There is no easy way of dealing with attackers who have a firm death wish
NOTHING clarifies like hindsight. The news that two out of three of the London Bridge attackers – Khura Butt and Youssef Zaghba – had flitted across the security services’ field of vision will have made a bad week worse for those charged with keeping the public safe.
They will also be concerned the attacks of March 22, May 22 and now June 3 have showed very considerable variation in terms of their modality and choice of targets. They range from an attack on the home of British democracy, towards an attempt to kindle a war on public relaxation, with massacres at a pop concert in Manchester, and on pubs and bars around London Bridge.
Only the Manchester suicide bomb attack showed any technical prowess; the others look rather opportunistic and improvised using an emergent template of a vehicle assault followed by a knife rampage. Such atrocities are low-tech, but they rely upon state-of-theart communications to generate a wider resonance.
There is an inverse relationship between means and effects here. Thus, a tactically-crude attack can be launched in the full knowledge a crowded street will be full of camera phones – dramatic images are guaranteed.
Yet for all their variation, all three of these attacks fully shared one common feature; that all five of the attackers went out, apparently, with a firm death wish and absolutely no intention of coming back.
Even though only the Manchester attacker, Salman Abedi, blew himself into fragments, it is hard to believe the other four attackers did not expect to be gunned down – as they all were.
Here Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposal of longer custodial sentences for those who flirt with joining such missions seems unlikely to have much deterrence effect. If anything, it may risk enhancing “rebel chic”: the perceived Islamist “glamour” that pulls in discontented youth and gives them a cause and meaning.
Of course, in the context of the London atrocity sharp questions about what the security services knew of Butt and Zaghba are appropriate. But wider context should also be factored in: and here it is worth sparing a thought for all those from Mrs May downwards whose unenviable job it is to protect a society whose expectations of total protection and safety are quite so extraordinarily high. After all, this is an age where you cannot buy a coffee without the cup carrying a warning that it might scald you.
In particular, the pressures on the police at the sharp end bear sympathetic assessment. Just over 100 years ago – in the Sydney Street siege of 1911 – the rules of engagement for the Metropolitan Police were so strict they had to knock on the door of the anarchist hide-out and get themselves shot before they were allowed to fire back.
Now they are expected to gun down suspected bombers accurately and within minutes. In 2017 they have done so flawlessly. In 2005, with the tragic killing of Jean-Charles de Menezes they did not. Such dilemmas must be weighing heavily on the minds of senior counter-terrorism officials.