“The real question is, is it part of a plan that is being directed by someone?”’ said David Bentley, an analyst in terrorism law at London-based policy research group Chatham House. “London today, Glasgow tomorrow, then maybe Birmingham or Manchester?’”
That question, from Bloomberg’s update on the story of abortive terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow certainly is a question but I don’t think it’s the only question.
The number of arrests in connection with the incidents has now risen to seven (six men and a woman) in England and Scotland. They’re being variously described as “al-Qaeda”, “al-Qaeda affiliated”, “al-Qaeda linked”, “sympathetic to al-Qaeda” and other similarly unhelpful descriptions. Frankly, I doubt that these particular would-be mass murderers received their directions from Osama bin Laden or that their plan was approved or contributed to by Osama bin Laden or his close associates. I find the term “al-Qaeda linked” troubling since we’re all linked to al-Qaeda in an Erdös number sort of way. Does it mean “linked to al-Qaeda with an Erdös number of 1”? 2? 10? I suspect that the entire Muslim world is linked to al-Qaeda with a fairly low Erdös number. “Six degrees of separation” and all. It’s meaningless.
But I think that the need to link terrorists to al-Qaeda does reflect a faultline between those who actually believe that we should respond in any way to radical Islamist terrorism. That’s what the “Afghanistan where the real war on terror is” notion is based on. If you believe that we are engaged in a war against al-Qaeda and that al-Qaeda is a relatively small number of people mostly holed up in the wilds of tribal Pakistan, that’s exactly what you do believe and you must be pretty darned frustrated at what’s been going on for the last six years. If, on the other hand, you think (as I do) that our problem is violent radical Islamist terrorists and you don’t much care whether they’re al-Qaeda, affiliated, linked to, or even heard of. Dead is dead whether murdered by doctors with exploding cars in Glasgow or terrorists flying planes into buildings.
The view of the War on Terror as broader has its own mistaken and, IMO, counterproductive subview: that Islam itself is the enemy a view I categorically reject since I don’t think it’s inevitable that Muslims become violent terrorists any more than I think it’s inevitable that Christians be Albigensians.
But I can see how people would be eager to discover ways of linking disaffected Muslims in Britain or Iraq with the al-Qaeda hiding in caves whereever they are if only in an attempt to convince those who think the real war is in Afghanistan otherwise. It’s not working. They’re complaining that everybody is being called al-Qaeda these days.
I think that only real use of the term al-Qaeda these days is for propaganda (maybe it’s always been the only real use). We can use it that way, too. In that sense we should flog the incompetence, impotence, and fecklessness of al-Qaeda for all we’re worth. Repute is what the terrorists mostly have to go on.
Cernig, a Scot, continues to be a good source of information on the situation, particularly on the Glasgow component.
