Radical Islam: the clues are in Britain, not Yemen

The immediate reaction of Barack Obama and Gordon Brown to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's near-successful attempt to blow up an American airliner above Detroit seems designed to tackle the symptoms and not the cause of the problem.

Obama ordered one of his ablest generals, David Petraeus, and Special Forces to Yemen, where the operation was organised. Brown has proposed a conference on Yemen and its troubles. The result of both actions has been the closure of the UK and US embassies in Sana'a, Yemen's capital, as both are now targets for terrorist attack.

Neither the Obama nor the Brown approach addresses the fundamental question of how Abdulmutallab (above) became radicalised, how his Muslim piety turned him to dreams of redemption by psychopathic violence. That process happened here in the UK when he was chairman of the Islamic Society at University College London.

It has now emerged that MI5 actually tracked and monitored his phone conversations with other known Islamic radicals during his time in London. It turns out that the security agencies were less interested in him than those he spoke to. He was overlooked, a model student in many respects, who did not seem to be making waves.

The phenomenon of an intelligent, privileged and even pious student turning to the path of nihilistic destruction, including self-immolation, is not uncommon. Psychologists talk of the 'associative-maladaptive' personality - a category which might embrace Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7/7 bombers in London, Mohammed Bouyeri, the killer of Theo Van Gogh in 2004, and now Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Each had some mental crisis that plunged them into psychic despair. It was this that first alerted Abdulmutallab's family. Farouk spoke and wrote of his sense of despair during his time in London.

The former activist of the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement, Rashad Ali, declared yesterday that he wasn't at all surprised at Abdulmutallab's path from Islamic student activist to suicide bomber. "The government and the university authorities need to become more aware of the tactics being used by extreme groups," he wrote in the Observer. "If they fail to do so, we will see more Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs."

Monitoring all Islamic student groups in detail is all but impossible - the resources of money and manpower just aren't there for it. More to the point is to identify what to look for, and where. If we are to have a conference on preventing Yemen from falling to the jihadists later this month, then why not conferences about other countries where al-Qaeda is active, such as Somalia, Palestine, Egypt, Chechnya, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania? Identify one 'forward mounting base' - as the military like to call it - for jihadi operations - Yemen and Algeria are current favourites - and others will soon take their place.

The jihadis still have the advantage in their use of cyberspace and the internet. Though he failed to blow up the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, Farouk Abdulmutallab has scored a propaganda coup in emblazoning his cause across the global media.

How to disrupt the power of the jihadis through cyberspace must now be the priority for Western counter-terrorist strategy. There are no easy solutions to tackling global jihadism, but it is clear a more radical approach - an ability to think 'out of the box' - is now required from governments and their security specialists.

There must also be a more realistic approach to the enormous changes and shifts in the domestic populations of Europe and America, for that is where the process of radicalisation of young Muslims begins, not in Yemen.

This decade the largest single group of births in many European cities, Germany especially, will be Muslim. The risk is that a tiny but potent minority of the newborn will cast themselves as alien from the city and country of their birth. ·