EDITORIAL: Britain, new terrorism and Pakistan

It seems that Pakistan now has to take steps to secure itself also against the rising terrorist threat in the United Kingdom. The head of the British secret service MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, has surfaced briefly from her traditionally low-profile office to declare that nearly 30 terrorist plots are being investigated in the country, and that her agents are tracking over 1,600 suspects from 200 groups, most with ties to Osama Bin Ladens Al Qaeda terror network. More ominously, she also warned that these terrorists might use chemical, bacteriological and radioactive devices in addition to the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) used on and after 7/7 in 2005.

Home-spun British terrorists have grown by 80 percent since January 2006, a spike not seen anywhere in the world, including the Islamic world where governments are taking steps to suppress radical Islam. Ms Buller then said something that should compel us to think about the problem of terrorism from a different angle. She said that MI5s database of British-based terror sympathisers  many of them British citizens  had increased by 80 percent since January, and that some of them were directed by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. The British radicals, she believed, were propelled by their fierce objection to British policy in Iraq and other Western interventions in Palestines etc. MI5, she said, was faced with the task of coping with at least 1,600 individuals so morphed into potential martyrs.

The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, says the problem of Islamic radical youths  most of them below 20 and in their teens  was generations in the making and that he had been giving out warnings about it for a long time. It is also agreed in London that the problem might take a generation of counter-action to fade away. Oddly, however, the MI5 assessment about the actual numbers involved in terrorism or thinking of it was made only last week; the 1,600 known potential terrorists have cropped up quite suddenly. Why this is so remains inexplicable. In any case, while British authorities have foiled at least one very big attempt at killing airline passengers, London must clearly do something about it, even as one must sympathise with Muslims living in the UK who have to take the brunt of this new vigilance.

There are two reasons why Pakistan gets mentioned when dangerous developments are under discussion in the UK. First, the Muslim population is almost 70 percent Pakistani and the horrible statistics which prove that the Muslims have not integrated into British society apply mostly to them. Second, the British Isles are the domain of contact between the ideology that drives Al Qaeda and the Pakistanis, something which is not available in the Gulf region where an even larger number of Pakistanis are resident workers. A third element is that of the presence of Al Qaeda in the vicinity of Pakistan which can be added to Pakistans burden; in this case one has to consider that in Pakistan, the conversion rate of growth to terrorism is not 80 percent.

If there are 1.5 million Muslims in the UK there are 5 million of them in France. There has been some unrest among French Muslims too but the kind of Al Qaeda-related brainwash evoked in the case of British Muslims is absent. However, if we consider the number of terrorists who have gone into Iraq to fight the Sunni war against the Shias there, the largest number has gone in from Algeria, probably those under the influence of the GIA which was trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with Saudi and Arab money. But the ability of Al Qaeda to proselytise in France is limited. On the other hand, Pakistanis who dont know enough Arabic in the Gulf region to talk to the Arab hosts can communicate with the Arab converters in the UK in English.

In Pakistan the anger against the United States and tangentially against the UK comes from the invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq matters too but it is surely not the biggest motivating factor. The youths in the UK are far more intense than the suicide-committing youths in Pakistan. Pakistan is paying the price of letting the Deobandis forcibly take over Barelvi mosques; the UK is also paying a price for delaying action against the clerics who were taking over the mosques built almost entirely by early Barelvi migrants to the UK. The first study of what was happening came in the middle of the decade of the 1990s in the form of a book by a French scholar. After that a Pakistani-British scholar at Warwick University did his major thesis on the plight of the Pakistani minority in the UK but this too didnt evoke any reaction from the British government.

The Londonistan alarm was first raised by the French who thought that the UK government was too cavalier about what was going on in the country. In the Benelux countries the heat of what was happening to Islam across the Channel was felt too. The most dangerous firebrand Muslim (mostly Moroccan) clerics were qualifying as imams and khateebs from seminaries in the UK but the visa continued to be liberally granted by ignorant British diplomats to hardline Deobandi clerics whose real objective was to take over the mosques in England.

In 2000, London exported to Pakistan an organisation called Hizb al Tahrir whose Paki-cockney preachers demanded the killing of President Pervez Musharraf and the setting up of a khilafat as proposed by their Arab leader. No one converted to Hizb al Tahrir, but the man who played a role in the kidnapping, if not the actual killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl was once a member of Hizb al Tahir. He was the British Pakistani called Omar Sheikh.

That is why one can say that Pakistan may be more sinned against than sinning in this case.

The most pitiable minority in the European Union is the Pakistani community in the UK whose youths are going astray under Wahhabi influence and which has to bear the brunt of official British reaction to what is going on. This community is not used to being suspected and roughed up. Barring the 1,600 mentioned by MI5, the community is completely innocent. Worse, it is backward and socially more depressed than the other expatriate communities there. Indeed, it is heart-rending to see them protesting against the rough and ready methods being used by the police against them. This is a time for serious stocktaking by the British state, the British people and the Muslim minority in the UK; the problem of terrorism can only be tackled if they cooperate with each other with a degree of understanding and sympathy. *