In January 2009, the head of Britain's Security Service (also known as MI5) boasted that his agents were succeeding in cracking down on potentially violent homegrown Islamists. Although conceding that "the battle [was] not won," Jonathan Evans told the Daily Telegraph that his agents were forcing would-be terrorists "to keep their heads down." He went on to note that there were undoubtedly terrorists planning attacks somewhere -- but probably not in Britain.
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His optimism, however hedged, was understandable. His interview took place 3 1/2 years after the London terrorist attacks of July 7, 2005. During that period, the British authorities put dozens of would-be terrorists on trial and thwarted numerous attacks. In the immediate wake of 7/7, the Security Service's public critics had taken its bosses to task for infiltrating violent groups without doing more to break them up. Needless to say, Britain's domestic spies immediately set out to do just that, in a flurry of arrests and prosecutions.
But that, of course, was before Christmas Day 2009, when a young Nigerian -- the former head of the Islamic students' association at University College London -- tried to blow up an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight and shattered the myth of Britain's newfound imperviousness to Islamism. Though security officials in Britain insist that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab radicalized after he left the country for Yemen (Sanaa, in turn, blames everything on London), the case of the Underwear Bomber has dramatized the extent to which Britain remains a launching pad for jihad. (Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka prefers the term "cesspit" to describe London's function as an Islamist breeding ground.)
Just in case the Brits hadn't figured that out, the usual anonymous U.S. State Department official was happy to do it for them. Last month, an official told the Daily Telegraph that their country "has the greatest concentration of active al Qaeda supporters [in the West]," posing a threat to Britain and "the rest of the world." The same article cited a fresh and ominous finding from the director of MI5. He estimated his service was aware of some 2,000 "radicalized Muslims" who might be involved in terrorist plots. That figure, of course, doesn't include the population of plotters who have escaped MI5 scrutiny, like Abdulmutallab. As if to underline the threat, on Jan. 12, the British government banned two of the country's most notorious Islamist organizations, Islam4UK and Al Muhajiroun, under a 2000 anti-terrorism law.
So why is this particular front in the war on terrorism proving such a challenge? Haras Rafiq, a British Muslim who founded a think tank to combat Islamic extremism, worries that a big share of the blame goes to his own government. For decades, he says, Britain tolerated plotting by domestic Islamic radicals as long as they targeted other countries, often ones in the Middle East. "We gave them freedom to preach violence and extremism -- [as long as] they were preaching it abroad and not in the U.K. They used that freedom to take over community organizations, mosques, TV stations," he says. "They've been building capacity for their viewpoint." He describes the radicals' techniques as strikingly reminiscent of those of 20th-century communists and fascists. The Islamists have also mimicked the Irish Republican movement by using ostensibly non-violent political groups to covertly radical ends.
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