Third Annual Colin Cramphorn Memorial Lecture

“Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: what next?”

Delivered by Charles Farr OBE, Director General of the Office for Security and
Counter-Terrorism in the Home Office.
25 March 2009

I am very grateful to Policy Exchange for the invitation to give this talk. I never met
Colin Cramphorn but I have seen what he achieved and the legacy he left for policing
and our counter terrorist work. It is immense; I would like to return to it later on.

But I’d first like to consider some of the themes in the revised counter terrorist
strategy, CONTEST, published by the Government yesterday and, specifically, three
key issues: what terrorists are trying to achieve and the nature of the threats we
now face; how these threats have emerged; and the broad features and principles of
our intended response.

I think I can best explain the first of these points by comparing the international
terrorist threat in the seventies and early eighties with the threats we face now.

The first sustained phase of international terrorism – at least as it affected this

country - was focused on Palestinian related issues and terrorist operations were
conducted primarily by a variety of Palestinian groups. Internationally, this phase
began for us in 1970 with the hijacking of a British airliner by the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP. It was subsequently marked by the Munich
airport massacre and later by the actions of the renegade Abu Nidal Organisation. At
the time the threat from ANO and some other Palestinian organisations seemed to
be high. It was certainly unfamiliar: we had seen nothing like it before.

Terrorist groups operating in this period were usually concerned with a specific
political issue, the creation of a Palestinian state. They had little or no interest in
regime change across the Arab or broader Islamic world, though at various times
they certainly caused significant unrest in both Jordan and Lebanon. They conducted
attacks which were deliberately limited in scope, often directed against Jewish and
Israeli targets. As far as I know they did not consider or even imagine the use of
weapons of mass destruction. They were often state sponsored, something which
perhaps explains much about their behaviour.

Like terrorists before and since these groups sought publicity. They had a carefully
crafted public message, which tried to attract support for their political objective.
They made no attempt to justify their actions by reference to anything other than
the political grievances they felt and the validity of their cause. They had no outward
religious motivation: some were Marxist and many were influenced by secular
European terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof.

These groups made little or no systematic attempt to recruit people to their cause in
this country or elsewhere in the non Islamic world. I suspect that, for them, the idea
would have seemed very strange. They considered themselves an elite and not a
vanguard.

In the eighties terrorism changed. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that an
event of really lasting significance (surely comparable to the Iranian revolution) was
the assassination of President Sadat of Egypt in 1981 - not because it succeeded in
overthrowing the state but because it marked the arrival of a new type of terrorist
organisation.

Their purpose was regime change. They wanted to establish what they regarded as a
genuine Islamic state ruled by Islamic law. They claimed to be able to justify their
actions by reference to Islam. No doubt, the example of revolutionary Iran played
some part in their thinking. They did not ignore Palestine. But, as one of them later
remarked, they thought the way to Jerusalem was through Cairo1.

Disrupted by the Egyptian security forces, the Egyptian organisations migrated to

Afghanistan with the intention of challenging the Soviet army, and again re-
establishing an Islamic state. They joined forces with what at first was a very small
number of like minded groups from around the Arab world.

Two things happened. The aim of these groups evolved, from confronting an
apostate government to challenging the invasion of what they regarded and
described as Muslim land. And they internationalised their struggle. They openly
sought recruits from across the Islamic and non Islamic worlds, including the US
(particularly New York) and the UK, where they found a sympathetic and supportive
audience. They styled themselves as ‘mujahideen’, meaning people engaged in jihad,
a term they used to refer to armed combat or conflict2.

By 1989 the Soviet army withdrew and these groups claimed victory. The myth was
then established that they had defeated a superpower.

In the following few years some people in these groups became the core of the
Taliban. Others – including influential members of the earlier Egyptian terrorist
groups - had already created Al Qai’da and continued to seek regime change in the
Islamic world. They came to see the West itself as a target, on the grounds that the
West (notably, of course, America) was judged to be supporting, sustaining and in
particular occupying the apostate regimes to which they took exception. They
thought the West was conducting a war on Islam itself. Having taken on one

1
The remark was made by Ayman al Zawahiri, writing in 1995 in Al Muhajidun, the publication of
Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Quoted in Gilles Kepel and Jean Pierre Milleli, (eds) Al Qaeda in its own
words (Cambridge Mass and London: Harvard, 2008) p156.
2
This is clearly set out in the very influential work of Abdallah Azzam, an ideologue for jihad in
Afghanistan - for example Join the Caravan, reproduced in Kepel and Milleli (eds), p.122
superpower they determined to take on the other and they declared war on
America3.

