As I sat in an armed American convoy, speeding through the streets of Kabul earlier this year, we passed an Afghan police checkpoint. 

The U.S. commander in the front of the vehicle turned to me and said: “I hold on pretty tightly to my firearm whether we see a crowd of civilians or Afghan police or the Afghan National Army or whatever.  You never know who’s going to turn on you.”

 It was a shrewd analysis and the officer meant every word.  His opinions were formed after a few tours of duty in Iraq and a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

His comments came to mind as Britain’s Ministry of Defence announced the deaths of five soldiers at the hands of an Afghan policeman who turned his gun on the allied forces trying to train him.  You could hear the skepticism about this war building on radio morning shows in Britain this morning.

Many quoted from the unsolicited remarks of Kim Howells, the government’s current intelligence and security watchdog but more importantly, the British minister responsible for Afghanistan until just last year.

Howells’ assessment in an editorial published in The Guardian newspaper was unequivocal: Britain should begin pulling out of Afghanistan now.

Howells writes: “Bring home the great majority of our fighting men and women and concentrate on using the money saved to secure our own borders, gather intelligence on terrorist activities inside Britain, expand our intelligence operations abroad, co-operate with foreign intelligence services, and counter the propaganda of those who encourage terrorism.”

His comments could not have been more at odds with his former and current boss, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Embedded in Brown’s statement of condolences to the families of the five killed was a pointed statement often repeated: British soldiers are not just trying to make Afghanistan safer; this war is about keeping Britain safe.

“They fought to make Afghanistan more secure, but above all to make Britain safer from the terrorism and extremism which continues to threaten us from the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Fewer and fewer people seem willing to believe that statement. A handful of polls this year confirm a majority of British citizens want their troops withdrawn from Afghanistan. And now an influential government voice is adding to the chorus.

“Such a shift in focus would have the benefit of exposing far fewer British servicemen and women to the deadly threats of Taliban snipers and roadside bombs, but would also have momentous implications for UK foreign and defence policy. We would need to reinvent ourselves diplomatically and militarily.” wrote Howells.

His analysis is at odds with that of General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander in Afghanistan who Pentagon insiders say is publicly urging U.S. President Barack Obama to beef up the mission with at least 40,000 additional troops.

On British soil to deliver a lecture, General McChrystal last month set out his arguments to a London audience.

 “We need to reverse the current trends and time does matter, waiting does not prolong a favourable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely public support will not last indefinitely but the cruel irony is to succeed we need patience, discipline, resolve and time.”

 He added: “The situation is serious and I chose that word very carefully. I also say that neither success or failure for our endeavour there in support of the Afghan people in the government can be taken for granted.”

But Howells directly refutes those arguments in his editorial.

“I doubt whether the presence, even of another 40,000 American troops – brave and efficient though they are – will guarantee that the Taliban and their allies will no longer be able to terrorize and control significant stretches of countryside, rural communities and key roads.

"Recent attacks in Kabul and other centers suggest that the present balance of territorial control is at best likely to remain – or, more likely, to shift in favor of the Taliban.”

There is a good reason that finding a middle-ground on Afghanistan isn’t that easy: There doesn’t seem to be one.

Tell us what you think. Do you think it’s time to rethink the Afghan strategy and pull troops out?

After dozens of internal investigations, public statements and now two high-profile inquiries the conclusion hasn’t changed much: The July 7th terror attack in London could not have been prevented. 

For years now this has been a difficult theory to accept for victims and victims’ families. 

“It’s a matter of public safety and we can’t in all conscience walk away” says Rachel North who was injured on an underground train near Kings Cross station. 

Since late 2005,  North and dozens of other victims and their families have lobbied for a full judicial inquiry because they say they believe security authorities have not owned up to their mistakes.

“That’s not to blame people that’s to say I think now in 2009 if we don’t apply the thinking that we should have learned after 7/7, we’ll have another one” says North.

But according to the authors of the latest inquiry, the uncomfortable truth not just for victims and families but for the wider public, is that there is no guarantee another attack won’t happen, no matter what is done to improve the security architecture.

It is sobering to hear the government and others stress that the threat of attack is still severe.

Still, pulling apart the anatomy of this attack and the ensuing investigation is a useful exercise for any country. One of the key mistakes was British intelligence seemingly believing ‘it can’t happen here’.

Chris Driver Williams, a military explosives expert who was called in within minutes of the attack, says he was one of the first to suggest it was inspired by Al Qaeda and says when he voiced that during an emergency cabinet meeting, the notion was literally laughed off.

“I came out with a very early assessment that it was an Al Qaeda attack and was met with actually from one very senior intelligence figure at the time who couldn’t understand how I could come up with that assessment” says Driver-Williams.

