The 9/11 complex

As Hilal al-Jedda fled to Britain in 1992, seeking asylum from Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, he would not have detected the tectonic plates of world politics shifting underfoot – nor guessed that one day he would be caught in their convulsions.

Over the following decades, Iraq was to become the theatre on which a new post-Cold War era would play out. Ushered in by the first Gulf War – which ended the year before al-Jedda arrived in Britain – it reached its devastating apogee with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Bracketed by these twin brutalities was a series of political and security realignments – global, regional and domestic – which would come violently to shape the lives of al-Jedda, and others like him.

The post-Cold War world still turned, as before, on the exploitation of the Global South. Decades after formal independence, states of the South found their fragile sovereignty shattered by political, economic and military policies enforced by the North. IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies (SAPs) embedded a global neoliberal order to enrich the North, while the creation of regional bodies like the European Union (EU) enshrined their political and economic dominance. The Cold War’s victorious side needed mechanisms for both maintaining a global hierarchy of states, while containing the human fallout within the South.

The frameworks of ‘national security’ and ‘countering terrorism’¹ helped serve this role. They facilitated the construction of international security apparatuses to consolidate state power, principally in the North as well as the creation of transnational policing arrangements to monitor and manage their respective populations.

In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, this process took the form of a war on the rights of asylum seekers and migrants that would lead eventually into a domestic war against ‘Islamist terrorism’ under the ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) in the wake of September 11, 2001. The figure of the ‘Third World’ asylum seeker blurred almost seamlessly into that of the ‘terrorist’, and the police powers for monitoring and controlling both largely overlapped.

For al-Jedda, this new political climate would see him twice deprived of his British citizenship by ministerial fiat. This was enabled by a series of laws passed by the British government in the name of protecting national security and countering terrorism – laws that have led to both spectacular violence, from dawn raids to citizenship revocation, and many quiet violations of dignity upon the population.

Recent organising to defund and/or abolish the militarised police has been a very welcome development, but with few exceptions, it has yet to tackle the question of ‘counter-terror’ policing. This is despite the growth of modern ‘counter-terror’ policing and surveillance being a key means through which coercive state powers have been transformed – indeed, the way through which what remains of the welfare state has been remade into the security state.

For this reason, organisers countering security policies experienced silent unease at the widely welcomed news from Minneapolis City Council following the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings. The City Council passed a resolution committed to replacing the city’s police force, but its proposed ‘community-led public safety system’ had disquieting echoes of the ‘counter-extremism’ surveillance programmes that have proliferated the world over -– and which, far from representing a retreat from the logic of policing, signal its qualitative expansion.

Part of the difficulty in tackling counter-terrorism policies is that resistance has often remained in the legal realm – presenting them as discrete violations of rights or protocols to be combated through the courts – or that opposition extends merely insofar as policies are racist and/or Islamophobic.

Neither approaches are without merit, but neither is sufficient. Connecting counter-terrorism to the question of policing at large is a vital step in advancing struggles against police and state violence. It compels us to broaden our understanding of policing, into a space where the boundaries between society and security grow hazy. It also forces us to confront the limits of anti-state violence strategies rooted in frameworks of legalism or moralism that fail to address either the politics or the underlying political economy of counter-terrorism.

‘Counter-terrorism’ is a set of policies, an ideology, a political project and, increasingly, an industry. It has been generated by the dynamics among states within the global system; through the machinations of different political parties in governments and their respective agendas; and through an expanding network of operators and power blocs seeking to find a niche within the security industry.

This essay traces the development of the modern security state in Britain, maps the political economy of counter-terrorism and offers possibilities for organising strategies against counter-terror and security policies.

The legislative backbone of Britain’s vast counter-terror complex is the Terrorism Act (2000), which consolidated powers under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974) and its successors. 

In 2020 the budget for counter-terror policing alone in Britain was £906 million out of an overall national policing budget of £15.2 billion while the government’s 2021 Spending Review announced funding for a multimillion National Counter-Terrorism Operations Centre. The 2018 Counter-Terrorism Strategy committed to invest £1.4 billion in the security and intelligence agencies, in addition to £2 billion investment in the anti-terror capabilities of the Special Forces as part of a 30% real terms spending increase on CT, alongside £500 million to ‘protect UK citizens from terrorist threats’.