They also developed their case for murdering civilians. They thought that democracy
had become a ‘new religion’, based on ‘making the people into gods and giving them
God’s rights and attributes’4. They argued that civilians in America and in allied
countries should be killed because they had voted for the Governments who were
now at war with Islam5. So they concluded that democracy had turned civilians into
targets.

For all Western states the significance of this was unclear for much longer than now
seems possible. We did not always understand the points Al Qai’da was making,
perhaps because they made them at great length, a long way away and in a language
and with a vocabulary which was unfamiliar: the terrorism of Al Qai’da and like
minded organisations was very different from the Palestinian terrorism which had
gone before it.

Fast forward twenty years. The threat we face now is driven not by a regional but a
global cause. Al Qai’da and its associates still want to change Governments and
fashion a new world order. We think of them as terrorist organisations but they
aspire to create an insurgency, meaning (according to the NATO definition) ‘a
movement which seeks to overthrow a Government by armed conflict and
subversion’6. That is their fundamental aim. Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, has been
clear on this point, remarking that the key objective of the Al Qai’da movement is to
establish what he describes as a ‘Muslim authority’ on ‘Muslim territory’7.

3
See for example the Declaration of Jihad by Usama bin Laden and others; parts of the text are
translated in Bruce Lawrence (ed) Messages to the World: the statements of Osama bin Laden
(London: Verso, 2005) p. 23; and Kepel and Milleli, p. 53.
4
The quotation is from Ayman al Zawahiri’s Advice to Reject the Fatwa of Bin Baz, translated in Kepel
and Milleli (eds), p.184. The text probably dates from the early 1990’s.
5
See for example Bin Laden’s comments in Lawrence (ed) p. 47 and p.61
6
www.nato.int/docu/stanag/aap006/aap6.htm
7
Ayman Al Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophets Banner, reproduced in Kepel and Milleli (eds) , p.
205
So for Al Qai’da and groups like it terrorism is a tactic, a means to an end, albeit a
tactic of a particularly ruthless and novel kind, involving indiscriminate killing of large
numbers of people using any kind of weapons, including chemical, biological,
radiological or even nuclear. I don’t think we can recast counter terrorism as
counter insurgency: but I can see why some people suggest that we should8.

Al Qai’da and like minded organisations differ in another and perhaps much more
profound way from the Palestinian secular groups which came before them because
they also claim that terrorism and insurgency are religious obligations. They
commend ‘martyrdom’ and suicide operations because they earn reward in the
afterlife. They invoke the duty to jihad, a concept which has a fundamental place in
Islamic thought, but develop its meaning to include not just resistance to the
occupation of Muslim land (the position of the early mujahideen in Afghanistan) but
also attacks on the United States and its allies, like us, and on civilians wherever they
may be. Zawahiri writes that ‘confronting’ what he describes as unbelievers is a
‘pillar of faith’9.

So Al Qai’da consider themselves a vanguard as well as elite. They look to recruit

people from across the Islamic and the non Islamic worlds, including this country.
They want to create a mass movement. For that reason, Al Qai’da and other like
minded groups have tried to enter our societies in a way that international terrorist
organisations had not tried before.

I do not therefore think we can characterise the threat we face only in terms of the
number of people engaged in violent extremism in this country, huge challenge
though that is. We need to consider the threat posed by insurgency, by the
aspiration to destabilise and change Governments and to alter the shape of the
Islamic world. And we also need to reflect on the challenge posed by an ideology

8
For example David Kilcullen, ‘Countering Global Insurgency’ in The Journal of Strategic Studies
August 2005, pp 597-617 and ‘Subversion and Countersubversion in the Campaign against Terrorism
in Europe’ in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 2007, pp 647-666.
9
Ayman Al Zawahiri, Loyalty and Separation, reproduced in Kepel and Milleli (eds), p. 231.
that tries to set one faith group against another, make violence an obligation and
appeal directly to people here to join a global terrorist movement.

