comprehensive research on those responsible for the wave of violence that the kingdom had suffered earlier in the decade showing how as time had passed the profile of militants had evolved with a clear decline in educational level and political and religious awareness and an increase in levels of previous involvement in violent crime. Early militants read commentaries on the Koran or histories of historical Islamic figures while later activists read thrillers if they read anything at all. The conference ended with a banquet and a show of local traditional dancing which saw the DGSE’s
chef de délégation
, a colonel from the ISI and a long-haired German sociologist link arms amid sword-waving beturbanned locals, all watched by a wry, cigar-smoking senior FBI official.

Counter-terrorism was thus rapidly evolving too, undergoing its own version to the US military’s ‘cultural turn’. A broader ‘surge’ was underway, with extra manpower and resources being used in better, more effective, more intelligent ways in the fight against radical militancy. In 2002, only 2 per cent of British security agencies’ budget had been devoted to prevention.
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By 2007, MI5, the British domestic security service, flush with new funds released following the 7/7 bombings, had vastly expanded in all areas, but particularly in those dealing with countering processes of radicalization. From being principally focused on Irish terrorism, the organizsation had successfully reorientated itself to concentrate on an entirely new target and sections of British society and parts of the country that had previously been virtually unknown. Its understanding of the nature of the new threat had evolved rapidly too. Officials spoke of the ‘paradigm shift’ of moving from looking at a foreign-based to a ‘homegrown’ threat. The service’s formal behavioural science unit had been enlarged too, giving the psychologists and social scientists who staffed it a more prominent role in planning of strategy and even of operations. MI5’s analysts told the author in the summer of 2007 that activism in the UK was ‘nothing to do with Islam’ and ‘everything to do with social movements … group think and social dynamics’, which, whether true or not, at the very least marked a huge change from previous thinking.
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As American soldiers had done in a rather different context in Iraq, MI5 also moved closer to the populations they viewed as critical, establishing regional offices across the UK, where intelligence operatives worked closely with local security forces – in this case, of course, the British police service, which is divided into local constabularies – who had the detailed low-level knowledge lacking at a national level.
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Some old habits continued. Over previous years MI5 officers from the section responsible for running international terrorism-related ‘agents’ had systematically failed to intervene to prevent individuals of interest to them being tortured by local security services in Pakistan, Egypt and elsewhere and had been avid consumers of the ‘product’ of such ‘robust’ interrogations. The new approach complemented earlier strategies rather than supplanted them entirely.
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And though serious problems remained with the British government’s new counter-radicalization strategy, known as ‘PREVENT’ and run by the Ministry of Local Government and Communities rather than the Home Office, it also signalled a new approach, one marrying ‘hard’ counter-terrorism with ‘softer’ counter-radicalization policies. One criticism was that PREVENT identified Muslims as a ‘suspect community’. There were problems with both the generalized suspicion and the idea that Muslims constituted one community. Officials countered by pointing out that their target was not those actively involved in terrorism but ‘the much larger group of people who feel a degree of negativity, if not hostility, towards the state, the country, the community, and who are, as it were, the pool in which terrorists will swim’.
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One positive development was a new understanding of nuances of who actually ran the organizations that were supposed to be official representatives of the British Muslim community and had hitherto been treated as privileged interlocutors of the government. So, for example, the government moved steadily to find alternatives to the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), a group which claimed to represent half the country’s Muslims but whose leaders’ views were often hardline and highly politicized.
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The voices of the large numbers of Muslims in the UK who followed the more personal, mystic Sufi strands of practice or simply were not particularly interested in politics had barely been heard.
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As the British government moved to distance itself from the MCB, new voices began to emerge from within the British Muslim population.
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Again, the picture was mixed as any group receiving funds under the PREVENT intitiative risked being seen as tainted by their association with the government – the local version of the occupier’s paradox that the Americans and their allies had faced in Iraq – but the series of former members of radical groups prepared to denounce their former associates were nonetheless useful in providing a ‘counter-narrative’ to the hitherto largely unchallenged language of global pan-Islamic solidarity, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism.
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The government’s strategy for countering extremism consistently underestimated the role British foreign policy played in reinforcing the ‘single narrative’ propagated by extremists but, by 2007, moderate clerics who had often waged a lonely and misunderstood struggle against extremism – such as Musa Abu Bakr Admani, the Muslim chaplain of London Metropolitan University – began to feel more confident. ‘When Muslim communities feel dislocated and uncertain, they have always gravitated towards utopian international ideas of Islam,’ Admani, who had personally known several of those involved in the 2006 ‘airlines plot’, told the author over tea and pasta in a café on north London’s Holloway Road.
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‘There is still a bumpy ride ahead, but values such as freedom, equality, human dignity and fairness, the well-embedded core of Britishness, are values which a lot of young Muslims identify with. They are Islamic as well as British values. Yes, we need to address the … hatred of the West; yes, we need to inculcate basic Islamic values such as compassion and respect. But people have woken up, and the debate on how to move forward has started.’