Evidently unconstrained by any concerns of resource scarcity, the counter-terror complex has grown to historically unprecedented levels in its scope, reach and capabilities: indeed in 2021, British counter-terror laws can prosecute ‘terror offences’ carried out in space.²

Figure 1 maps the powers available to the British state and its agencies in the name of ‘countering terrorism’ and/or preserving ‘national security’.

[Figure 1: Powers available for the purposes of counter-terrorism and national security in Britain (excluding those granted through international treaties)]

The huge investment in counter-terrorism is at odds with its miserable performance in terms of the stated goals: catching terrorists. Based on government statistics up to December 2020, 87.4% of the 4,869 arrests under the broad category of ‘terrorist-related activity’ prosecuted under terrorism legislation were not ultimately convicted of any terror-related offences. Since 2015, between 89% and 95% of individuals tipped off by the public or police each year to the ‘Prevent’ surveillance programme have been deemed ‘false positives’.

Worse, several acts of actual violence have been carried out under the nose of policing and security agencies by individuals known to them : a policy failure by any measure. These include the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi, the Westminster attacker Khalid Masood and the attempted Parsons Green bomber Ahmed Hassan.

Yet, arguing against counter-terror policy merely on the basis of efficacy, or lack thereof, is a politically fraught exercise. It can serve to naturalise what is an inherently political category – the ‘terror offence’ – as well as blurring how much of counter-terrorism operates outside the ‘criminal space’. Moreover, the security framework effectively operates on an unfalsifiable logic – that ‘security’ policies are the only real guarantee of safety, and where attacks or the failure to ensure public safety serve to highlight the need for further security policies, which can expand infinitely.

The refrain repeated by successive government ministers, with almost rhythmic frequency, of the need for more counter-terror laws to fill another unforeseen loophole, and extend the reach of state agencies ever further, illustrates the resilience of this logic.

Rather than engaging on the same discursive terrain as the state, or arguing on the basis of poor or bad application of policies, it is more worthwhile for opponents to analyse the politics and political economy that drives security policies.

Put simply, the project of modern British counter-terrorism has been to securitise and police the contradictions thrown up by successive governments’ domestic policy orientation and imperialist ambitions.

It does so by marshalling a complex of policing, surveillance and ideological apparatus that allow for a set of politics to be recast as ‘extreme’ or ‘terrorist’, for sections of the population to be rendered ‘threats’ – and for both to be subjected to an expanding array of disciplinary, coercive and punitive powers. 

Through this process the many real fractures and contradictions generated by British politics are decoupled from the state and projected onto ideas, individuals and groups. In this way, the growth of counter-terrorism is inseparable from the contemporary regimes of capitalism and globalisation that it helps govern. 

1990s: Post-Cold War security consensus emerges

During the 1990s, the leadership of the G7 and the newly-formed EU (from the earlier European Economic Community (EEC) established a political consensus on the key domestic ‘security threats’ they faced in a post-Soviet world. Chief among these were refugees and dissidents fleeing from states of the Global South which had been wracked by years of neoliberal ‘modernisation’, and the violent social and political dislocations these processes produced.

Britain – a key player in both groupings – used this security framework to reorganise its policing arrangements on two fronts. First, it provided the context against which it could fortify its borders against asylum seekers, principally flowing in from countries across Africa and Asia. An increasingly brazen assault on the rights of migrants and asylum seekers came to define British politics through the 1990s to the present. Hilal al-Jedda received his British citizenship in 2000, shortly before the Labour government pulled up the ladder on new asylum seekers from Iraq entirely – predominantly Iraqi Kurds seeking asylum from the very government which Britain would join the US coalition against as part of the GWOT.

Second, the British state deployed counter-terror policing against foreign dissidents at home in order to demonstrate political loyalty to its allies abroad: police batons held aloft with one hand, olive branches in the other. Algerian, Egyptian, Kurdish and Tamil migrant communities in particular were subject to this repression, which was later enhanced by a rash of counter-terror laws.¹⁶

Across Europe, these political realignments towards securitisation were expressed through an increasingly entangled relationship between migration control and countering ‘terrorism’ that would swallow the continent up in racial turmoil, and laid the groundwork for today’s mass securitisation.

