Failure of the War on Terror

If it is assessed against an objective of reducing the number of Muslims recruited or inspired to commit terrorist acts in the name of al-Qaeda, then the U.S.-led, UK-backed war on terror launched in the aftermath of 9/11 has failed demonstrably.¹

This performance-related assessment, as William Tupman and Carina O'Reilly argue, favors examining counterterrorism experience and the consistency of government conduct during the war on terror (Tupman and O'Reilly 2004). Such an approach, however, tends to expose the disregard the architects of the war on terror had for counterterrorism experience and policy-makers in the U.S. or UK have not adopted it in the six years since 9/11. Performance measurement may be routine in other areas of government-sponsored activity, but the war on terror has always been presented as a separate and exceptional activity dealing with an extraordinary enemy where familiar rules of engagement and conventional government behavior do not apply. However, in writing this introduction on 9/11 in 2007, it is apparent that the failure of the response to the world's most dramatic terrorist attack has finally become clear to many who supported it for the major part of its duration. Not that there is a consensus about the nature and extent of the failure. Nor is there a willingness to look to prior counterterrorism experience that might have been used to promote a measured, effective, and counterintuitive response to 9/11. Rather, notwithstanding moves to re-brand the war on terror in softer tones with particular emphasis on counterinsurgency “hearts and minds” approaches (Kilcullen 2006), the sixth anniversary of 9/11 marks the culmination of a poorly targeted military led response that has unintentionally boosted al-Qaeda credibility and recruitment.

In contrast, this article highlights a local police and Muslim community response to al-Qaeda terrorism in London that has challenged the rationale of the war on terror from its launch, and that has had the objective to reduce terrorist recruitment since its inception.²

Like the war on terror, this London-based police and community initiative is only six years old, but it has consistently adopted a wholly different analysis of al-Qaeda and the tools necessary to combat its influence. Operating in the shadow of the war on terror—and to a surprising extent beneath its radar—the local initiative has used two kinds of negotiation strategies that have been anathema to the mainstream war on terror: police negotiation leading to partnership with Muslim groups conventionally deemed to be subversive to democracy; and negotiation by those groups with Muslim youth drawn to al-Qaeda terrorism that is aimed at challenging the al-Qaeda narratives that promote 9/11 and 7/7. However, the small scale of the local initiative and its inability to distance itself from the adverse impact of the wider war on terror on the Muslim communities, whose support it solicits, means its success can only be measured in marginal, individual cases that have no impact on wider, perceptible trends. Moreover, like proactive outreach youth work in other fields (drugs, street crime, sex education, etc.), the initiative is bound to encounter failure as often as success. Consequently, for example, whatever the value of persuading nine young Muslims to abandon the al-Qaeda worldview, the implications of failing to prevent one other from becoming a potential suicide bomber are such as to make risk-averse counterterrorism civil servants nervous. Nonetheless, the street level police officers and Muslim community groups who have pioneered this approach on their own initiative insist that it could become a cost effective and complementary counterterrorism tool if it were modestly resourced and integrated into a cohesive national strategy.

Nowhere is the failure to reduce the terrorism threat posed by al-Qaeda more palpable than in the UK, where counterterrorism officers work around the clock seeking to monitor, disrupt, and apprehend a burgeoning number of al-Qaeda operatives and supporters (Oliver 2007; Manningham-Buller 2006), many of whom have been galvanized by the war on terror itself. To be sure, the 9/11 plotters' strategic purpose to precipitate overreaction by the U.S. government should have been recognized immediately as axiomatic to terrorism in Whitehall, most especially by serving and former ministers and civil servants with years spent countering the terrorist tactics of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). Moreover, the initial failure of military overreaction to the terrorist tactics of PIRA and the belated success of law enforcement and negotiation against that sustained terrorist threat might have been at the forefront of Tony Blair's mind as he traveled to Washington to offer his support and counsel to George Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Indeed, the UK prime minister's key role in the negotiation process with PIRA placed added weight on his experience and ensuing informed counsel to his transatlantic counterpart. Which is not to suggest that all the lessons learned in combating PIRA are easily or immediately transferable to al-Qaeda, merely that the experience provided a potentially sound basis for avoiding overreaction of the kind that terrorists universally seek to provoke.

