Intelligence

Britain’s secret plans to win Muslim hearts and minds

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

Robert Winnett and David Leppard
Bomb finds stir ministers to target the roots of terrorism

ELEVEN days ago, Whitehall’s top mandarins gathered around a table in the Cabinet Office to plan a secret project to thwart Al-Qaeda in Britain.
Sir Andrew Turnbull, the cabinet secretary and one of Tony Blair’s closest aides, was in the chair. With him were the heads of some of the most important departments in government.

The Wednesday morning meeting of permanent secretaries had been convened to discuss Contest, one of the most ambitious government social engineering projects in recent years.

Its agenda, set out in more than 100 pages of confidential documents leaked to The Sunday Times, followed growing evidence that fanatics linked to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group might be planning a terrorist “spectacular” in Britain.

Prompted by the massacre of 191 people in the Madrid bombings on March 11 and the discovery of more than half a ton of explosives and bomb-making equipment in west London a fortnight later, the cabinet had ordered Turnbull to draft a plan to tackle the roots of Islamic terrorism in Britain.

He outlined the task several days later in a letter on “Relations with the Muslim Community” to John Gieve, the permanent secretary at the Home Office.

The first item in that letter was what Turnbull candidly called “The Problem”. “There is a feeling that parts of the Muslim community, particularly younger men, are disaffected,” the cabinet secretary wrote.

“This includes some that are well-educated with good economic prospects. Al-Qaeda and its offshoots provide a dramatic pole of attraction for the most disaffected.”

Turnbull told Gieve he wanted a “strategic response” to the issues raised by ministers. “The aim is to prevent terrorism by tackling its underlying causes,” he wrote. In short, the cabinet secretary wanted nothing less than a blueprint to win the “hearts and minds” of Muslim youth.

The meeting that morning on May 19 aimed to consider Gieve’s reply and to draw up an “action plan”. In his written note, he had remarked that Islamic extremism might be a “symptom of disaffection”. The same disaffection previously surfaced during the riots that shook Oldham and Bradford in 2001.

“We need policies to handle the symptoms and limit their impact,” he added. “But the broader task is to address the roots of the problem, which include discrimination, disadvantage and exclusion suffered by many Muslim communities.”

Gieve presented the meeting with a paper jointly written by Home Office and Foreign Office civil servants and entitled Young Muslims and Extremism.

Written for Blair and drawing on a confidential Downing Street strategy unit “audit” of the 1.6m-strong Muslim community, it painted a devastating picture of how discontent among Muslims could be providing the seedbed of terrorism in Britain.

An audit cited by the Home Office found that 16% of working-age Muslims had never worked or were long-term unemployed — five times the level among the population as a whole.

More than half (51%) were economically inactive, 1½ times the figure for the general population. More than four out of 10 (43%) had no recognised educational qualification. Half of all Muslim women had never worked.

As one document noted: “Compared with the population as a whole, Muslims have three times the unemployment rate (nearly 15% against 5% for the population as a whole); the lowest economic activity rates (48% against 67% for the population as a whole); a higher proportion who are unqualified (43% against 36%); and a higher concentration in deprived areas (15% of Muslims live in the 10 most deprived districts, against 4.4% of the population as a whole)”.

In their paper, Home Office analysts tried to quantify the pool of terrorists in Britain. They suggested there may be between 10,000 and 15,000 British Muslims who “actively support” Al-Qaeda or related terrorist groups.

These numbers appear to draw on intelligence, opinion polls and a report that 10,000 Muslims attended a conference held by Hizb ut-Tahir, described by the Home Office as a “structured extremist organisation”, last year.

Although less than 1% of the Muslim population, the sheer size of the actual “pool” of potential Al-Qaeda recruits — those who go to meetings to express their support — represents a stark warning about the extent of the threat.

Al-Qaeda, the leaked paper noted, is now after the very young. “Extremists are known to target schools and colleges where young people may be very inquisitive but less challenging and more susceptible to extremist reasoning/arguments.

“There is evidence of the presence of extremist organisations on campuses and colleges.” The paper notes that even when an organisation is banned, its members often set up a society under another name.

“The 1924 Society, Muslim Media Forum and Muslim Cultural Society all have extremist tendencies,” the paper claims. However, there is no suggestion they are linked to terrorist activity.

The evidence of antipathy towards the West among a significant minority in the wider Muslim community is equally alarming. Opinion polls showed that while the majority of Muslims supported the government’s stance on the war on terror, a significant proportion were disaffected enough to say they backed Al-Qaeda’s terrorist campaigns.

An ICM poll published last March found that 13% of British Muslims thought that further terrorist attacks on America would be justified. Another poll found that up to 26% did not feel loyal to Britain.

Turnbull told his colleagues that because of the terrorist threat, Eliza Manningham-Buller, MI5’s director general, had been asked to contribute to the debate. According to the leaked documents, intelligence officers are already drawing up profiles of the typical Muslim recruited by Al-Qaeda.

Gieve summarised this MI5 evidence in his note to Turnbull. He wrote: “Muslims who are most at risk of being drawn into extremism and terrorism fall into two groups: a) well- educated with degrees or technical/professional qualifications, typically targeted by extremist recruiters and organisations circulating on campuses; b) underachievers with few or no qualifications, and often a non-terrorist criminal background — sometimes drawn to mosques where they may be targeted by extremist preachers and in other cases radicalised or converted whilst in prison.”