The CONTEST strategy argues that we have never faced a terrorist threat of this
complexity before. There are few analogies either with the earlier international
groups which had an impact on this country or with Irish related terrorism. This is
different.

Why is it necessary to make these points? Partly, I think, because we want to

connect strategy to history; partly because we have to connect insurgency to
terrorism; and partly because unless we agree the outline of the threat, our
response will often seem neither necessary nor proportionate. That seems to have
been the issue in some of the debates about counter terrorism during the past year:
the argument has been not just about the nature of the Government’s response but
more fundamentally about the extent of the problem itself.

- 2-

Terrorist objectives are not the only basis on which to build a counter terrorist
strategy. CONTEST also argues that we need to identify the factors which have
enabled terrorism to develop as it has over the past twenty years.

I have already mentioned one – the ideology that has come to be linked to Al Qai’da;
but there are three others, of rather different kinds, which seem to be important.

The first is conflict and the failure of states.

Contemporary terrorist groups have emerged in and been developed by unresolved

disputes, specifically conflict in the Muslim world or conflict affecting Muslims and
often conflict in which the West is somehow engaged. Palestine, Afghanistan,
Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon, Kashmir, Iraq and now Somalia are all obvious examples.
Conflict has created conditions for terrorist recruitment, facilitated training and
provided a theatre for the rapid development of operational expertise.

Conflict is a frequent characteristic of failed or fragile states although there are

certainly others, including poor governance and erosion of the rule of law. Failing or
fragile states create safe havens where terrorist organisations have assembled,
settled and then grown, free from Government sanction. Afghanistan, the Tribal
Areas of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and much of sub Saharan Africa are all areas on
which Al Qai’da and associated groups depend for their very survival.

In failed and fragile states terrorist organisations like Al Qai’da also have the greatest
chance of creating an insurgency and challenging Government authority and power.
Research suggests that, as a general rule, the poorer the country the more terrorist
groups reach the insurgency stage and of course the longer it then takes to control
them – on average fourteen years10.

The second factor is technology.

It is one of the accidents of history that at the moment when terrorist organisations
set out to change the way that people think and behave, so technology, developed
for the US military, provided it with the perfect tool to do so.

The communications revolution, the internet, has enabled the current generation of
terrorists to reach far more people than they ever could before – and, as I have said,
with a quite different message. The fact that cognitive change in the hyper reality of
the internet seems to take place much faster and with less challenge than anywhere
else only makes it a more powerful and appropriate terrorist tool.

Many contemporary terrorist groups have their own media teams. Al Qai’da is just
one example. There are over 4000 terrorist related websites. Ten years ago there

10
Seth Jones and Martin Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End, Lessons for Countering Al Qai’da (Santa
Monica: RAND Corporation, 2008)
were about twelve and the communications tool of choice was the fax machine. The
cumulative effect of the 4000, in conjunction with international satellite television,
has been to establish a new worldwide global audience, watching not only every
move made by Al Qai’da and other like minded groups but also every move we make
in response.

Technology has had other impacts. It has enabled terrorists to more easily and
securely communicate with one another, to plan their operations from a distance
and to obtain and then share more lethal weapons. Terrorists aspire to develop and
use chemical, biological and radiological weapons and look to the internet to assist
them.

But neither conflict nor technology would have enabled terrorism unless some
people, for whatever reasons, were prepared to support it. Radicalisation – the
process by which people come to support terrorism and violent extremism - is
therefore the final key factor or enabler and perhaps the most important.

Radicalisation has obvious effects.

Not everyone who is radicalised becomes a member of a terrorist organisation or an

insurgency. But it is from those who are radicalised that these groups are able to
recruit and to survive.

Moreover, as the agenda of the radicalised or even parts of it, enters the political
blood stream so it may be a constraint on authorities around the world, aware of the
possible risks from publicly challenging militant networks or their ideology. The
wider effect of radicalisation can be the absence of an international consensus about
the challenge we face and of the international support on which we depend.

A great deal has now been written on the causes as opposed to the effects of
radicalisation. This is summarised in CONTEST. Several points are particularly
important.
People support terrorism today as they have in the past for a wide range of reasons.
They vary from one country and group to another; even within a single organisation
the motivation of those in the leadership can differ significantly from those who are
not.