As Ian Lustick argues, the failure of the war on terror can be linked directly to a willful determination by the neoconservative cabal guiding it to misrepresent the real nature of the terrorist threat (Lustick 2006). While the invasion of Iraq is the most notable example of that misrepresentation, this article is more concerned with the extent to which al-Qaeda has been purposefully misconstrued as an entity that is so opposed to Western interests as to be beyond the scope of law enforcement and negotiation. In The Lesser Evil, Michael Ignatieff expresses the political wisdom that has prevailed in Washington and Whitehall and facilitates the neoconservative agenda in which wholesale human rights abuses against al-Qaeda suspects are permitted on the premise of their exceptional threat (Ignatieff 2004). Ignatieff also licenses the scope and methodology of the war on terror by endorsing the prevailing view that al-Qaeda is beyond politics and thereby beyond negotiation:

The logical frailty of this position is articulated by Isabelle Duyvesteyn, who describes the argument that “religious terrorists have no motivation because the achievement of their goals is impossible” as untenable (Duyvesteyn 2004). Such philosophical quibbling has not, however, prevented Ignatieff's view serving to license the war on terror for a majority of liberals outside the neoconservative cabal driving it. According to al-Qaeda propagandist Saif al-Adl, 9/11 was intended to provoke the U.S. to “lash out militarily against the ummah” in the manner if not the scale of “the War on Terror” (Gerges 2005, 270). “The Americans took the bait,” he continues, “and fell into our trap,” doubtless using hindsight to describe al-Qaeda's ability to predict the massive scale and range of the response to 9/11 (Gerges 2005, 270). Apart from falling for a familiar terrorist ploy (and thereby boosting al-Qaeda propaganda and recruitment strategy) responses such as Ignatieff's fail to distinguish between inveterate al-Qaeda ideologists (such as Saif al-Adl) who may well be beyond the scope of immediate negotiation and local activists who may be susceptible to skillful intervention strategies. More importantly, the war on terror has failed to take account of the extent to which young recruits to al-Qaeda might easily be rehabilitated to nonviolent politics if credible figures in their communities were encouraged or facilitated to undertake negotiations to that end. Such negotiations form the cornerstone of the police and Muslim community interventions in London that stand outside the narrow parameters of the war on terror.

Police and Muslim Communities

These initiatives have achieved modest success at the local, grassroots level in countering al-Qaeda propaganda and recruitment strategies among sections of Muslim youth in London who have been targeted by recruiters and propagandists. Unlike the war on terror itself, which has adopted a coercive approach to Muslim communities, these London-based police and Muslim community initiatives have adopted a nonjudgmental approach and utilized negotiating skills to persuade young Muslims that al-Qaeda propaganda is wrong to sanction suicide bomb attacks like 7/7. While this Muslim community outreach work took place for many years in London prior to 9/11 without police support, since 9/11 the Muslim Contact Unit (MCU), a small, specialist police unit, has facilitated it.³

To the extent that small-scale police involvement has contributed to modest success in countering al-Qaeda propaganda and recruitment, it stands in marked contrast to the war on terror that has so far eschewed soft community-based approaches. That at least provides a basis for highlighting what might be considered a pilot project in London—one in which police and Muslim community groups have worked in a partnership devoid of coercion. This departure from coercive relationships places the local London initiative at odds with conventional counterterrorism that relies instead on controlled relationships with paid informants. The initiative should also be distinguished from conventional terrorist hostage negotiation strategies where trust-building skills are used instrumentally by police for short-term tactical purposes. As will be made clear, however, these distinctions do not take the MCU initiative outside the realm of traditional imperatives governing the conduct of partnership activity and mainstream community policing (Alderson 1979, 1998). The MCU initiative merely transfers trust building and a commensurate concern for community confidence from mainstream policing into the counterterrorism arena for the first time.

