Leaking the news of an upcoming police raid, said Britain’s top antiterrorism policeman last week, is wrong. Indeed, said the Met’s Peter Clarke, it is “beneath contempt”, the act of those who “do not care what damage they do”. These are strong words, stronger still when they were apparently directed at John Reid, the home secretary. The prime minister later referred to them, as repeated by David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, as “a smear”. Such are the squabbles to which Tony Blair’s war on terror has degenerated.

What began with Richard the Lionheart riding against the infidel mussulman on the white charger of western values has become a game of political cat and mouse with the local fuzz. Blair once presented himself as a clean-living young lawyer of the sort who regarded policemen as the salt of the earth. Now he shudders at their name.

The leak to which Clarke referred concerned a widely publicised dawn raid in Birmingham on January 31, leading to nine arrests for terrorism. This was at a time when Reid was facing a prisons crisis and Blair and Lord Levy, his friend, faced questioning by police over cash for honours.

Even before the raids took place someone told certain tabloids that they concerned a plot to kidnap a British Muslim soldier from a list of 25 followed by a ritual Al-Qaeda style beheading. Most of this was untrue, yet the news was leaked before all the suspects had been captured. It enraged local Muslims and left David Shaw, the head of the operation, publicly “seething” at being “hijacked by the government” to divert media attention from its troubles.

Since Clarke’s outburst much effort has gone into detecting the source of the leak. Reid is a leading exponent of the Blair/Campbell school of medialed government. He speeds to the scene of any police raid and then demands that the media should “not rush to judgment”. When defence secretary, his press office was told its target was the “number of favourable references to the secretary of state per day”.

On this occasion any involvement by Reid or his aides, Steve Bates and Simon Wren, was denied. Inquirers were steered to the Metropolitan police, who would have known first about the raid (as might MI5), before presumably informing the Home Office.

But while the police had a powerful motive for not revealing details of the operation, an opposite motive applied to Reid. Shaw in Birmingham had no doubt. His raid was jeopardised, a suspect could have escaped capture and a subsequent trial was clearly prejudiced, all for political gain.

The revelation last week of the capture in Iraq of Abd al-Hadi, an Al-Qaeda leader with alleged links to certain British terrorists, reminds us of two things: that there are people intent on exploding bombs on Britain’s streets and that part, at least, of their inspiration and training comes from radical groups in Asia. But the attempt to portray this relatively contained threat as a “war” is becoming threadbare and counter-productive.

On both sides of the Atlantic its warriors are in disarray and the enemy, Al-Qaeda, described by Reid last year as “posing a worse threat than Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich”, fails to live up to its global billing. Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, has sensibly called for the phrase “war on terror” to be scrapped as “strengthening terrorist groups by implying an organised enemy”.

Washington’s House armed services committee has taken the same view. Admiral William Fallon, the new head of US Centcom, has banned George Bush’s “long war on terror” as alienating Middle East opinion and, as a spokesman gently put it, “failing to capture the nuance of an intended withdrawal”.

Tony Blair claims that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are intrinsic to his crusade against terrorism and have made Britain a safer place. Yet both have become confused and bloody occupations of nations whose threat to British national security has been wildly overrated.

The wars have clearly strengthened, not weakened, Al-Qaeda and, as far as Britain is concerned, offered a glamorous focus for impressionable young Asians and a training ground for misfits eager for a cause. Billions of dollars have been directed to countering this threat with main force, killing tens of thousands and generating great hostility to western interests. I have always suspected that a few bags of gold to some Pashtun or Tajik warlord in 2001 would have done for Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda long ago.

No 10 has spent five years exploiting the politics of fear. Britons have been threatened by their government (not by terrorists) with smallpox, anthrax, ricin, dirty nuclear devices, beheadings and kidnaps, with no more evidence than there was of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The attacks in London and Madrid were with conventional explosives.

Like those in Bali, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, most have been locally inspired, whatever the claims invariably made for Al-Qaeda by security chiefs eager for a “noble enemy”. Every country is vulnerable to random killings. Ministers and policemen still claim that another explosion is “a matter of when, not if”, as if that somehow excused them for failure.

Britain’s vulnerability is real but no different from that of years gone by. The current threat is from Islamist radicals induced to believe they can destabilise democracy and replace it with a global caliphate.

Blair said last week that “in fighting terrorism you should use both military and political means”. He is wrong. Deploying armies against supposed terrorists in distant states is cruel, costly and counter-productive. As for politics, how can the caliphate be treated politically? Unlike the objectives of IRA bombing, its chances of success are zero. All it can hope is to make Britain a less liberal and tolerant place, in which the Blair government has allowed it modest success.

The Birmingham saga indicates that counter-terrorism in Britain has become riddled with political opportunism and departmental logrolling. But in the communities where terrorism germinates, all has until recently been ignorance and inertia. Nothing will stop a few madmen setting off bombs, whether or not graced with the blessing of a Mister Big thousands of miles away.

More than 100 people are in prison on what we assume are reasonable grounds for suspicion. Nobody reading Ed Husain’s memoir, The Islamist, about the grooming of militants in London colleges ( reviewed in Books, Culture, page 39) could be in doubt of the danger. But as long as Britain is waging a “war of values” in Muslim countries, young Muslims will be a recruiting ground for attacks on domestic targets.

Blair’s wars have been a total distraction from grassroots policing of extremism in Britain, be it Islamist, racist or animal rights. I have no trouble in being a hawk on this. Tolerance is a British virtue but tolerance of intolerance must have a limit. As Husain shows, education authorities and Muslim institutions are putty in the hands of rabid imams and organisations such as Hizb ut Tahrir. Many of these are not harmless nutters but terrorist recruiters with cell structures.

Alienated young Asians are attracted to a religious ideology. I see no problem in banning their organisations and expelling foreigners who not only preach but recruit for violence. Nor, unlike the Foreign Office and the judiciary, am I overly worried about what happens to them when sent home to Libya or Algeria. British hospitality is never unconditional.

What is stupid is the government’s use of the politics of fear to poison the sea in which these young people swim, that of Asian Muslims, among Britain’s most loyal and motivated immigrants. Those who plainly intend to harm others are not to be countered in the poppy fields of Helmand or on the streets of Basra, but in the backrooms of ordinary houses in London, the Midlands and Yorkshire. They are contained by local policing, low-level surveillance, integrated schools and elected civic leadership, not the self-appointed “stakeholders” preferred by government.

This is not a war, just efficient neighbourhood crime-busting. But it lacks the best tunes. Its hard work is unglamorous and its claim for resources is drowned by the trumpets and drums of Kabul and Baghdad, by princes sent on desert convoys, by leaks of beheadings and ricin plots, and by ministers who have convinced themselves that their role in life is to save western civilisation.

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