AS WE GROPE our way around the next corner of history, it would be nice to feel that we had an accurate picture of the past. But while politicians, judges and police are variously blamed for their struggle to get to grips with terror after July 7, the most guilty part of the Establishment is still lurking in the shadows offstage.

The intelligence services bear considerable responsibility for letting in many of the extremists who have done so much damage in this country since the early 1990s and for doing so little to curtail their activities. It is distinctly ironic that those whose complacency helped to create the problem are now overreacting by pressing for unnecessarily draconian powers. Especially when some of these will make it harder to encourage British Muslims to inform on extremists — which must surely now be the intelligence services’ best hope.

I have long pondered which would be worse: spooks living in blissful ignorance of the extremists living here, warnings from France and Algeria languishing in their in-trays while they recruited more good-looking blondes; or spooks blithely assuming that Britain would be safe if they kept a few preachers in view. Planning to assassinate Musharraf? Fine. Funding camps in Afghanistan? OK, doesn’t really affect Blighty, at least we know where they are.

The latter, it seems, is closer to the truth. The security services were still focusing heavily on the IRA in the 1990s; they thought the Muslim clerics were clowns; and having failed to infiltrate many Muslim groups, they tried to get these clerics to inform on each other. In doing so they may well have prolonged their stay. When Abu Qatada’s leave to remain expired in 1998, the Home Office dawdled over his application for indefinite leave to remain despite warnings from six countries about his links with terror. Why?

This is a man who was convicted in Jordan of involvement in two terrorist attacks, who was visited in London by the chief suspect in the Madrid train bombings and by Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. Who came to Britain in 1993 on a forged United Arab Emirates passport, and was not arrested until 2002. Who met MI5 officers on at least three occasions.

How provincial, how complacent, how staggeringly arrogant, to think that he was better left free to build what the Special Immigration Appeals Commission last year described as “the centre of terrorist activities associated with al-Qaeda”. Abu Qatada is one of the ten men that the Government is now struggling to deport. If he reveals as part of his appeal that MI5 tried to recruit him, the service will be highly embarrassed. And he may not be the only one to do so. The whispers are that several of these characters have as much on the intelligence services as they have on them.

In the 1990s Britain made a fatal decision, against the advice of other governments, to try to use these people rather than shut them down. But we weren’t even serious about using them. We thought they looked too much like pantomime villains to be the real thing. In 2001, when investigators discovered links between the 9/11 hijackers and the Finsbury Park Mosque, the Government began to put powers in place to try to convict men such as Abu Hamza, the Finsbury cleric. Even then, the Americans were often ahead of us in bringing charges.

It is possible that MI5 was partially right. In an astonishing interview in Prospect magazine carried out shortly before the bombings, a British recruiter for the Taleban stated that attacks in London were extremely unlikely because they would endanger the radical Muslim networks that work from here. Anyone involved in such an attack would be an “utterly loose cannon”, he said, on the fringes of the main terror networks. If there is any truth in that, the men now in custody may be the smallest of small fry, who will lead us nowhere. But it makes the “Londonistan” strategy look no less irresponsible. Providing a home for a terror network can never guarantee you protection: it can only foment evil against you and your allies.

When Mr Blair returns from holiday, he must start to marshal the weapons of the State more effectively. If MI5 and MI6 are to plaster their recruitment ads over the newspapers, we must be sure they have got better at telling friend from foe. If the police are to keep up the old-fashioned detective work that led them to the suspected July 21 bombers, we must not alienate potential informants with unnecessary laws. Those men were caught partly because the parents of Muktar Said Ibrahim looked at the CCTV images of the suspects, recognised their son and called the police. That good deed is not best repaid by threats to close mosques and ban organisations that will only go underground. Nor by interning people for 90 days without trial: that was what gave succour to the IRA. Nor by creating vague laws of “indirect incitement to commit a terrorist act”, which could, a Home Office spokesman has pretty much admitted, criminalise a tone of voice.

Mr Blair will have to resist the temptation to get tough where it is easiest for him to do so, by chalking up a bevy of new offences when he has already enacted three anti-terrorism laws since 2000. And he must get toughest where he is weakest. To deport the ten suspects he will eventually have to sacrifice his Human Rights Act: he will not get round the European Convention either by derogating or by waving memos of understanding at judges who will never believe that Algeria has thrown away its thumbscrews.

He will also need to ask some tough questions of his intelligence services. Who authorised the appeasement strategy? Is it still in place? Did it produce any useful leads or is it, like information given under torture, severely compromised? And how do we now get the brothers, the fathers, the wives, on the right side? For make no mistake: the wrong side is far more dangerous than our clever spies ever realised.

camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk

JOIN THE DEBATE
Send your e-mails via www.timesonline.co.uk/debate

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden