Four times a year the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism issues a report on the Terrorist Threat Level in the Netherlands (Dreigingsbeeld Terrorisme Nederland). Giles Scott-Smith of TheHollandBureau.com looks at the implications of the latest report.

The summary that gets the most news – for instance on DutchNews.nl – is that the terrorist threat is currently ‘limited’ but that there is a chance of pre-election violence due to a greater political and social polarisation in Dutch society (although comments to the media have emphasised that there are “no concrete indications that anything will happen”).
Also, domestic radicalism is minimal (and has been for a while), thanks to lack of leadership, a lack of interest in extremism among the vast majority of Dutch Muslims, and counter-terrorism policy itself.
However, what is more interesting is how the report characterises the current international situation. There has been a “pluriformity” of threats since the previous report, which involves Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Al Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, the attempted attack on the Danish cartooonist, and of course the failed NW Airlines bombing over Detroit.
The question is to what extent these developments are related. The report doesn’t draw specific lines between them (the closest it comes is by referring several times to the radical imam Al-Awlaki as the latest figure of online inspiration), but instead gives a picture of a series of potential threats that could – that claim to have the intention to – form a genuine threat to Dutch interests at home and abroad. Thats as far as it goes.
The report suggests that AQAP may gain confidence from the Detroit scheme, but it is hard to see how. Shoe-bomber Richard Reid tried to bring down an airliner in late 2001 with the same explosive as Abdulmutallab – PETN – and both failed.
What is more, there is eight years between both attempts – eight years to work out how to use PETN, which has not succeeded. Its nasty stuff, but its very difficult to ignite. I agree it would be wrong to get overconfident about this – airline security will never be fail-safe – but this statistic is worth considering.
This sums up the overall view of the report. The Al Qaeda “core” – assuming it still exists – is weakened in both organisation and finance. But this must not lead to exclusion of a mixed bag of threats that are isolated physically, connected in terms of radical ideology, and occasionally able to develop a plan that can cause havoc with confidence in Western security.
Threats can rise up “unexpectedly” after a long period of calm. “Jihadists apply a time frame for combatting their enemies that is long in Western perception.” The world is a more dangerous place because its a more uncertain place. We have to take these disparate group like AQAP and AQLM seriously precisely because they can out of the blue produce an Abdulmutallab on an airliner with a bomb.
While the White House assessed the failings of its post-9/11 intelligence and security framework, AQAP (and Abdulmutallab himself, in his interviews with the FBI) gleefully spread messages of further attacks to come, involving everything from false body parts to butane gas. The Dutch report is realistic on this situation – “there is no guarantee of security in modern, open societies despite all efforts.” But that can’t stop the effort to try.
Final interesting detail – it used to be that the US right would castigate Western European (failing) immigration as a source of radicalisation and so a source of threat to the United States. ‘Get your house in order’ was the message from Fox and the Washington Times, backed up by academic types like Christopher Caldwell. Well, now its the opposite.
The report notes that “increasingly more Americans of foreign descent join the jihad.” While they used to be loners – remember John Walker Lindh? – but now they are getting organised, as the five Americans arrested in Pakistan not long ago show all to well.
Where might this go? The report is careful: “this shift underlines, also for the Netherlands, that there are indeed important developments with far-reaching implications despite an unchanged threat level.” Hmmm. ‘There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is…….’

For more from Giles Scott-Smith, see www.thehollandbureau.com