Certainly, some people become terrorists because they hold political grievances.
Open source research suggests that significant numbers of Muslims believe that
some Western states have set out to deliberately weaken and divide the Islamic
world and to dominate their land, resources and culture11. There is a widespread and
fundamental view that the Western world does not respect its Islamic counterpart or
Islam as a religion12. Research suggests that the stronger these grievances the more
likely people may be to approve of terrorism and the more vulnerable they will be to
the ideology of Al Qai’da and other groups like it13.

But many people are also drawn to terrorist groups because they offer the security
and support that Governments in failed or fragile states cannot provide. Others join
or even create terrorist groups for reasons connected with nationalism or the well
being of a clan or a tribe. Some drift into terrorism because they lose their bearings,
and are disconnected from family, community and state, perhaps by migration or
criminality but also by a range of other socio economic grievances; and some get
recruited into terrorist organisations because they value the personal support which
those organisations can provide.

So radicalisation is rarely just a function of ideology and perhaps even less so in this
country than in some others. People come to support and even to join organisations
like Al Qai’da for a range of external reasons; they buy the brand and – to extend the
metaphor - sometimes even want to sell it, but not always because of the contents.

11
Stephen Kull, Muslim Public Opinion on US policy, Attacks on Civilians and al Qaeda (University
of Maryland: World Public Opinion.org 2007).
12
John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think
(New York: Gallup Press, 2007), p. 91
13
Stephen Weber, Perceptions of the US and Support for Violence against America (Maryland:
University of Maryland, Studies on Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, START, 2006).
This is fundamental when we come to consider our response: counter ideology and
counter radicalisation are not the same thing.

Clearly the factors I have talked about here – conflict and state failure, ideology,
technology and radicalisation are related. They tend to reinforce one another.
Conflicts create grievances which are interpreted and exploited by ideology and
technology and which can lead to the radicalisation process. Radicalisation –
amongst many of other factors – contributes to state failure and conflict. There is of
course nothing inevitable about this cycle. But it happens; one interpretation of our
task is that we need to break it.

-3-

I have tried to explain here the ambition and objectives of contemporary terrorism
and the factors which have enabled terrorism to become what it is today.

In very simple terms the response outlined in CONTEST takes three parts.

We need to address what we might call the symptoms of the problem - planned
terrorist attacks or insurgent movements. The first is the theme of CONTEST. The
second is connected to and coordinated closely with it. Both operate within the
broader framework now provided by the Government’s National Security Strategy,
published last year.

Our experience in Europe over the past few years illustrates how both these
challenges affect us. The immediate threat we have faced has come partly from
people intending to attack targets here and cause civilian casualties. Many people
have been arrested. We have seen and continue to see attempts by Al Qai’da, their
affiliates and like minded groups to conduct operations.

We believe these attempts are likely to persist even as the shape and structure of Al
Qa’ida may change under concerted pressure against the leadership group in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is clearly not the case that a change in structure will lead
to a reduction in the threats. Indeed, it might create exactly the kind of structure
that some people in Al Qai’da have long argued would be most effective14.

But these terrorist operations are often planned in the areas where insurgency has
begun to take root and where Al Qai’da and associated networks have obtained
control. The people who conduct operations here often train over there and receive
instructions from the leadership in the region.

Moreover, we have also seen many people from across Europe travelling to take part
in these insurgencies, mainly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and more recently in
Somalia. Indeed, of the people arrested in Europe in the past few years a very
significant proportion – probably the majority - have been trying to engage in
insurgency and not initially in terrorism. Entire facilitation networks have emerged
around Europe to enable them to do so. Some of these people then intend to come
back to Europe and reengage with the terrorist networks whose focus is on
operations here.

So terrorism and insurgency have become interwoven and even interdependent. The
stability of Governments overseas is vital to us for a very wide range of reasons, but
our own domestic security is certainly one.

