Are We Safe Yet?

How capable are Islamist organizations, though, of actually bringing off an attack? “Al Qaeda remains a threat, but it is not quite the threat that people feared it might be after 9/11,” suggests Wark. Since 9/11, al Qaeda has lost its base in Afghanistan, and many of its top leaders have been killed. The American military surge in Iraq succeeded in eliminating the base al Qaeda had built up there after the US invasion.

In 2007, one of the most influential figures in the Islamist movement, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, renounced violence, to the dismay of the terror network’s leadership. This was especially significant because Fadl wrote two of the books al Qaeda uses to justify its terrorist ideology. In an interview last year with Al Hayat, a major Arabic language newspaper, he said he had been wrong and called 9/11 “a catastrophe for Muslims.” Islam, he argued, forbids killing civilians, including non-Muslims. Fadl’s change of heart might make it more difficult for al Qaeda to replenish its ranks.

Most of the world’s one-billion-plus Muslims already dislike the Islamists. Polls by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2006 found strong opposition to terrorism among Muslim populations in seven out of ten countries. As for Osama bin Laden, majorities in eight out of ten countries had no confidence in him. A poll in Pakistan, taken before the 2008 elections, found that if al Qaeda were on the ballot as a political party, only 1 percent of Pakistanis would vote for it. Only 3 percent would have cast a ballot for the Taliban. A Gallup poll in ten countries in 2005 found that a vast majority of Muslims supports such so-called “Western” values as freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, as well as women’s right to vote and work outside the home. Even in Afghanistan, one of the most socially conservative Muslim countries, a large majority supports women’s rights.

“Islamic terrorism is on the decline worldwide, because the terrorists have nothing to offer,” says Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project, based at Simon Fraser University. “Most of the civilians killed by Islamic terrorists haven’t been Westerners but rather fellow Muslims, and I think that has totally pissed off a majority of Muslims.” In Mack’s view, a decline in support for al Qaeda makes Canada safer, because once it dawns on terrorists that they are not achieving their political goals they stop being terrorists. He draws a parallel to Marxist radicals in Europe during the 1960s, who thought their acts of terrorism would radicalize the masses by triggering state repression, thereby sparking a revolution. “It was an idea that was in fact completely stupid,” he says. Terrorist acts created hostility to terrorists, not to the governments they wished to overthrow, so the radicals eventually adopted more peaceful means of working for political change.

The Human Security Report Project, which is supported by the governments of the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, published a brief in 2007 that documented a 40 percent decline in fatalities from terrorism. And as Mack points out, international terrorism kills fewer than 1,000 people a year, on average. (The project does not count deaths in the civil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as terrorism.) “Allot resources to it, but don’t call it a world war,” he says. “There is no way any of these guys are actually going to overthrow a state.”

Homegrown terrorists aren’t going to overthrow a state either, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do plenty of damage. Unlike, for example, the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks last November, homegrown terrorists are amateurs. They don’t have the skills bred by terrorist organizations with access to money, training camps, and operational experience. Some are “lone wolf terrorists” who aren’t in communication with larger entities. A 2007 report by Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre pointed out that “Islamist terrorist strategists are now advocating that Muslims take action at a grassroots level, without waiting for instructions.”

Because they are amateurs, homegrown terrorists prefer soft, undefended targets — a restaurant rather than a military installation, a bus rather than a hydro dam. And because they are part of the community, they are hard to detect. “We have cases of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants converting to the most radical forms of Islam,” Jack Hooper, then deputy director of operations for csis, told the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence in 2006. “These are people who blend in with us and our neighbours.”

Liberal senator Colin Kenny, long-time chair of the committee, says Canadian security agencies are doing the best they can, given resources that are so limited as to call into question the government’s commitment to protecting its citizens. Every agency charged with protecting Canada is understaffed, including the Canadian Forces, the rcmp, csis, and the Canadian Border Services Agency. “csis has fewer people than it did in 1990,” he points out. “It seems to me to be a much more dangerous world than it was in 1990, and yet we have fewer people collecting intelligence to tell us about it.” Kenny’s Senate committee estimates that the rcmp is short 5,000 to 7,000 staff. “We have fourteen members to secure the border on the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway. That’s compared to the US, which has 2,200.”

Only twenty-nine rcmp officers guard Canada’s nineteen most important ports, and just 100 are assigned to the major airports. As for the border agency, 22 percent of its front-line staff are part-timers, mostly student age, who have received just two weeks of training. “They’re the ones determining who gets into the country and who doesn’t,” says Kenny. “This is just goofy.” (Peter Van Loan, minister of public safety in the Conservative government, declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Short staffing is all the more problematic because counterterrorism is a labour-intensive job. The 2006 arrests of the so-called Toronto 18 (later renamed the Toronto 11, after seven suspects were released) required the work of 400 police officers. It takes about twenty-five people to follow a suspect for five days. To install one listening device during the Toronto 18 investigation took sixteen people, including someone to break into a building, lookouts, electricians to install the device and test it, and carpenters to repair the damage.

Visible deterrents, such as closed-circuit TV cameras and uniformed police patrols at airports and train stations, provide some degree of security protection. “But the essence of the effort to combat homegrown terrorism is good intelligence,” says Wark. “It’s not just the work of law enforcement and intelligence agencies trying to understand threats and penetrate groups. A lot depends on the willingness of groups in society to be watchful about activity within their own ethnic or religious or political communities, and their willingness to communicate those concerns to the authorities.” The Toronto 18 case illustrates his point: the plot probably would not have been exposed without the assistance of an informer in Toronto’s Muslim community.

Sometimes, intelligence and law enforcement agencies simply disrupt attacks by letting the would-be terrorists and their families and associates know they are being watched, or by arresting them on lesser charges. Last fall, for example, a counterterrorism team disrupted ceremonies in Toronto celebrating the Tamil Tigers by discouraging owners of halls from renting to pro-Tiger groups, and by making themselves obvious in parking lots. The latter measure gave Tamil families who had been pressured to come an excuse to stay away.

While passenger inspection, which is visible to the public, has been tightened to include new photo identification requirements, restrictions on liquids, and increased police presence on flights and at airports, security behind the scenes at Canada’s airports remains flimsy. Airport employees are rarely searched. So while a passenger has to surrender her oversized container of yogurt, it would be easy for a cleaner to plant a weapon on a plane for a terrorist associate to use during the flight. And while passengers’ bags are screened, cargo isn’t. Nor are trucks driving in and out of the airport inspected. Unacceptable, Kenny says. It signifies that Transport Canada puts a greater priority on moving goods and people than it does on security. “Some day, something is going to blow up at one of these airports.”

Back in 1998, Ward Elcock, then director of csis, said that fifty international terrorist groups were active in Canada, more than in any other country, with the possible exception of the US. That’s no surprise to David Harris, a lawyer and a former chief of strategic planning for csis. “We offer everything a discriminating terrorist would want,” he says. “Good communications, ease of travel, a generous welfare system, a good health care system, an excellent banking system, and a wonderfully out-of-control immigration system.”

Anyone who can get to a Canadian airport can enter the country simply by claiming to be a refugee. That’s what the notorious “millennium bomber,” Ahmed Ressam, did. After landing in Montreal in 1994, he made a refugee claim, and immigration officials released him. He didn’t show up for his refugee hearing, instead obtaining a passport under a false name. Five years later, following a training trip to Afghanistan and a period spent plotting to bomb a Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal, he was arrested at the US border carrying a trunk full of explosives that he planned to detonate at the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the new century.