Since 9/11 UK counterterrorism has not been immune to the war on terror's overarching “you are either with us or with the terrorists” attitude towards Muslim communities—an approach that does not lend itself to subtle proactive community engagement programs. In consequence, a comparison between the MCU's methodology and counterterrorism methodology more generally is germane. Politicians and counterterrorism officials are certainly more comfortable when they can appear in the media being tough on terrorism. In many instances this will manifest itself in support for extended powers to detain terrorist suspects and to expand police powers generally. Invariably police chiefs will mirror such postures just as the UK's Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) did in endorsing the government's call for a massively increased period of pre-charge detention in 2005. At such times there appears to be little consideration of the likely impact of such measures on terrorist recruitment. Instead the debate is typically between “tough” politicians and police chiefs in one corner, and human rights lawyers and activists, who are caricatured in the tabloid media as the “bleeding heart liberals,” in the other.

Counter-intuitively and against the grain of the war on terror, the MCU has identified the counterterrorism value of activists and politicians in this latter category. For instance, Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway, rebel UK MPs at the forefront of the “Stop The (Iraq) War” campaign and countless “Justice for Palestine” marches in London, have demonstrated an outstanding ability to work in partnership with Muslim community groups to persuade Muslim youth to channel their political grievances into local and national democratic processes.⁴

In doing so they have incurred the wrath of prominent al-Qaeda propagandists who are incensed to see potential terrorist recruits being indoctrinated by kafirs and thereby removed from their influence. The ensuing threats al-Qaeda supporters made to Corbyn and Galloway help indicate which politicians and which activists have the greatest impact against al-Qaeda propaganda and recruitment. Thus while Tony Blair portrayed himself as the archenemy of al-Qaeda, it has been two of his fiercest critics who may have achieved a greater impact against al-Qaeda propaganda and recruitment at a street level in London. Needless to say, such an analysis incurs fierce disapprobation from mainstream political commentators who regard an alliance between radical socialists (e.g., Corbyn and Galloway), radical Muslims (e.g., the Muslim Association of Britain), and police as illustrative of a wider malaise. Dean Godson expresses this concern eloquently when he suggests the MCU has worked so closely with its chosen Islamist partners as to be suffering from “ideological Stockholm syndrome” (Godson 2006a). In being labeled an “appeaser of extremists” by powerful lobbyists such as Godson, the MCU suffered the same stigmatization that awaited any public servant who offered partnership to any but the most quiescent Muslim community groups in the UK during the first six years of the war on terror (Godson 2006b, 2007; Gove 2006a, 2006b; Phillips 2006).

Moreover, while counterterrorism has long recognized the value of community intelligence, it tends to see this role as falling to non-specialist colleagues—community or neighborhood police officers (Innes 2006, 1–20). Thus the MCU is unique in utilizing significant counterterrorism experience in a community partnership setting. In doing so it breaches an implicit demarcation line between a covert specialism and mainstream policing, which results in the unit sitting awkwardly between proponents on both sides of the divide (Innes 2006, 1–20). In consequence, even though the unit was singled out as an exemplary role model in research conducted by Demos, an influential think tank, the Association of Chief Police Officers has studiously ignored the report's recommendation that they expand the police unit nationally (Briggs, Fieschi, and Lownsbrough 2006).

The chief characteristic of MCU support for Muslim youth workers' negotiation with those vulnerable to al-Qaeda recruitment is empowerment. The distance between this approach and conventional top-down counterterrorism is significant. Nonetheless, my research indicates that nothing in the innovative methodology of the police unit's empowerment approach restricts hard counterterrorism from pursuing terrorist suspects in more familiar ways. In my interviews Muslim youth workers express awareness that any of their clients might at any time and unbeknown to them be the subject of a covert terrorist investigation. Indeed the same Muslim youth workers express an understanding that if their efforts to remove a young person from terrorist influence are unsuccessful they will be obliged to report the individual to the police. At such a point it becomes clear that this approach to counterterrorism places considerable reliance on trust and a concomitant regard for the community partner's right to genuine partnership status. It is merely its application to countering terrorist propaganda recruitment that is pioneering, and, therefore, in need of assessment. Indeed, assessment becomes a pressing need when the community partners—either members of Salafi or Islamist communities in London—are consistently identified as subversives.