There is, I know, a school of thought that argues that whatever Al Qai’da might say it
is neither serious about nor capable of insurgency. I think this is a mistake. It is
certainly very important to talk about the failure of Al Qai’da. CONTEST does this. Al
Qai’da and its affiliates have not succeeded in creating mass movements. They have
not yet overthrown Governments, let alone established a state. They are not as big
as they would like to be and as they often claim. It is possible to read their repetitive
press statements as a spurious claim for relevance. They have provided no support

14
Some of the debate inside Al Qai’da about these issues is summarised in Gilles Kepel, Beyond
Terrorism and Martyrdom (Cambridge Mass and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp.160-
171
to Muslim communities: rather the opposite - they have killed Muslims in great
numbers. Certainly they are regarded with revulsion in communities here and across
the world.

But failure has been a consequence of continued international pressure and not luck
or chance. Al Qai’da remain committed to regime change - as Zawahiri has said,
however long it takes and whatever sacrifices are required15 - and are working with
and alongside the many and varied groups who share at least part of their cause.
Some of these are formal Al Qai’da affiliates; others are semi independent. They may
not yet be capable of overthrowing states. But they are capable of taking over areas
and using them to try to take over more. That of course was the intent in Iraq and
remains the intent in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and parts of sub
Saharan Africa.

So dealing with terrorist attack planning and coordinating with counter insurgency
work are key themes in CONTEST. But one of the main arguments in CONTEST is that
dealing with symptoms is not going to be enough. We also need to address the
underlying enablers or causes I touched on earlier. This is about conflict and state
failure, ideology and technology as well as radicalisation. It is a key principle that we
cannot do either symptoms or causes. We have to do both. In that sense the answer
to the question – counter terrorism: what next? – is not just more counter terrorism,
or at least not in the way we sometimes describe it.

I am not going to spend much time on how we might address conflict resolution and
state failure and fragility. These are not only or mainly matters for counter terrorism
and, for broader reasons, they feature in the National Security Strategy. Of almost
thirty countries recently identified as being at risk of conflict or state failure, half
have already experienced terrorist attacks16. We know that conflicts exploited by

15
Ayman Al Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, reproduced in Kepel and Milleli (eds), p.
205
16
The Interim Report of the IPPR Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, Shared
Destinies, Security in a Globalised World (London: IPPR, 2008), p. 57.
terrorist organisations show no sign of early resolution. We can see their corrosive
effect.

The challenges of technological change are perhaps less familiar.

Some new technologies, often developed for peaceful purposes, are or will be
capable of lethal application and use by terrorist groups. We worry about chemical,
biological, radiological and even nuclear exploitation and that is reflected in
CONTEST. This threat is as much about supply of these materials as it is about
demand for them. Other technologies will make terrorist operations easier to plan
and conduct. New age communications, for example, confer greater privacy and
anonymity than before and are much faster and more flexible.

We can anticipate these technologies and, often by developing other technologies,

we can try to stop terrorists taking advantage of them. We can protect ourselves
against their possible deployment. We can prepare for the possibility that they may
be used and anticipate the actions that will then be required. We can reach
multilateral agreements that will support our domestic programmes. But we cannot
stop technology or stand still in its path.

The internet is a particular case. It’s not a country with borders and a police force.
Governments cannot ask someone to remove 4000 websites. And if they could the
websites would reappear a day later somewhere else. But we can better understand
the use to which the internet is being put by violent extremists. We can and do
develop ways in which we can level the playing field, enabling others to respond to
terrorist messaging and propaganda. We can support multilateral programmes,
notably with the EU and the UN, as they try to develop collaborative research work
in this area. And Government has placed much greater emphasis on counter terrorist
related communications. This is all set out in CONTEST.
I think it is partly because our ability to shape state failure and technology is
inevitably limited that we tend to focus on the work we do to counter ideologies and
disrupt radicalisation.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this. The ability of communities and

Governments to reach and persuade those who already support violent extremism is
limited. But their ability to reach and persuade those who hold grievances or are
vulnerable to radicalisation for other reasons is much greater. CONTEST argues that
the extent to which the international community can collectively do so will
significantly determine the future shape of the threat.

The Government has set a series of objectives for Prevent. They include challenging
the ideology that regards terrorism as a religious obligation. But we also aim to
disrupt the propagandists for this ideology, identify and support people vulnerable
to radicalisation, build community resilience and address some of the grievances
which can lead people to engage with violent extremist organisations. These
grievances include a misreading of our foreign policy and, in particular, the view that
we are trying to weaken and divide the Islamic world and to humiliate its religion.

