IBS

Reuters

IT IS becoming a dreadful summer ritual for Britain. On July 7th, 2005, suicide bombers struck London’s public transport system, killing 52 and injuring 700; two weeks later four more would-be bombers attempted to repeat the attacks but failed to detonate their explosives in underground trains. In August last year British authorities said they had foiled another massive attack, in which terrorists apparently planned to blow up several transatlantic airliners mid-flight, supposedly through the use of liquid explosives. That caused months of disruptions at airports in Britain and elsewhere.

Two failed attacks in Britain in the past few days suggest that more of the same may indeed be expected. A car-bomb was driven into Glasgow airport on Saturday June 30th, and two car-bombs were discovered in London the day before. These failed to kill anyone, but investigators are claiming to have found a treasure trove of forensic and human intelligence. Seven suspects have been arrested, with British authorities quick to make clear that the people in custody are not British and nor had they been in the country for long. Evidence gathered from the cars involved—including one that burst into flames at Glasgow airport—and recordings made by closed circuit television cameras is helping to give investigators a detailed picture of how these particular attacks were planned.

But the broader picture is far harder to assess. The timing of the attacks is intriguing. They would have coincided with the arrival of a new government in Britain, under Gordon Brown, who became prime minister last week. If the assaults had succeeded in either British city—the cars in London were packed with petrol, gas canisters and nails—the bombs could have killed many people. Yet the apparent incompetence of the attackers is striking: although some of them seemed ready to kill themselves in the assaults, they in effect bungled both the London and the Glasgow attempts.

That failure raises questions about al-Qaeda, if those attacks were indeed planned by individuals associated with the Islamist terror network. It suggests that there is variable ability among al-Qaeda’s operatives, some of whom are highly professional, but others who are fanatical yet amateurish. If it is indeed the case that the attackers in Britain were not “home-grown terrorists”—the four successful killers in the July 2005 bombings were all British; of the five unsuccessful attackers later that month, only two had been born in Britain—that raises questions about how al-Qaeda recruits members for its attacks.

But there is a more alarming possibility, too. For some time Britain’s intelligence services have been giving warning that they risk being swamped by the sheer number of potential terror attacks. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, MI5's departed head, said in November that her service was tracking more than 1,600 known active militants (up from 250 in 2001, according to a parliamentary report). Those extremists operated in a pool of perhaps 100,000 sympathisers who, according to one poll she cited, thought the 2005 London bombings were justified.

Attempted bombings like these recent ones may not be carried out by the most effective al-Qaeda operatives, but even failed strikes take up a huge quantity of time from intelligence officers and police, potentially distracting them from other planned attacks. In Britain MI5 is expanding substantially, from 1,800 staff in 2001 to a projected 3,500 in 2008. But growth takes time, as does the training of new officers and the recruiting of informers. Meanwhile the number of suspected terrorist networks is growing exponentially, roughly doubling every year since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The great fear, therefore, is that al-Qaeda will attempt to swamp Britain with repeated attacks—some professional, some amateurish, some relatively easily foiled, some not—making it ever more likely that a big one, such as these might have been, will one day succeed again.