Patrick Mercer: Terrorists will laugh at our weakness until we learn the lessons of the past

EXPLODING underpants, women jihadists, bombs in the rectum – Osama bin Laden must be watching the Free World and laughing his socks off. And that, of course, is exactly what al-Qaida and its thuggish pals wants to achieve.

They do not have to kill and maim in order to terrify us. They know both the power and the weakness of democracy and its free media, and they exploit it ruthlessly.

For instance, the United States has seen a pulse of violent activity mounted against the homeland and government institutions that started in early November last year. This included two plots to bring down airliners, an attempt on the New York subway, a shooting spree by a radicalised army officer in Fort Hood and a bloody attack on CIA officers in Afghanistan.

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And what was the response? President Obama first tried to deny any connection between the incidents. Then, after a curiously slow response to the Christmas Day bomb, he blamed everybody except himself.

The Commander-in-Chief publicly tore his main intelligence officers and their agencies to pieces, exposed operational shortcomings to his enemies, described the plans to put things right to anyone that could bear to listen to this disloyalty and then, several days later, announced to the world that "the buck stops with me".

When this is added to his dithering for three months over the deployment of more US troops to Afghanistan, you can see how Obama is unwittingly playing into al-Qaida's hands. It's no wonder that bin Laden has just released a tape taking responsibility for the failed Y Fronts bomb; whether he was actually involved or not is irrelevant for in terrorism perception is all.

This brings us to the strange business of last week's terror alert. It wasn't given much publicity, but in a speech given by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates in New Delhi last week, he warned of the chilling desire by al-Qaida to fan the sparks of war between India and Pakistan – both of them, of course, have nuclear weapons.

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This was no casual assessment by Gates so, when intelligence was received of a possible plot to hijack aircraft flying out of India to the West over the period of the London summits on Yemen and Afghanistan, the Home Secretary, quite properly, reacted.

I say "quite properly" because a number of us pressurised the Government back in 2006 to make the terrorist alert state public and, eventually, they obliged. But, we insisted, such warnings had to be underpinned with proper information and proper training about what the public was to do. Now, I'm not suggesting a detailed expose of received intelligence; clearly, to tell our enemies what we do and do not know would be daft.

Currently, transport and energy hubs, certain businesses and other parts of the critical national infrastructure are given more information by MI5 when the alert state changes. But the public are told very little unless they trawl obscure Home Office websites. For instance, there is a terror hotline to telephone if you see something suspicious, but who knows what it is? We are not warned about the dangers of road travel without being told to put on our safety belts, are we?

The counter-argument is, of course, that such warnings will only scare people. Possibly, but I saw how the public was allowed to know as much as they possibly could be about the IRA threat in Ulster, how they were taught to recognise terrorist reconnaissance, suspicious vehicles and the like while going about their everyday lives.

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Clearly, the threat is not the same – the IRA made its presence felt every day while, actually doing (thankfully) not very much damage. Our latest foes will only strike occasionally but when they do, they intend

to kill thousands. In the meantime, they will continue to posture and threaten, playing on the sensibilities of civilised and free societies.

If the Government wants to be taken seriously on the whole question of anti-terrorism, it must act more vigorously. For instance, why does every warning seem to be focused on London? Yorkshire contains more terror "hotspots" than any other county, most of the 7/7 bombers came from Beeston area of Leeds and it now has its own police Counter Terrorist Unit – yet most investment is concentrated in the South East. No, we need a proper, thoughtful and enduring public information and training campaign much like the ones that were mounted when the threat of AIDs was identified.

Only by acting responsibly and proactively will this, or any other government, avoid the accusation of using the "politics of fear" when danger or elections loom. On top of this, an alert and suspicious public is the greatest possible deterrent that a terrorist can face. We tried all of this in Northern Ireland years ago. We made mistakes but we learnt from them. When is this Government going to capitalise on those lessons and realise that prevention is better than cure?

Patrick Mercer is MP for Newark and is now chairman of the Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee in the House of Commons.