Commemorations to mark the third anniversary of the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks in London were subdued this year. A little more than 1,000 people gathered at King’s Cross station, where the first and deadliest of the four bombs exploded that day. Mayor Boris Johnson placed flowers, as did several survivors and relatives of the victims. Then most people got back on the subway and went to work. Stereotypes about British emotional reticence are accurate, and partially explain the restraint. But there’s a deeper reason for Britons not to dwell too deeply on the bombings three years ago. Several attacks have been thwarted since. More will come.
Last year, Jonathan Evans, the head of Britain’s MI5 domestic secret service, said the agency was watching some 2,000 people who posed a threat to Britain’s security, a number that had risen by 400 since the previous year. He added that the threat had not yet peaked. “Al-Qaeda has a clear determination to mount terrorist attacks against the United Kingdom,” he said. He rejected the idea that these threats come mostly from homegrown freelancers who have been radicalized on the Internet, noting that MI5 estimates half of the suspects it is monitoring have been trained at camps in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas.
This Pakistani connection is one of the reasons why Britain is so vulnerable. Al-Qaeda has suffered setbacks in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and across the world clerics and scholars who were once supportive have turned against it. But al-Qaeda continues to thrive in Pakistan—where it may have played a role in the horrific Sept. 20 suicide bombing at Islamabad’s Marriott hotel that left 53 people dead . “The group has retained or regenerated key elements of its capability, including top leadership, operational mid-level lieutenants, and de facto safe haven in Pakistan’s border area with Afghanistan,” Mike McConnell, the American director of national intelligence, told Congress earlier this year. British Pakistanis make thousands of visits to Pakistan every year. Many come from conservative and poorly developed regions such as Kashmir. They are particularly sought-after al-Qaeda recruits because their passports promise easy access to Europe and the United States, and some are sympathetic. Tahir Pervez, an uncle of the July 7 bomber Shehzad Tanweer, travels frequently between the two countries. This year, as mourners gathered at King’s Cross to commemorate those murdered by Tanweer and his co-conspirators, Pervez hosted a celebration at his nephew’s grave in Pakistan.
According to Paul Cruickshank, a fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security, British Muslims are among the most radicalized in western Europe. “Britain is a key battleground in the fight against al-Qaeda,” he said in an interview with Maclean’s. “The trends that are going to appear in the future are likely going to appear in London first.”
