TERRORISTS WILL always have one advantage over democratic states — surprise. What begins as another normal day in the capital turns into chaos, crisis meetings in 10 Downing Street, mobile phone surges, fear and red alerts even when the terrorist devices are duds and the casualties minor.

But yesterday’s events and the grim death toll of July 7 are also proof not of the strength but of the weakness of our enemy. The tiny group who killed so blindly two weeks ago are not and can never be a serious threat to the state, or the vast majority of its citizens.

The golden rule of any terrorist organisation planning a spectacular operation is to throw everything into the first attack. From a terrorist point of view your first strike against a major power will always be your best strike simply because your enemy is sleeping. The paradigm terrorist operation is, of course, September 11, when as if from nowhere al-Qaeda hijackers seized four planes to crash them into their targets.

As Osama bin Laden knew, life for a terrorist organisation gets immeasurably harder after its spectacular. Democratic states wake up quickly and the manhunt begins for those responsible. Armies are unleashed, wars begun, informers recruited and hundreds of suspects hauled in for interrogation. Even if it survives the inevitable military crackdown, the terrorist leadership has to go on the run and its capabilities are diminished. Pulling off another 9/11 becomes infinitely more difficult.

July 7 in London was no different. Knowing that surprise was their greatest weapon the bombers planned to maximise the impact by carrying out simultaneous suicide bomb attacks on London’s transport network. It was only by chance that Hasib Hussain, the bus bomber, was 81 minutes late for his appointment with death.

Although it can be little compensation to the grieving relatives, the death toll of 52 is comparable not with the cataclysmic thousands killed in the Twin Towers but with the Real IRA’s murderous work, 29 killed, on the streets of Omagh in 1998.

Obviously this is not because the terrorists themselves felt constrained to avoid a high civilian death toll. Their aim was to kill as many people as possible. They failed to kill more people because they did not have the operational capacity to do so. They are weak and poorly financed, not strong.

Every terrorist organisation operates under a set of rules of engagement. When the IRA murdered large numbers of civilians it was usually a mistake because mass murder of women and children has never played well, even in the Republican bars of South Armagh. Gunmen and bombers were shunned, doors were closed to them and collection tins ran empty.

Al-Qaeda and its British spawn clearly operate under no such restraint. The Tube attacks were deliberate acts of mass murder. But the key question is why there were not more casualties. If your aim is mass slaughter then why not pack a car with explosives and drive down Oxford Street?

The reason is not the terrorist’s sensitivities but their incapacities. The explosive they used, acetone peroxide, is proof that the enemy we face is home-grown. Their warped ideology, the cult of the suicide bomber, might be imported from the Middle East, but the instructions in how to make their bombs came from the internet. Acetone peroxide, whose base materials are easily purchased in most British hardware stores, is a lethally unstable compound with a shelf life of less than a week.

It is difficult to store and as it dries out it becomes even more unstable. It was just as likely to kill the bombmaker as the civilians at whom it was eventually targeted. Unscrew the cap the wrong way or drop the bottle and it will blow you and your bomb factory to smithereens. The only reason to use acetone peroxide for explosives is because you have no alternative.

Acetone peroxide is the base material of plots dreamt up in a two bed-room terrace in Beeston, not the training camps of Afghanistan where stable military explosives, such as C4, can be readily purchased for a few hundred dollars in the local bazaar. No money, and certainly no weapons and explosives, are being clandestinely shipped across the globe to Yorkshire from the wilds of Afghanistan.

Nor is it conceivable that a prolonged terrorist campaign could be sustained from within the Muslim communities of Britain. In order to survive as a terrorist group, such as the IRA, you need a community to swim in. You need a network of supporters and sympathisers prepared to hide and give succour, financial and otherwise for the cause. But the July 7 bombings have been universally condemned. A number of the victims are themselves Muslims. Cold-blooded murder on the Tube does not appear to play well in Beeston. And all of those communities now and in years to come are likely to be scrutinised intensely by Special Branch and MI5. There is no chance that Osama bin Laden’s British followers will be training in the Yorkshire hills in the near future.

Terrorism is normally the weapon of the weak, although as we discovered after July 7, it can also be the weapon of the ideologically deranged.

Counter-terrorism is the weapon of the state. And a state such as Britain is indeed powerful at stopping terrorists in their tracks. Once our defences are up and the intelligence community on high alert it becomes infinitely harder for the terrorists to strike again. The odds are on our side not theirs.

Kevin Toolis is a producer of a forthcoming Channel 4 series, The Cult of the Suicide Bomber

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