Excerpt:
From the little information available so far, it is possible that the nine arrested men were linked to the London-headquartered al-Muhajiroun. The organisation was proscribed in January this year, but continues to function underground. Last year, The Telegraph reported that a US diplomat had said the UK had "the greatest concentration of active al-Qaeda supporters of any Western country."
In a superb monograph, Jytte Klausen has claimed that al-Muhajiroun and its successor networks were implicated in 19 of 56 jihadist plots linked to the UK between December, 1998, and February, 2010. The bombing of the Indian Army's XV corps headquarters in Srinagar in December, 2000; the attack on a Tel Aviv bar in April 2003; or last year's 9/11 anniversary plot: all these involved elements of al-Muhajiroun's British networks. The International Crisis Group has documented the flow of funds from these networks to the al-Qaeda linked Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen in Bangladesh.
There's an important lesson here, which is this: policing, though critical, isn't going to win this war. Leah Farrall, who is among the most perceptive experts on Islamist terrorism, recently observed "that disrupting a network is equated with weakening it, which I don't think is necessarily the case." She's right: hundreds have been held since the tragic events of 2005, but the threat hasn't receded. That is because while the UK's police and intelligence services have shown skill and determination, there is no credible political challenge to Islamism itself.