9/11 and the Global War on Terror

From 2001, the GWOT ushered in global tolerance of permissiveness towards the exercise of state violence – directed most often, though by no means exclusively, at Muslim populations – as well as an international framework of securitisation in which countries worldwide were implicated. Britain and many other countries massively expanded their capacity for policing, surveillance and expulsion during this time.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) – al-Jedda’s initial destination after fleeing Iraq – became a key node in the US’ global complex of torture and detention in the run-up to and during the GWOT. Today, it is also home to projects like the Global Counterterrorism Forum’s Hedayah Center for countering violent extremism, as well as spearheading attempts to brand and ban its rival, the Muslim Brotherhood, as ‘terrorists’ internationally.

Al-Jedda’s next stop, Pakistan, would serve as the launchpad for the GWOT’s first salvo: the assault on Afghanistan. It was also instrumental in facilitating the US’ broader imperialist strategies in Asia in subsequent years, readily sacrificing sovereignty in order to serve US interests.

Britain, Al-Jedda’s onetime home, played a leading role in the destruction of his homeland in 2003, before subjecting al-Jedda himself to its sweeping new powers to insulate itself from the backlash. It was while he was being interned by British and US occupying forces in Iraq that al-Jedda was first stripped of his citizenship.

In this way, al-Jedda was subjected to both fronts of Britain’s part in the GWOT: international and domestic. Wherever he travelled he would remain under the security umbrella cast by the GWOT, and potentially at its mercy.

Late 2000s: Politics of austerity and authoritarianism

The decade following the 2007/08 global financial crisis was marked by an acceleration of ultra-nationalist tendencies across Europe and beyond, often held together by politics of virulent Islamophobia, xenophobia and hardline monoculturalism.

That lingering nexus between Muslims, asylum seekers, migrants and a supposed existential threat to the nation that animated counter-terrorism policy in the 1990s coalesced into a tighter political programme. 

Britain itself embraced this new political realignment with its change of leadership in 2010, after which a series of Conservative-led governments took the opportunity to further ratchet up the counter-terrorism complex to new heights. These post-2010 governments married the work of ‘counter-terrorism’ to more tightly managed nationalist frameworks of ‘British Values’ and ‘muscular liberalism’ – in contrast to the supposed leniency of state ‘multiculturalism’. 

It was under the first of these governments that Home Secretary Theresa May (later Prime Minister) pushed through her flagship Immigration Act (2014), and the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants, asylum seekers and, by extension, foreigners living in the UK. It was an amendment hastily appended to this law that legitimised the enhanced citizenship-deprivation powers that were used against al-Jedda. Indeed, his case was repeatedly invoked during parliamentary debates on the amendment. 

2016 to the present

The years since 2016 have seen a further unravelling of the political consensus, with hard-right tendencies surging to state power worldwide, ongoing instability wherever the GWOT was waged and broader geopolitical polarisation.

In this context, British counter-terrorism has reached its logical conclusion, by overextending, and ideologically collapsing in on itself. The British state is increasingly justifying its counter-terrorism policy to target a far-right that it has itself helped conjure into being, and all manner of politics are being ritually denounced as ‘extremist’, from the direct-action environmental organisation Extinction Rebellion and BLM demonstrations²⁰ to the proliferation of right-wing COVID-19 conspiracies.

In a telling indication of political priorities, in November 2020 a Europe still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic published a pan-EU joint approach to countering terrorism, at the behest of France and Austria. The approach included a commitment to strengthening deportation powers to tackle ‘extremists’, and restriction of public funding for groups deemed to have violated ‘the democratic order and values of EU Member States’ – a thinly veiled reference to Muslim organisations.

Counter-terrorism powers have proved no more successful in tackling acts of political violence²³ than they have in their secondary aim of stemming domestic discontent – not that that will stop such powers from being deployed as a blunt tool to contain and police the situation.

National security and counter-terrorism are not only a means of amassing state power, but increasingly the language spoken by the state: with counter-terrorism being incorporated into social provision and political programmes, from funding streams for civil society to anti-domestic violence strategies. Programmes under the banner of ‘Countering Violent Extremism’, for example Britain’s ‘Prevent’ strategy, have conscripted vast swathes of the public into ‘counter-terror’ work by demanding they identify ‘extremists’. It is through this that national security policies have trickled down to domestic politics: what began as strategies ostensibly to police the ‘fringes’ of British society have poisoned the heart of political life.

In this way, national security has increasingly become the means through which politics are managed, filtered and controlled: acting as a buffer against democratic politics from below, and serving as justification for an expanding array of powers from above. Alongside this, it has allowed for the consolidation of shadowy ‘securocrats’ at the very centre of state power, with an array of thinktanks, lobbies and agencies clustered around the hallways of the powerful.