Authorities not just in Britain, but around the world, have learned from that experience and are taking home grown terror very seriously. In particular, the security structure, how intelligence is gathered and analyzed, has been changed in Britain to ensure a more comprehensive approach to potential threats.

Driver-Williams believes that’s important because far from the ‘spectacular’ attack of 9/11, we are more likely to see future attacks model 7/7 and more recently, the Mumbai attacks in late 2008.

The investigations and inquiries post 7/7, as imperfect as they may seem to victims, have been valuable in dissecting the possible foundations for a home grown terror attack. And as that threat evolves, the British experience may prove more and more relevant in other countries.

LONDON, England – A few months ago I wrote a short item suggesting that radical Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary might usefully be compared with Johnny Rotten. Thinly argued - if widely slammed - as that post was, it's a comparison that retains value.

The real argument, though, as I attempted to clarify in the comments to the original article, is not over the use of the acronym "UK," but rather over the media, and the symbiotic relationship Choudary enjoys with certain sections of it.

CNN itself has not stood entirely above the fray on this, and there's an argument, of course, that this post itself is just adding to the exposure. But I don't see a way round that given the point I wish to make here.

Like Rotten and the Sex Pistols, Choudary knows the media loves nothing more than the opportunity to express outrage. The trick is then to exploit that outrage and fold it back into the greater narrative: the core message aimed at the real audience.

Punk, in its early days, traded on its outlaw status, which gained greater and greater currency the ruder and more shocking the Pistols became. The media lapped it up because they could portray it as a simple story of moral decline and social decay. It sold newspapers, which in turn helped sell records. Which then sold more newspapers, which sold even more records. Everyone was happy.

Choudary and his group, known once as Al-Muhajiroun until it was banned, play a similar game. Last year I attended two of its meetings within the space of a couple of weeks. It's not hard to get in to these events and reporters who suggest otherwise are being disingenuous.

Most, if not all, will have received an SMS from Choudary inviting them to come. Even so, some prefer to come incognito. I've had a cameraman at one event telling me he worked for Hungarian television and a reporter at another purporting to write for the Irish Times newspaper. Both later turned out to be working for British tabloids.

At the first event, held to mark the anniversary of 9/11, the message from the platform was a familiar one. The 9/11 perpetrators were described as "disciplined role models" responsible for a "great day in history." The people of Britain would "one day live under the sharia – so get used to it!" More than enough material for the assembled journalists, perhaps half a dozen in number, to get their story in the paper.

At the next event, a week or so later, this time highlighting "Muslim Youth - Spark of the Fire," those very news stories arising from the first meeting were brandished from the platform like evidence planted on a dupe: "See how they twist our words! This is not a war on terror, this is a war on Muslims!"

Choudary's expertise in all of this has come to the fore yet again with the excessive coverage given to the protest in Luton last week during the parade by British soldiers returned from Afghanistan. A small, though provocative, demonstration, which solicited an angry response from some of those who turned out to salute the infantrymen, garnered acres of coverage in the press and on TV. The Evening Standard, London's main local newspaper, even devoted three pages to an interview with Choudary, including the front-page splash "I want to see flag of Allah flying over Downing Street."

There will be plenty of winners from this. The papers, presumably, were happy with their stories. Choudary and his followers must be absolutely delighted: they can mine this one for weeks, if not months. And the far-right British National Party, the BNP, are exploiting it heavily as well: the story is all over the front-page of its Web site.

The main losers are the vast majority of people - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - who are getting a highly-skewed picture of what constitutes Muslim opinion in the UK. Because no matter how sincerely Choudary and his acolytes may hold their views, their support within Muslim communities is paltry.

Indeed, it's been suggested to me by people intimately involved in de-radicalization that Al-Muhajiroun is losing ground, its followers' heightened public presence over the last six months or so actually born out of frustration over lost momentum.

If that is indeed the case then it's surely time for the media to move on and stop over-inflating the importance of these particular proponents of division and separatism.

LONDON, England – The orange jumpsuits, the barbed wire, the "redacted" files. President Obama may be able to make it all history by closing Guantanamo Bay, but their effect on American justice will be profound.

Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate who was released in 2005, has always stressed to me that during torture and detention he would have confessed to anything.  And that is the heart of the legal problem now facing the administration.

"Guantanamo Bay is the most notorious prison on earth," says Begg. He believes Guantanamo is a radicalizing force for militants around the world.

Former inmates like Begg have joined a chorus of U.S. officials saying the prison - which is in effect "above the law" - could now cripple the chances of bringing those who are truly dangerous to justice.

"What procedure can you use on people who have been systematically tortured including water-boarding, including being stripped naked and beaten?" asks Begg.  "What sort of evidence can be admitted into a court of law that has been extracted under that process?"

