Ganesh Sahathevan rightly drew our attention to a problem that may now open up in Australia’s counter-terrorism policies, in his recent article here entitled ’Australia to adapt British national security policies; more resources into building relationships, less for intelligence agencies.’
Britain, on the one hand, has achieved less and less effective policing over the last few years thanks to an increasingly bureaucratic police culture that sends fewer police into the field to prevent and investigate crime, something that definitely also doesn’t help to prevent or deter terrorism; although it has to be said in fairness that the British government is now investing much more in the intelligence services. And on the other hand, the premise that Ganesh describes as motivating the new Australian government, that terrorism can only be halted by tackling its root causes of poverty, racial discrimination and so on, is indeed politically correct humbug.
Nevertheless, I would like to play devil’s advocate. There are at least two very good reasons why it is important for the British, Australian and other governments, especially when acting through their police forces, to build relationships with local immigrant communities if they want to fight terrorism, not least terror financing.
The first is that effective counter-terrorism starts with intelligence. If the government wants to defend the broader community from terrorism that originates within a particular immigrant group, or that is aided and promoted by members of that group, then it must start by developing intelligence sources within that group -- whether Sudanese, Pakistani, Tamil or whatever. In the counter-terrorism finance world, too many people believe that terrorist outrages are mainly stopped or detected by the transaction-monitoring software deployed by banks, or by eagle-eyed bank clerks and compliance managers. But according to one of the most experienced terror finance investigators in the UK, most of these investigations actually start from intelligence gathered by the security services: only at the point where intelligence targets have been identified does the investigation move across to these targets’ financial activities, which frequently corroborate the original suspicions, add necessary detail about the planned outrage, and make it possible to arrest or neutralise the potential terrorists and foil their plans. To gather this intelligence effectively -- preferably from people who trust the police and security services rather than from paid informants who are inherently unreliable -- the government has to gain the confidence and trust of the community, and to make its members, and especially its leaders, believe that the government regards them as loyal and trustworthy, rather than as members of a fifth column.
The second reason has to do with the nature of terrorism itself. Terrorism is not all about hijacking civilian airliners and flying them into iconic public buildings at great loss of life. It can also be about frightening parts of the population, or the entire population, or the government, into inaction and passivity without deploying violence at all. The immigrant communities in the democratic nations such as the USA, Britain, France or Australia, especially the Muslim immigrant communities, are actually the most vulnerable targets for the disaffected young people who most often turn into terrorists or active supporters. This small minority of extremists is able to exploit the general weakness and timidity of the community not only to spread extreme religious or nationalist ideology and seditious propaganda, but also to intimidate the moderate majority, find shelter within the community and raise money: Hassan Butt, a former jihadi within the British Muslim community who has changed sides and now writes frequently about this phenomenon, has described how easily his former colleagues would raise cash contributions for the jihad from middle-class professionals in the British Pakistani community. The governments of the democratic nations that are endangered by terrorism need to make a very clear statement, by developing strong and credible relations in these immigrant communities, that they will protect the silent majority from intimidation or worse, no less than they will protect the broader community.
Does this work? It’s difficult to tell: no police or security service chief will talk in public, except in the most general terms possible, about the successes achieved in gathering intelligence from sensitive immigrant communities or in reassuring them that it is safe to cooperate, since clearly nobody in these communities wants to attract suspicion as a collaborator, and probably a painful death. However, from conversations I have had in London, it is clear that a community relations project between the police and the population in a key area of central London with a very large Arab immigrant community has both helped to produce intelligence and to defuse potential tension. And it is certainly not by accident that the British security service is actively trying to recruit staff from within the immigrant communities: it is not only a question of language and cultural familiarity that make it easier to develop intelligence sources and gather necessary information, but also of helping these communities understand that they, too, are targets of extremist terrorists and that they have a common interest with the rest of the country in fighting them.
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