But positioning Prevent is vital. It does not dominate Pursue or CONTEST. Its purpose
is not community cohesion, though cohesive communities undoubtedly facilitate
counter radicalisation. It is neither about supporting one extremist against another
nor criminalising ‘types’ of extremism for the first time. Neither the new nor the old
CONTEST strategies talk about these things. Nor (as is sometimes claimed) is it
simply about the application of soft power: a key part of this work is to identify,
disrupt and where possible to prosecute propagandists for violence.

And it’s not just domestic and local: the international agenda on Prevent is every bit
as important as it is for other parts of counter terrorism. Ideas cross borders. We
work under the scrutiny of a global audience. Communities in this country are
influenced as much by the media and events overseas as they are by the media and
events here. The term ‘homegrown’ terrorist has never been very helpful and the
internet has made it largely redundant.

I have said that CONTEST sets out to deal with symptoms and with causes. But it also
aims to ensure that in addressing symptoms, in handling the immediacy and urgency
of an attack, in saving lives, we do not inadvertently reinforce the very factors which
we are trying to resolve. We have to ensure that in the process of disrupting a
terrorist network here or tackling an insurgency overseas we do not create or
reinforce state failure or fragility, provide fuel for an ideology, enable the use of
lethal technologies by terrorist groups and enhance the process of radicalisation.

No strategy will provide a neat solution to all the challenges we face. It is a strategy,
not a mathematical formula. But there are principles running through CONTEST, set
out in terms, which try to give it consistency and are intended to avoid parts of the
strategy conflicting with one another. Some of the most important are rights, values,
partnerships and people.

Rights and values are at the forefront of both the National Security Strategy and
CONTEST. The aim of the strategy is ‘to reduce the risk from terrorism so that people
can go about their lives freely and with confidence’. ‘Freely’ is a key word. The
strategy explains how measures the Government has taken to protect the right to
life are consistent with other rights which form the basis for society. By providing an
objective account of the threat, CONTEST also seeks to demonstrate the necessity
and proportionality of the Government’s response to it. Discussing rights without
considering these threats has become commonplace but is surely an imperfect basis
for debate.

The Government has also made clear that this is not just a strategy about protecting
rights. It’s about promoting rights, values and, as the document says, the ‘kind of
society we want for ourselves’17. And that also means – in this and other contexts -

17
The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism CM7547 (London: The
Stationary Office, 2009) p.87.
challenging those who reject those rights and values, ‘for whatever reason or
cause’18. This is not quite as new as has sometimes been claimed. The National
Security Strategy talks in similar terms19.

But if rights and values are at the forefront of these strategies so are partnerships
and people. The more counter terrorism is something we do with and not to people,
the less likely it will be that in resolving a security problem, a symptom, we aggravate
a cause. Working with people is therefore a second theme running through
CONTEST.

One of the most striking features of this work in the last few years have been the
growing convergence of tactics in very different areas of the world around this single
principle. It is prominent in work under Pursue, Prevent, Protect and Prepare in this
country and in connected policies on cohesion, community empowerment and race
equality. It features in counter terrorist work overseas, in its very broadest sense,
including conflict resolution and poverty reduction. It is also a key theme in the
counter insurgency work, to which CONTEST is connected, in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan. As Commander of the Multinational force in Iraq, General Petraeus, caught
this trend perfectly. In his 2008 Counter Insurgency Guidance he instructed his
command to secure and serve the population, live among the people, generate unity
of effort, promote reconciliation, be ‘first with the truth’ and ‘live our values’. I do
not think it is a coincidence that Al Qai’da in Iraq has lost much of the support on
which they once relied.

This really brings me back to where I started. Colin Cramphorn was responsible for
the early development of the counter terrorist network (and of course for policing in
Northern Ireland) and for setting counter terrorist work in a regional and a local
context, with and among people and communities. He made counter terrorism
something for a police service, not just a police force. As counter terrorist work

18
ibid, p. 87
19
The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom CM 7291 (London: The Stationary Office,
2008), p. 6.
continues to evolve that seems to me to be a vital legacy and essential theme for the
future.