The leaked papers show that MI5 is now drawing up a detailed description of the terrorist career path. The aim is to identify the “specific actions taken by individuals on the path from law-abiding citizen to terrorist”.

On the basis of this, the blueprint says that ministers need a plan to “intervene at key trigger points to prevent young Muslims from becoming drawn into extremist and terrorist activity and action. We need to understand the evolution of the terrorist career path . . . to enable us to turn people from the path”.

The papers outline the need for detailed planning across key departments in Whitehall to reduce the alienation and disaffection that is leading young Muslims to join Al-Qaeda.

Dozens of officials are now working across Whitehall on plans to improve relations with the Muslim community. Their strategic aim is to win “the hearts and minds” of those who might otherwise be diverted by Al-Qaeda recruiters on to a terrorist career path.

“We need to focus specifically on influencing opinion around young Muslims,” the paper says.

Spiritual leaders are a target, as the security service has advised the government that many extremists are drawn into terrorism through their respect for “key individuals”.

In future the government plans to boost the careers of moderate clerics who back Blair’s line on terrorism, while radical foreign imams will be barred from entering the country in an effort to prevent a repeat of the fiasco over Abu Hamza, the outspoken Finsbury Park cleric now facing extradition to America (see panel below).

The documents state: “We need to find ways of strengthening the hand of moderate Muslim leaders, including the young Muslims with future leadership potential, through the status which contact with the government can confer, and through practical capacitybuilding measures.”

Among those identified by the government in the documents is Amr Khaled, 36, an accountant-turned-lay preacher who came to prominence in Egypt in the late 1990s and now lives in Britain.

Dubbed the “sheikh to the chic” or “sheikh in a suit”, his popularity, particularly with Cairo’s youth and middle classes, stems from his decision to eschew the full beard and flowing robes of the orthodox Islamic cleric and put out his message on television wearing a business suit and sporting a neatly trimmed moustache.

The government will also seek to “promote awareness” of foreign-based imams, including Hamza Yusuf and Suhaib Webb. Yusuf is an adviser to President George W Bush and is described as the “rock star of the new Muslim generation”. He recently completed a lecture tour of this country, which included an appearance on BBC1’s Question Time.

Webb, another American, helped raise money for the widows of New York firefighters killed in the September 11 attacks.

The Home Office is setting up a series of government-backed training courses for a new generation of British imams likely to be modelled on Yusuf and Webb.

The move to try to influence Muslim culture is the most controversial of an extensive package of proposals that also includes:

Creating young Muslim ambassadors to act as “role models” to “represent” Britain abroad, “signalling the UK’s pride in its Muslim youth”.
Developing “communications plans aimed at combating distorted public and media perceptions of Islam and Muslims”.
Encouraging young Muslims to enter local and national youth parliaments.
Funding moderate Islamic television and radio stations and newspapers.
Setting up right-to-buy Islamic mortgages and creating “Muslim-friendly workplaces”.
Ministers and officials will be asked to hold regular private meetings with Muslim leaders to urge them to adopt a more positive, pro-government line.

The document notes: “It is privately, within such partnerships, that Muslim representatives should be challenged to work harder at improving their relations and image with other communities (of different religions), and to be more unequivocal in their condemnation of terrorism and espousal of democratic values.”

There will be plans to combat Islamophobia and racism. These could involve extending the Race Relations Act to include religious — as well as racial — discrimination.

The first visible signs of Contest have already begun to emerge. The day after the seizure of bomb-making material in London last March, the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella group of about 400 moderate organisations, wrote to all Islamic clerics and community leaders urging them to co-operate with police in the fight against “any criminal activity including (the) terrorist threat”.

It was also announced that an influential Brighton-based imam would distribute an anti-terrorist sermon to be read out at mosques.

Improving relations with the Muslim community alone will not be enough to protect the country from Islamist fanatics. As the leaked Turnbull letter reveals, Contest is just the “first plank” in the government’s counterterrorism strategy — prevention. David Blunkett, the home secretary, is already considering more effective anti-terrorism laws that could see evidence from police phone taps introduced in court.

Officials with knowledge of Contest describe it as the longer-term phase of the government’s war on terrorism.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, ministers focused on the immediate threat. The priority then was to introduce new laws to allow police to detain foreign terrorists in Britain without trial.

Other short-term measures involved strengthening Britain’s resilience to a terrorist attack by increasing police protection of key targets, and toughening physical security measures around likely targets such as parliament, Downing Street and other government buildings.

“The idea now is to take a more co-ordinated approach to the problem,” said one insider. “We did the same in Northern Ireland in the 1980s when as well as deploying police and troops on the streets we had a massive programme of investment in the local community, raising living standards. We also set about bridge-building with the Catholic community.”

The political challenge is to get the right balance between protecting the public by cracking down on terrorist suspects without further alienating the Muslim community. Such alienation would push some of the more vulnerable Muslim youngsters into the arms of Al-Qaeda.

Labour strategists, contemplating the forthcoming general election, are only too aware that Blair’s alliance with Bush over Iraq and the war on terror may have lost votes for the party.

The leaked documents show that many law-abiding Muslims view Blair and Bush’s foreign policy as the cause of dissatisfaction.

The Home Office paper notes that many Muslims are angry at what they perceive as the “double standards” of British foreign policy “where democracy is preached but oppression of the Ummah (the one nation of believers) is practised or tolerated, eg in Palestine, Iraq, Kashmir and Chechnya”.

May 30, 2004 at 05:24 PM in UK | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home