President Obama ordered the U.S. government to suspend prosecutions of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay for 120 days, military officials said Tuesday.

As if to punctuate his actions, Obama stressed during his inaugural speech that he would cling to the moral high ground.

"As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," he said. "Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."

But the fact remains that even when closed, the enduring legacy of Guantanamo may be that a place designed to keep us safe from terror may actually make us less so.

Legal issues complicate the cases against even the most important terror suspects like Mohammed Al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker. Earlier this month, a Guantanamo judge admitted that Al-Qahtani was tortured and could not therefore be put forward for prosecution. But can the United States really set him free?

And beyond high profile suspects, human rights campaigners say there is little evidence to prosecute dozens of Guantanamo inmates still being held. They argue keeping those detainees locked up will not help keep al Qaeda at bay.

"I think it's actually one of the most harmful myths about it, that we can't let people go because we've got the tiger by the tail," says Cori Crider of the human rights organization Reprieve. "I've met over 20 people and in my experience it's just not true."

For the new administration, closing Guantanamo could just be the beginning of a real headache: How do you prosecute terror suspects within the American legal system? And if you can't, how do you create a whole new legal framework to keep them locked up without a conviction?

LONDON,  England – I was not lucky enough to be in the room as Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic spy agency, gave his historic interview. It has only been about 15 years since the government has even officially acknowledged the existence of the agency. So MI5's first newspaper interview in a century of existence is a big deal, even if the news Evans divulged was less than ground breaking. Still for those of us covering security, it is reassuring to be able to hang all those intelligence tips and accumulated research on cold, hard facts uttered by Britain's chief spook. 

What is the single most important thing he said? His intelligence tells him the threat level can stay right where it is, at situation ‘severe' but not crucially, a notch above at ‘critical.'

Why? Al Qaeda has not given birth to a British franchise. And, significantly, Evans says they have monitored fewer and fewer plots in "late-stage" attack mode.

The rest is all a bit academic, but let's go through it anyway.

Evans describes the financial crisis as a "watershed moment" for security reasons, not economic ones. He points out that the power paradigm is shifting in meaningful ways; Western nations will lose financial leverage and that will have security implications. Bankrolling the bust will affect more than our financial wellbeing, you can count on it.

Evans also catalogues the latest chapter in what is known as ‘blowback'. The theory contends that violence in Muslim countries will eventually ‘blowback' to countries like Britain, motivating attackers to seek revenge. Evans says there is no doubt the latest crisis in Gaza will be used as a new selling point to radicalize and recruit future attackers.

In terms of future attacks, Evans has shared some concrete insights. In terms of the likelihood of another al Qaeda inspired terror attack on Britain he says: "There is enough intelligence to show they have the intention to mount an attack here."

Secondly he confirms what other authorities in Britain have asserted for years, far too many British young men are leaving for Pakistan, Afghanistan and even Somalia in search of terrorist training and indoctrination.

There is still plenty in what Evans said that you can lose sleep over, including the fact that MI5 will double its staff in the decade after 9/11. Still, although Britain's spook-in-chief can't and won't say so bluntly, reading between his lines you can arguably conclude we are safer today than were the day after 9/11.

Am I wrong? We want to hear from you.

Two UK terror trials came to an end this week.

On Tuesday, a jury in London convicted Bilal Abdulla of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. Abdulla was one of two people who tried to detonate car bombs in London and then, on a suicide mission, drove a jeep filled with gas canisters into Glasgow airport. His partner, Kafeel Ahmed, died in the second attack.

The trial rightly received plenty of coverage. But the case itself failed to open up much, if anything, in the way of links to Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organisation. It was, it appears, a stand-alone operation.

Far more interesting, I think, was the result from Manchester this afternoon. For the first time in the UK, a jury convicted a man, Rangzieb Ahmed,  of directing terrorism. Not only that, they also convicted him, and his co-defendant, Habib Ahmed, no relation, of belonging to Al Qaeda.

We talk a great deal about people or plots being AQ-linked or AQ-inspired. Well here's a case, according to Greater Manchester Police head of counterterrorism, Tony Porter, that's indisputably AQ-core.

In many ways, the Manchester case was the polar opposite of the London one. It didn't have any plot or planned attack per se, but it had links to all manner of interesting people and plots. 

Here's a few:

Phone links between Rangzieb Ahmed and Yassin Omar, one of the failed London bombers.

Habib Ahmed named as a fellow traveller by Mohammed Junaid Babar, the supergrass whose testimony helped convict the fertiliser bomb plotters in May 2007.

Phone links with Abdul Rahman, who pled guilty last year to recruiting people in the UK to go and fight coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Habib Ahmed married by Omar Bakri Mohammad, founder of Al Muhajiroun, the UK's highest profile organisation supporting bin Laden ideology.