Islamists and Salafis

Following John Esposito's definitions in the Oxford Dictionary of Islam and stripped of pejorative usage, “Islamist” becomes “a term used to describe an Islamic political or social activist.” Similarly, “Salafi” is reduced to “a name derived from salaf, ‘pious ancestors,’ given to a reform movement that emphasizes the restoration of Islamic doctrines to pure form, adherence to the Qur'an and Sunnah, rejection of the authority of later interpretations, and maintenance of the unity of ummah”—that is, a global Muslim fellowship (Esposito 2003). On this basis, there is nothing inherent to either community to warrant them being the subject of stigmatization or pejorative religious profiling. Indeed, in London a handful of Salafi and Islamist groups have been at the forefront of groundbreaking community work that successfully counters the adverse influence of al-Qaeda propaganda among susceptible youth. In doing so they face the double jeopardy of attack from within their own increasingly alienated communities—where they are described as working with the enemy, viz Bush and Blair—and suspicion from without—where Islamists and Salafis are pejoratively conflated with the al-Qaeda threat. Such mutually reinforcing stigmatization is symptomatic of a failure of the war on terror to construct a coherent “hearts and minds” counter terrorism strategy in its first six years.

Certainly, precious little academic or activist attention has been paid to the question of whether Salafi and Islamist communities might be as deserving of equal treatment as other Muslims. Instead, prevailing media wisdom acknowledges a counterterrorism need for police to talk to “extremists”⁵

but with the caveat that such unsavory business be done “in a dark alley” (Godson 2007). Elsewhere, comment is confined to the need for police to treat ethnic groups—especially UK Asians (principally Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs)—fairly so as to avoid alienating large sections of the community. Indeed, many Muslim groups have been quick to support the view that Salafis and Islamists are part and parcel of the extremist problem of which al-Qaeda is but one violent manifestation. Thus when the Sufi Muslim Council (as approved by the UK's Department of Communities and Local Government) attacked UK Salafis and Islamists as dangerous extremists it was reminiscent of loyalist Protestant condemnation of Catholic communities as terrorist sympathizers in Northern Ireland during “the troubles.” Interestingly, the Sufi Muslim Council sets itself up as being in the business of “counter radicalization” that is, presumably, preventing young Muslims from becoming Salafi or Islamist.

Needless to say Salafi and Islamist communities are aware of this government alliance with their religious opponents and tend to retreat further into a position of “passive disengagement” in consequence. Those few Salafi and Islamist groups who engage proactively with the MCU to help tackle the adverse influence of al-Qaeda propaganda feel dismayed at this development. In interviews they note that police and government refused to take heed when they sought to highlight the extremist problem posed by influential al-Qaeda propagandists like Abu Qatada, Abu Hamza, and Abdullah el Faisal in London throughout much of the 1990s. Now that the threat is taken seriously, government, they complain, appears more comfortable working in partnership with other Muslim community groups, most especially Sufi groups that have little knowledge of al-Qaeda activity and even less street credibility to be able to tackle it. My research suggests that licensing and encouraging one religious community (e.g., Sufis) to conduct “counter radicalization” community work against another (e.g., Salafis and Islamists) may prove divisive and provide further ammunition for al-Qaeda propagandists who seek to demonstrate how UK and other Western governments continue to adopt what they describe as neo-colonial tactics of “divide and rule” when engaging with Muslim communities. There is a need for policymakers to think through the counterterrorism implications of such activity.

