ALONGSIDE a hefty helping of fear, last week’s events in Britain have spawned a host of conspiracy theories. These fall into two categories: inevitable speculation about the purported plot to blow up several commercial airliners during transatlantic flights on the one hand and, on the other, remarkably widespread suspicion that if the entire sordid scenario isn’t a figment of someone’s overheated imagination, at least significant aspects of it are more likely to be fiction rather than fact.

Hyperbole from British officials hasn’t helped. On the day before the dawn raids that netted 24 suspects, Home Secretary John Reid was quoted as saying that Britain hadn’t been under a greater threat since the Second World War. And in announcing the success of a pre-emptive police operation, Scotland Yard’s deputy commissioner Paul Stephenson spoke of “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”, a phrase that has been quoted more or less everywhere, with only a few commentators bothering to challenge its implications. Stephenson clearly hasn’t spent any time in Iraq over the past three years.

It has also been alleged that the timing of the raids was calculated rather than fortuitous: it took the heat off the Blair government amid a growing backlash, particularly within the Labour Party, against its indefensible stance on the war in Lebanon. The counterpoint to this particular charge is the claim that although authorities had been keeping an eye on the suspects for several months, information received from Pakistan suggested that the attacks were imminent. Hence the sudden decision to swoop — even though not one of the suspects had thus far booked a seat on a flight to the United States.

The scepticism is obviously not unrelated to the fact that Scotland Yard has in the past been prone to serious error. In the immediate aftermath of the July 7 atrocities last year, its counter-terrorism goons gratuitously executed an innocent Brazilian engineer on the London Underground. More recently, an equally innocent Briton of South Asian origin was shot during a raid on a Forest Gate residence that was based on seriously flawed intelligence, much like the claims about the contents of Saddam Hussein’s armouries.

For all that, there is a thread of plausibility running through what has been revealed about the plan. There are a host of unanswered questions, plus a number of contradictions between accounts being leaked by British, American and Pakistani intelligence agencies. In all three cases, there is bound to be a degree of self-serving propaganda woven into the revelations. And there is no basis for assuming that all of the 24 people taken into custody in England last Thursday are necessarily guilty of terrorism-related activities.

One of the suspects has already been freed, and Britain’s track record in this sphere does not inspire a great deal of confidence: as Reid himself noted last week, of the nearly 1,000 people taken into custody for terror-related offences over the past six years, only 154 have been charged.

However, none of the foregoing detracts from the likelihood of a plan to blow up airliners packed with passengers. It is far from clear how far advanced the plan was: there is no suggestion that any tickets had been purchased, even for a dry run, nor have the British security services revealed whether they have come across any materials that might substantiate the suspicion that innocuous-seeming liquid explosives were to be used in perpetrating the atrocities.

A similar plot was apparently aborted more or less by accident in Manila 11 years ago, about two months after Ramzi Yousef had tested a nitroglycerin-based device on a Philippines Airlines flight to Tokyo.

Last year’s suicide bombings on London transport alerted Britons to the lethal risks posed by the existence among them of Islamist extremists of the nihilist variety. Like the July 7 killers, the suspects arrested last week appear for the most part to be young Britons of Pakistani origin, alongside a few converts. Their culpability is yet to be determined, but the pattern appears to confirm that second-generation immigrants in their teens and twenties are particularly vulnerable to being led astray by the preachers of hatred and violence.

The proportion of young British Muslims who fall prey to fanatical fantasies is probably not very different from the proportion of Britons who are attracted to racist organisations such as the British National Party: the anger that stems from alienation and marginalisation does not automatically translate into a faith-based urge to commit mass murder. But there can be little question that conditions have changed drastically over the decades; they have undoubtedly been exacerbated by international developments during the past five years, but the seeds of deadly extremism were sown much earlier.

For those of us who subscribe to one form or another of rationalism, it is rather difficult to discern the precise motivation behind the destructive impulse. The Irish Republican Army’s acts of terrorism, however wrong-headed they may have been as a tactic, were aimed at achieving an objective. You did not have to agree with that objective to understand the motivation. Much the same could be said about the Tamil Tigers. The consequences of suicide bombings in Israel are often mortifying, yet they are open to interpretation as acts of resistance: they may be no more justified than the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians by the Israeli state, but they are not altogether bereft of logic.

On the other hand, what were the London Underground bombs aimed at achieving, beyond the maximum possible loss of life? They sowed fear — but to what end, from the point of view of the perpetrators? By the same token, what exactly would have been achieved, apart from a great deal of gratuitous bloodshed and a temporary disruption of everyday routine, had the plotters succeeded in smuggling explosive fuels and detonators aboard a bunch of outbound flights at Heathrow?

Is revenge the driving force behind the murderous impulse: the urge to replicate on some scale the ongoing meaningless loss of life in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine? This may well be the biggest contributory factor: those to whom evil is done, as the poet put it, do evil in return. The obvious counter-argument that no evil has been done to British Muslims flounders in the face of the fact reiterated by a recent poll that the majority of them — a larger proportion than in any country other than Pakistan, evidently — see themselves primarily as Muslims and only secondarily as members of a society in which many of them feel they don’t have much of a stake.

Only a minority — hopefully a very small minority — are willing to kill their compatriots without compunction, and there are bound to be other factors that feed into this mindset. Fanatical devotion to a peculiarly ruthless interpretation of the Islamic faith is presumably a crucial component. The yearning for houris in the hereafter may well be no more than a conveniently colourful caricature, but there cannot be much doubt that most of those willing to blow themselves to bits in the process of claiming as many other lives as possible perceive themselves as potential martyrs rather than mass murderers. They need to be disabused of this absurd notion. A concerted effort by the scholars and preachers who purportedly represent mainstream Islam could go some way towards achieving this. Its absence serves only to reinforce the demonisation of Islam as a faith that is somehow beyond the pale.

In the aftermath of the arrests in Britain, a bunch of Muslim representatives, including members of parliament, wrote a letter to Tony Blair suggesting that changes in his government’s foreign policy would reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks. They are not completely off the mark: Blair’s embarrassingly servile devotion to the demonstrably counterproductive neo-conservative ideals that emanate from Washington has almost certainly played a role in inflaming passions conducive to mindless acts of violence. However, as Roy Hattersley, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, pointed out in his column in The Guardian on Monday, Blair’s foreign policy ought to be opposed on the basis that it is wrong, rather than because of the increased threat it guarantees.

There are plenty of civilised means of countering the utterly misguided hegemonistic zeal that Blair endorses, and a large number of Britons are mortified by the consequences of direct and indirect western intervention in the Middle East. They sympathise with the victims not because they are Muslims, but because they are fellow human beings.

The ranks of such Britons are unlikely to be swelled by the knowledge that some of their neighbours harbour dreams of blowing up trains or aeroplanes. In fact, such intimations are likely only to encourage the prejudices of those who suspect Enoch Powell may have been right when he foresaw rivers of blood. As has amply been demonstrated over the past five years, extremists feed off one another.

No one in their right mind can for a moment doubt that if a plot to blow up airliners — regardless of when it was intended to be put into action and various other details — has indeed been foiled, this is a profoundly gratifying achievement. Pakistan appears to have played a significant role, which has prompted a round of self-congratulatory utterances from various officials. The pride is somewhat misplaced: Pakistan’s involvement serves as a reminder that it continues to reap the whirlwind. The attempts to point the finger at Al Qaeda in Afghanistan may well backfire. Intelligence sources quoted by the American press are once more wondering whether their so-called war on terror is being waged in the wrong places. If last week’s events have prompted soul-searching in Britain, there should be plenty of that going on in Pakistan as well.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com