Finally, there are the links with a man at one time credited with being bin Laden's number three, Hamza Rabia.

The investigation itself included bugged conversations in Dubai, a luggage intercept at Amsterdam Schipol, and phone numbers written in invisible ink.

For a taster of the story, click here.

 LONDON, England – One day after Lord West's ominous warning of one  'great plot' being monitored by UK security forces, there was a reminder today  of the terror threat at the other end of the scale.

 Nicky Reilly, a 22 year-old convert to Islam, admitted launching a failed  suicide bomb attack on a busy family restaurant.

 The attack was carried out not in London, or in any other of the UK's major  cities, but in Exeter, a town of just over 100,000 people in the southwest of  England.

 Reilly had never travelled to Pakistan, for instance, to receive training; his  research was carried out on the Internet. Nor does it appear that he was part of  any cell – though more on that later.

The Old Bailey heard that Nicky Reilly entered the Giraffe restaurant in Exeter on a Thursday in late May carrying six bottle bombs, three containing caustic soda, three containing kerosene. He was also carrying nails packed around the devices to maximize the planned carnage.

CCTV footage shows plenty of people inside the restaurant as Reilly walked in, including a table of two women, one of whom is seen spoon-feeding her baby in a highchair.

Reilly made his way to the toilet cubicle to prepare his devices – which began to explode as he was doing so. He staggered out of the cubicle bearing serious facial injuries and was arrested by police.

Nicky Reilly was a convert to Islam who took the name Mohammad Abdulaziz Rashid Saeed-Alim The court heard he became a Muslim in his mid-teens and that over time he became drawn to violent action and the idea of himself becoming a martyr.

It's well-established that converts are of particular interest to intelligence agencies. Security officials tracking the terror threat say one in ten of those they are concerned with were not born into Muslim families. In Reilly's case, though, it's only part of the story.

That's because, in the words of his defence team, he has "rather simple characteristics." When he was interviewed by police he was treated as a "vulnerable adult." According to his mother he has a mental age of about ten and suffers from Asperger's syndrome.

She believes he had been "brainwashed" into carrying out his attack. Police statements appear to back that up. They say he was "preyed upon, radicalized, and taken advantage of" by extremists in his home town of Plymouth.

Perhaps more worryingly he was also in frequent contact with two individuals over the Internet from whom he received encouragement and information about the attack.

One of the conversations included a discussion about the type of person to be targeted: public servants like the police, or ordinary citizens. In the end, the decision was to target the latter.

Police say they are still trying to trace Reilly's Internet correspondents. It's believed they do not live in Britain.

Reilly will be sentenced next month when the judge will have to weigh the significance of psychological and psychiatric reports promised by the defence. In doing so he will have to decide to what extent violent extremists are now deliberately targeting some of society's most vulnerable individuals to carry out acts of terrorism.

LONDON, England - Paula Newton writes below on the British Government shelving plans to extend pre-charge detention limits for terrorism suspects from 28 to 42 days.

As a follow-up, it's worth noting comments today from the the country's security minister, Alan West, about the nature of the threat facing Britain.

Now, West has "misspoken" in the past. He had to be rapped on the knuckles last year after he appeared to express a certain ambivalence towards the very counterterrorism legislation he was about to pilot through the House of Lords. (Something he clearly failed to do with the loss of the vote in the upper chamber yesterday.) But his latest comments are stark and give pause for thought.

"The threat is huge," he said.

Yes, we've heard that sort of thing before. But it's the next bit, albeit awkwardly worded, that's more interesting.

"The threat dipped slightly and is now rising again with the context of severe, large complex plots, because we unraveled one the damage it caused to Al Qaeda actually faded slightly.

"They are now building up again. There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this."

It's the last bit that grabs my attention. Rather than the numbers game that MI5 has played in recent years, we have a reference, it seems, to one, great, specific plot.

The analysis about the ebb and flow of the threat is interesting as well and it tallies with something I heard from a senior figure in the UK counterterrorism firmament earlier this year.

His analysis at that time (May) was that there had been a pause in centrally directed Al Qaeda operations in the UK. There was still a huge amount of activity being monitored by police and the intelligence agencies, he said, but no big plots.

His assessment was that Al Qaeda had taken a bit of a beating in the UK with more than sixty terrorism convictions. He characterized it thus: "Somewhere someone [in Al Qaeda] has been saying, ‘we've taken losses in the UK, what do we do now?'"

That was then, this is now. And things really do appear to have changed.

Lord West's comments follow hot on the heels of a security briefing from a "senior Whitehall source" that the current threat level is almost as high as it was immediately after 7/7. It's not critical yet (the highest level), according to the "source," but it is at "the severe end of severe."