Admani’s impressions appeared to be confirmed by events more broadly. Young British-born men continued to become involved in radical violence, and foreign militants continued to operate on UK soil, but general levels of radicalization remained apparently stable.
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This was bad news in that a threat clearly remained – six plots were foiled in the two years following the 7/7 bombings, and the summer of 2007 saw a small group of highly educated young British Muslim doctors attempt a double bombing of a nightclub in London before two of them drove a vehicle loaded with petrol and gas canisters into the front of Glasgow airport – but it was good news in that at least things were not getting worse. London Muslims appeared as likely as the general public to condemn terrorist attacks on civilians and more likely than the population at large to find no moral justification for using violence in a ‘noble cause’.
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While 48 per cent thought it wrong that the security services should infiltrate Muslim groups, the same number thought it perfectly acceptable. Polls in Europe showed no great shifts in any direction either.
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Converts continued to cause concern with a plot uncovered in western Germany in September 2007 involving two young local men who had become Muslims and who planned to blow up a ‘disco full of American sluts’ on an American base or a similar target. However, the danger posed by converts was not going to be enough to return European nations to the darker days of 2004 or 2005.
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The growing general rejection of violent extremism seen in the Middle East appeared to be in the process of being reproduced among Muslim communities in Europe too.

A calmer atmosphere also allowed a more sensible general debate. Senior figures in the British police and the security services appeared less prone to terrifying doomsday predictions or to the systematic exaggeration of the threat posed by individual cells in the UK that had previously marked their statements. This was perhaps because by 2007 they now had the vast bulk of the increased powers that they had so vociferously demanded in the immediate post-9/11 years and were more confident that the legislation needed to secure convictions for a range of activities that previously might have escaped prosecution let alone significant custodial sentences was in place.
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With populations now becoming habituated to repeated scares, claims of new threats were in any case greeted more sceptically and more phlegmatically than before. Few security officials would ever admit that the likelihood of a devastating attack had lessened – ‘We’d be cutting our own budgets,’ admitted one MI5 officer to the author in a moment of unwarranted frankness – but there was a realization that the public was much more critical of any claim of potential danger than had been the case before.
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One reason for this was the steady demolition of many of the tenacious if tendentious ideas about the capabilities of the enemy. Many of the claims of 2002 and 2003 had long been shown to be without foundation. The various investigations in Iraq had shown that Saddam had not possessed weapons of mass destruction, and some of the more fabulous inventions about the potential and nature of al-Qaeda had been effectively deconstructed as scholars, analysts and journalists picked over the voluminous material that had become available as years passed.
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The debate over whether al-Qaeda was more ideology or more organization and whether bin Laden was ‘inciter-in-chief’ or of marginal importance or terrorist mastermind continued, as highly politicized and polarized as it had always been, but some broad areas of consensus had emerged. Around 1,000 English-language books with ‘terrorism’ in the title had existed in 1995. A decade later there were nearly eleven times as many, with most of the new additions focusing on Islamic militancy.Though the ‘al-Qaeda industry’ that had sprung up post-9/11 had attracted more than its fair share of frauds, fantasists and ideologues, it had nonetheless created a substantial body of research and a cohort of often very fine researchers whose conclusions filtered through both to policy-makers and to an increasingly well-informed public.
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In the US, 2007 too saw a broader reassessment of the more egregious excesses of the early years of the 9/11 Wars. This was in part enforced – the previous year had seen a landmark Supreme Court decision that prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were covered by the articles of the Geneva Conventions forbidding abusive or humiliating treatment of prisoners and that the military tribunals the detainees faced were illegal without explicit authorization from Congress – but was also due to a slow realization among some senior figures that at least some earlier policies had been counterproductive.
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These changes sometimes occurred almost in spite of the ideological atmosphere. So, for example, as prosecutors and investigators received more resources and became more adept at framing charges, the law became a much more potent counter-terrorist weapon and much more attractive to the authorities as a consequence. Over the two years after the 9/11 attacks, only one in thirty American defendants described as ‘terrorists’ to the media when arrested were actually charged with terrorism offences. Only around a third of these were eventually convicted on terrorism charges. By 2006 and 2007, although the Bush administration’s National Defense Strategy of 2005 had referred to the use of courts to pursue terrorists as part of a ‘strategy of the weak’, a range of improvements in training and organization as well as new legislative tools meant that nearly half of individuals labelled terrorists were charged as such and more than 80 per cent of these were convicted.
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One major contributing factor was the success government prosecutors began to have in convincing defendants to cooperate. Another improvement, as in the UK, was an understanding of exactly what charge could be made to stick, particularly when it came to membership of a terrorist organization.
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Almost by default, therefore, a much-derided ‘legal approach’ to counter-terrorism gained ground at the expense of hardline strategies which emphasized the extraordinary nature of the threat facing the USA and therefore justified deeply divisive ‘extra-legal’ responses to it.