The recent horrific attack in Golders Green has generated much anger and despair at this latest in a series of concerted, violent assaults currently aimed primarily at the Jewish community, but with a clear lineage to earlier Islamist outrages such as the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby and the London Bridge attacks of 2017 and 2019. The UK terrorism threat level was raised to ‘severe’ following the attack on Thursday. But terrorism, ‘…an action or threat designed to influence the government or intimidate the public’, is an inadequate descriptor of what we face. Instead, I believe we face a different problem: a full-blown insurgency.
Correct diagnoses are important: ‘If you define the problem correctly’, Steve Jobs is supposed to have said, ‘…you almost have the solution’; some psychologists would agree, ‘Name it to tame it’. But if a doctor gets a diagnosis wrong, then at the least it is less likely that a patient will recover well, to put it mildly: that is where we are in dealing with Islamist extremism.
While terror and terrorism are elements of an insurgency, they are but part; definitions of insurgency are numerous and as slippery as the beast itself, but the British Army’s definition, albeit from 2001, seems a good start point: ‘…the actions of a minority group within a state who are intent on forcing political change by means of a mixture of subversion, propaganda and military pressure, aiming to persuade or intimidate the broad mass of people to accept such a change. It is an organised armed political struggle, the goals of which may be diverse.’
From organised ‘Globalise the Intifada’ hate marches, terror attacks and online trolling, through to the deplatforming of ‘heterodox’ speakers, we are facing what seems to be almost a dictionary definition of an insurgency. And it has not been unsuccessful politically: the government’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, judicial tolerance of attacks on supposedly Israeli-linked firms, the unwillingness of the government to join or even support the US and Israeli assault on the Iranian terror regime, the promotion of Islamophobia definitions, the reluctance to proscribe the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – all could be attributed to the ‘success’ of the insurgency and the electoral calculus of a Labour government that can see the Muslim vote, hitherto one of its two pillars of support (the other being public sector workers), slipping through its fingers.
The government would, of course, resist this analysis. On all the political ‘successes’ above, it would argue that they stand and fall on their own merits. In terms of counter-terrorism, it would point to the Prevent programme, itself part of the wider CONTEST strategy and Counter-Terrorism Command (CTC). While both have been criticised, the former most recently in the failure to apprehend the Stockport murderer before he carried out his attack, both are heavily stretched. That is primarily because they are set up to deal with a problem – terrorism – when what we are facing is another – an insurgency. Prevent is focused on individuals, ‘…stopping people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism’; it is, in essence, safeguarding. CTC’s role, by contrast, is to ‘…prevent, disrupt and investigate dangerous extremists’, which in reality means going after those who are potential plotters, not just the disaffected and deluded.
According to its website, CTC currently has 800 live investigations involving thousands of potential suspects, with the largest single focus being ‘Islamist extremist terrorism’. It is also responsible for countering state-sponsored criminality in the UK and investigating war crimes: an impossibly large portfolio. Leaving those aside, between supporting an ‘at risk’ individual and going after a nascent or actual terrorist plotter, there is a gap currently unfilled; meeting that gap is the difference between a counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency campaign, and why we need to pursue the latter.
Recognising the problem for what it really is would make a difference, but the consequences of such a recognition would be uncomfortable. Key to any successful counter-insurgency campaign is separating the insurgents from the milieu in which they operate; the analogy usually quoted is that of fish – the terrorist – swimming in the sea, the cultural and human terrain from whence they spring. Arguably, that is what Prevent does, or is supposed to. But given the scale of the problem, we will need to do more: in effect, change the nature of the sea. That means directly challenging the prejudices, cultural and religious baggage of the Muslim communities that harbour Islamist extremists and thus make a reality of genuine integration, not our current trajectory, ‘…an island of strangers’, in the Prime Minister’s words. This is a ‘whole of society’, ‘whole of state’ endeavour; a ‘hearts and minds’ struggle for the support of our Muslim fellow citizens. As an aside, the attempt to impose an Islamophobia definition would, perhaps counter-intuitively for a ‘hearts and minds’ struggle, be a massive misstep in the wrong direction.
Dr David Kilcullen, the world’s leading authority on modern counter-insurgency, would point to two other essentials. The first is control: someone must own the problem. As Winston Churchill put it to General Gerald Templer, the High Commissioner in Malaya in the successful counter-insurgent campaign against the Chinese communists, ‘You are in charge.’ However, as the Stockport inquiry showed us, no one was in charge even for a single Prevent case, let alone a complete counter-extremism campaign.
The second element is owning the information space, which in our wired but anarchic and disaggregated cyber and social media world is probably, to use a military term, our ‘vital ground’: that which we must win and cannot afford to lose. If we own it, we can counter the ideology of hate, deny sanctuary to the haters and, more positively, provide an alternative motivation to the siren calls of a Jew- and Christian-hating death cult.
In the last year, the Emiratis have restricted state-funded scholarships for students wishing to study at UK universities because of the extent of Islamic radicalisation and extremism found here; our Jewish community has never felt so threatened. We have, it should be clear to all, a major problem that we are not addressing: a failure would not just be another crisis; it would be existential to our survival as a liberal democracy. We have an absolute duty to confront this peril, but it must begin with a proper recognition of what we face: so, in fine military fashion, let us start with the proper ‘naming of parts’.
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