The West’s ‘war on terror’ has failed, as Orlando proved. We cannot rely on MI5 to protect us

The police and the security services are powerless to know when hatred has taken hold. It is incumbent on all of us to expose extremist networks to the disinfectant of counter-argument

MI5 Headquarters, London (REUTERS/David Bebber BEB/MD/AA)

The next terror attack against the West will almost certainly be committed by someone already on the security radar. This is not the latest example of scaremongering by Donald Trump but the sober assessment of our own security services.

The recent terror atrocities carried out in Orlando and Paris have worryingly shown that terrorists who align themselves with Isis are likely to have been well known to the security services. In the case of Frenchman Larossi Abballa, 25, who butchered a husband and wife working for the Paris police, he had already served three years in prison on terrorism offences. He was part of a terrorist recruitment network well known to the authorities.

In America, Omar Mateen, 29, who slaughtered 49 clubbers in Orlando last weekend had also been investigated over his extremist views. The FBI spent almost a year delving into Mateen's life, after his work colleagues said in 2013 that he had boasted of ties to the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda. The remarks prompted the local sheriff to request his removal from the St Lucie County Courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, where he worked as a security guard, to a residential golfing community.

FBI agents secretly followed him and monitored his movements. They interviewed him twice, and used an informant to get close to him. At the end of 2013 the FBI closed its investigation, declaring Mateen to be of no special concern.

In September that year, Larossi Abballa was released from prison and returned to the streets of Paris where his behaviour continued to be monitored by the probation service. But in the space of 48 hours this week the authorities in both Paris and Orlando were forced to confront the stark truth that suspects who were on their own security radars had carried out horrific acts of terror.

In the UK, it is a phenomenon with which our security services are very familiar. One of the 7/7 London bombers, who killed 52 civilians, had been investigated by MI5 before the attack. Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, had been subject to a routine assessment by the security service because of an indirect connection to a separate alleged terror plot. But he was deemed not to be a threat.

More recently it has emerged that one of the killers of soldier Lee Rigby had also been known to the security services. Michael Adebolajo, 29, had been targeted in a drive by MI5 to recruit agents the year before he and Michael Adebowale, 22, murdered Rigby on the streets of Woolwich in 2013.

The task facing security services all over the world has become much more difficult since the emergence of Isis and the complex matrix of terrorism in Syria.

In the UK, more than 3,000 British extremists are being monitored by police and MI5. Of these, 350 are under close surveillance. The numbers are very similar in France and the United States.

Not one of these suspects represents a cast iron case of terrorism. Among the 3,000 will be people who are the subject of false accusations, Islamist extremists who have turned their lives around and the victims of suspicion by association. There will also be a tiny minority who may one day participate in terrorism.

This is why the security services, who do not have resources to closely monitor every suspect, acknowledge that it is likely that the next attack against the UK will be carried out by, or will involve, one of the 3,000.

Unless we want to swap the freedoms of living in a democracy for a police state, where the courts have the power to lock up everyone who has expressed extremist views, we must accept the reality of our home-grown terror problem.

But that doesn't mean we need to be fatalistic about the terror threat, either.

What Orlando, Paris, Brussels and London has shown is that closed groups of people who live their lives outside of mainstream society can be poisoned by the nihilistic ideology of the terrorist.

The police and the security services are powerless to know when the hatred has taken hold and an individual is ready to act on his warped sense of reality.

This means it is incumbent on all of us to do more to open up these communities and expose the extremist networks to the disinfectant of counter-argument that can challenge the narrative of the terrorist.