In this context and when addressing Muslim community groups post 7/7, Paddy Hillyard is right to highlight the significance of the Northern Ireland experience of “suspect communities” over 30 years in a counterterrorist context (Hillyard 1993). But while all Northern Irish communities might have suffered to some to degree, the evidence is clear in demonstrating that one religious group—Irish Catholics—bore the brunt of stereotyping, profiling, and stigmatization. This is not to overlook the fact that good counterterrorism policing will always properly investigate intelligence links to terrorist activity—rather to argue that poor policing lazily mimics good practice by resorting to superficial stereotypes. On this basis, Tarique Ghaffur and Ali Dezaei—senior Muslim police voices in London—make brave and important points in arguing against the blanket profiling of Asian Muslim communities (Judd 2006). In doing so, however, both officers unintentionally compound the greater risk of Salafis and Islamists—minority Muslim communities—being targeted in the same way Irish Catholics were. Significantly, in interviews I conducted, specialist police officers with firsthand experience of Provisional IRA terrorism acknowledged that one of the major lessons of that long campaign was UK counterterrorism's failure to adequately distinguish terrorists from the Republican Catholic communities where they sought support. Indeed, a key motivational factor for the specialist officers running the MCU has been a desire to reassure Salafi and Islamist communities that they ought not to be conflated with the terrorists in the way Irish Catholics sometimes were.

Nonetheless, major reservations look set to remain within broader U.S., European, and UK Muslim communities where Salafis and Islamists are often viewed with deep distrust and hostility (El-Fadl 2005; Kamali 2003; Malik 2005; Tibi 2005). Moreover, Salafi and Islamist community leaders are at pains to stress how this hostility has been exacerbated by a concerted effort from lobbyists to separate moderates from extremists in the aftermath of 7/7—a sense of good versus bad Muslims (Batty 2006). Popularist accounts like Ed Hussein's The Islamist compound the problem by describing some of the most effective Muslim opponents of al-Qaeda as extremists, conflating them with fringe groups like Hizb ut Tahrir and the terrorist threat itself (Hussein 2007). Hassan Butt, a former extremist, appears to have undergone a similar conversion and makes the same public conflation (Butt 2007). The extent to which this approach distorts the reality on the ground is highlighted by the leading Islamist commentator Anas Altikriti in an indignant response that exposes Butt's shallow opportunism (Altikriti 2007). Significantly, Hussein's personal account of growing out of Hizb ut Tahrir campus politics is also misused by media pundits to posit a model of extremist de-radicalization. Ironically, Hussein's account has more in common with the organic development of young secular students like UK government ministers John Reid, Peter Hain, and Jack Straw from far left student rebels to conservative defenders of the status quo than it does to terrorist recruitment. Needless to say, in his role as home secretary the former communist John Reid welcomes Ed Hussein's approach and especially former extremist Hassan Butt's disingenuous insider claim that the al-Qaeda terrorist threat has little to do with UK foreign policy and everything to do with distorted Islamic theology (Butt 2007). In the hands of dubious characters such as Butt, stalwart Islamist opponents of al-Qaeda of Altikriti's caliber are pejoratively miscast as subversives.

Certainly, the stereotyping, profiling, and conflating of Salafis and Islamists with al-Qaeda terrorism is misleading and counterproductive. The fact that al-Qaeda terrorists adapt and distort Salafi and Islamist approaches to Islam does not mean that Salafis and Islamists are implicitly linked to terrorism or extremism—nor does it mean that individual Salafis and Islamists are likely to be terrorists or extremists. No more was Irish Catholicism a key pointer to Provisional IRA terrorism. Equally, it is true that UK recruits to al-Qaeda have a range of backgrounds that will sometimes include prior affiliation to, or family association with, Sufi or Barelvi traditions. However, it is axiomatic that by the time they become al-Qaeda suicide bombers (or other active terrorists) UK Muslim recruits have bought into an ideology that distorts strands of Salafi and Islamist thinking. That is why Salafis and Islamists often have the best antidotes to al-Qaeda propaganda once it has taken hold. To conflate them with the problem is to inhibit their willingness to immunize their communities against it. This does not make the error of conflating Salafis with Islamists since important differences exist between the groups. Instead, this acknowledges what they have in common—effectiveness against al-Qaeda propaganda and recruitment.

