THE more detail we discover about the carnage that was planned to be unleashed, the more it echoes the attacks of September 11, five years ago, in scale and grotesque showmanship.
Never mind that the London Tube bombings and the Madrid attacks exposed the vulnerability of any rail network, which no security measures can overcome. These terrorists had returned to the prototype: the near-simultaneous destruction, in mid-air, of fully loaded jumbo jets belonging to US airlines by a large team of knowing, well-rehearsed suicide bombers.
The immediate question is whether these would-be bombers, like those on September 11, 2001, were part of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. But that is almost irrelevant. The better question is whether al-Qaeda is now more of an inspiration than an organisation, more powerful in its ability to recruit sympathisers and prompt them to devise their own assaults, than in its ability to plan every detail of the operation and pull the trigger.
There is an air of overreaching competition about the planning of this latest stunt. To blow up a US embassy in Africa is no longer enough. As the terrorists craft their plots, they are aiming for a stunned gasp around the world, for images so horrific that they lock their hold on the world’s television screens for days. And, of course, they are aiming for terror: for the abrupt termination of ordinary life and for the pervasive fear that it may never return.
Even though their plot failed, they achieved that most banal result. The overhead shots of Heathrow, paralysed, echoed the days after September 11, when the world’s most powerful country was entirely cut off.
If they had been content to aim just for a car bomb here and there, as the IRA did, not even requiring the bombers to sacrifice their own lives, they would have achieved this disruption and perpetuated this fear with far less chance of being caught. But to them, it seems, that would not be spectacular enough. They had to aim, in the words of John Reid, the Home Secretary, for the loss of civilian life on an unprecedented scale.
So we had a planned macabre dress-rehearsal, choreographed with the meticulousness of the assassin in The Day of the Jackal, except that it was on a far larger scale.
There lay its weakness. The more complex the plan, the more delayed its operation, the more people who are involved, then the more likely that there will be a leak. That seems to have happened, and the leak may have lain in the links in Pakistan. Because this group was large and organised, with ties to Pakistan, does that mean that it was formally part of al-Qaeda? Not at all. True, alQaeda has worked hard to claim credit for operations since September 11, notably Madrid. It claimed that it alone had blasted Spain away from President Bush’s side and out of the Iraq war when those bombings brought a change of government and policy.
Yet what is al-Qaeda these days? The taped messages smuggled out from Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri are carefully scripted to spit defiance at the West and to encourage their followers. But they suggest impotence more strongly.
True, neither man has been caught, to make the point thrown at Bush and Tony Blair at the start of every press conference, but there is every sign that their network, such as it was, has been badly damaged.Their own ability to move around is limited to the craggy valleys of the Pakistan-Afghan border. Their communications are reduced to runners and written (or taped) messages, Western intelligence officials believe. The steady capture of senior al-Qaeda members, many in Pakistan, has removed their ability to move money around, although that is the hardest facility to curb.
Those al-Qaeda captives, who have disappeared off into the dark neverland where the CIA keeps its “high-value” prisoners, have not yielded great stores of information about al-Qaeda, US military officers say. But their removal still appears to have had a real impact.
It was clear in Iraq that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the so-called head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was well beyond the control of bin Laden or Zawahiri. Intercepted messages to him, which US officials consider authentic, had a distinctly respectful tone, appreciative of his project of igniting civil war in Iraq, but not giving orders (beyond the tentative suggestion that cutting off hostages’ heads on camera was bad for public support).
Iraq has clearly acted as a magnet and an inspiration for “foreign fighters”, many of whom appear to be young Arab men from neighbouring countries, easily rallied to the call of jihad. But there is no sign that for the past couple of years they were under bin Laden’s control, simply his inspiration. The same goes for the latest alleged terrorists. Their links with Pakistan suggest possible contact with al-Qaeda militants who have woven themselves through that country. But, even more likely, they were inspired by the great, sloshing pool of disaffected young men and teenagers, Pakistani by nationality, often Pashtun by ethnicity, who swill around the Pakistan’s western cities, and for whom 9/11 was the defining inspiration of their adolescence.
For decades such young men, Arab or Pakistani, have found justification for anger, if they sought it, in the Israeli- Palestinian struggle. But their countries’ population booms, combined with the sudden spread of television, has made that anger more combustible by the spark of a shocking image on the overhead television of a street café.
Now al-Qaeda has a rival in Hezbollah, taking on Israel in Lebanon, and through it the US, and remaining undefeated. For al-Qaeda, preaching an austere form of Sunni Islam, this challenge by the upstart Shia rival threatens to throw it off the television screens. For several days the British plot has succeeded, but in this global competition to inspire the next band of willing terrorists, al-Qaeda could still lose out to Lebanon.
YOUR WORDS ON THE WEB
What all the governments in the world forget is that the Al Quaeda has no real base or country therefore they can be nowhere and everywhere at once.
So attacking afganistan and Iraq was a bit pointless. The war cannot be fought be [sic] traditional means but through stealth and intellegence.
This is world war 3 and it is up to the who [sic] world to unite to defeat them. Until we do this, Al Quaeda have won.
Julie Gelder, Leeds
Not worried about terrorists. Very worried about what the governement will do next.
Andrew Baines
Eric Hobsbawn [sic] called it the “the eerie forgetting of our History”. History didn’t start on 9/11. Since 1945 alone, the US has aimed to overthrow 50 governments, many of them democracies; to crush over 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes & to sponsor many “allied” dictators. 25 countries have been bombed in the process, at the cost of millions of lives. Geopolitics in the ME & Africa has been shaped by colonial powers’ decisions. Eventually they come home to roost.
Alice Dancer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Hey Brits dont panic, walk publicly as if the bomb plot least matters to you. We in India are to praying [sic] for your country.
I have confidence in Mr Blair’s govt rather than mine.
You people are lucky enough to live in safe country. But in a country like mine the Govt is fully corrupted.
Human Life is lot more Cheaper. No one know’s when will we die.
Gaurang, Bombay
It is important not to come to early conclusions as the Forest Gate situation showed but at the end-of-the-day if the security forces feel there is a risk they have simply got to act and not bother about “offending” a community. There are many innocent muslims who are perhaps the biggest losers in this situation and perhaps collectively they have not done enough to oust the extremists.
Mark Butterworth, Bury