To analyze this assessment it is important to present the work of the MCU—and its Salafi and Islamist partners—coherently and in context (Lambert forthcoming). First and foremost, it is necessary to provide an insight into the activity of al-Qaeda recruiters and propagandists in London since the mid-1990s. Crucially, the Muslim youth workers involved in the partnership project with a track record of intervening directly against dangerous al-Qaeda operatives from 1994 to 2007 provide such an insight. Significantly, prior to 2002 their interventions lacked any kind of support or acknowledgment from police. Rather they were shunned and ignored by police and government agencies alike, barely distinguished from the problem they were tackling in their own communities. In addition, the community-based policing approach is at odds with an authoritative strand of specialist terrorism studies literature that has sought to use 9/11 as the marker of a “new” exceptional terrorist threat and the beginning of a “global war on terror” to defeat or disrupt it (Berman 2003; Hoffman 2004; Ben-Dor and Pedahzur 2004). As Marie Breen Smyth notes, this view has three problematic features: (1) it “tends towards a-historicity … ignoring the historical experiences of numerous countries”; (2) it “exceptionalises the experience of the U.S. and al-Qaeda”; and (3), it “tends towards ‘state-centrism,’ with the ‘terrorist’ defined as the (security) problem and inquiry restricted to the assembling of information and data that would solve or eradicate the ‘problem’ as the state defines it” (Smyth 2007, 1). Of particular relevance to the London partnership project is Smyth's observation that this account “ignores the roots of terrorism and the contribution of the state itself to the creation of the conditions in which terrorist action by non-state actors occurs” (Smyth 2007, 2). The London partnership project also sits at odds with mainstream accounts of countering al-Qaeda (both academic and popular) because it offers a bottom-up perspective against the post 9/11 discourses that approach the issue from a decidedly top-down vantage point (Carter 2001; Coker 2002; Walt 2002).

In contrast, key figures in minority sections of Muslim communities in London have become expert “street level” observers of al-Qaeda propaganda and recruitment strategy and methodology since they found themselves on the receiving end of such efforts as early as 1994. Many candidly admit that they were nearly won over by the blandishments of such compelling propagandists as Abu Qatada before they acquired the knowledge and skill to countermand them. Essentially insiders, these observers have witnessed and interpreted the social, religious, and political imperatives that terrorist propagandists and recruiters have employed to win support within Muslim communities. Such a vantage point has enabled them to discern three key terrorist objectives—the recruitment of foot soldiers, the recruitment of operational support members, and the encouragement of wider tacit community support. Intriguingly, in interviews these insider observers explain how in practice processes often best categorized as indoctrination, talent spotting, recruitment, and selection are far more interwoven and organic than researchers more familiar with formal recruitment processes might suppose. This is a rich area of specialist community expertise that provides insight and guidance for practitioners, mediators, or researchers wishing to enter into a dialogue with prospective, existing, or lapsed al-Qaeda members. Of special value to researchers seeking to locate the trigger point at which susceptible young Muslims become radicalized is the observation that in the real world an alienated young Muslim recruited by a high caliber al-Qaeda strategist is far more likely to become a suicide bomber than his twin brother who is recruited by Hizb ut-Tahrir.⁶

Surprisingly, notwithstanding the massive proliferation of academic and policy papers dealing with strategies to counter the threat posed by al-Qaeda in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, precious little attention has focused on the relationship between al-Qaeda's propaganda and recruitment strategy and its target audience in any given country's Muslim communities, least of all in London. By highlighting the work of a police and community partnership pilot project in London that counters al-Qaeda's purpose this article seeks to encourage a belated examination of the topic.