Drowned out by all the kerfuffle over the chaos caused to flight plans across the world, the motive for the abortive attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has received little attention. The issues over tighter airport security, the detection of the colourless crystals of PETN (pentaerythritol trinitrate), the US procedures for moving suspects from a general watchlist of half a million people to a no-fly status, and the failure of the US authorities to react even when alerted by his father to his son’s extremist behaviour are all understandably being pursued in depth. But the most important question remains why the privileged son of a wealthy banker who is one of Nigeria’s most respected businessmen should want to kill 278 people along with himself. It is not enough to write it off as crazed indoctrination by Al Qaeda madmen. While what he sought to do is absolutely horrendous, he himself made clear he was driven by seething anger over the occupation and killings in Afghanistan, and while that continues, there will certainly be no let-up in attacks such as this one, especially against planes.

No-one can seriously imagine that Western interests, particularly the US, are likely to pull back from Afghanistan as a result of incidents such as this one, though if a series of terrorist outrages did materialise, one can only speculate about what impact that might have on public opinion. We now know of at least 3 such plots, all of which came close to succeeding – Richard Reid the shoe bomber in 2001, the planned multiple bombing of aircraft across the Atlantic in 2007, and now this latest attempt (Iin addition to the recent slaughter at a US Army base that killed 14 soldiers). Of course stringent efforts will be made by the authorities to tighten security at every possible weak link in the chain, but the task is limitless. At the very least it should give cause for further consideration of the rationale and justification for the Western presence in Afghanistan, and certainly above all the exposure of such plots plainly gives the lie to the canard regularly deployed that Western forces are fighting in Afghanistan to make the UK and the US safer. The opposite is clearly the truth – that the only reason that death and destruction are aimed at the population of these two countries is retaliation against the death and destruction perceived as being wrought on Muslim civilians in an unjust war in Afghanistan.
Equally it has been assumed that if only the ‘badlands’ of North and South Waziristan just across the Afghan border in the Pakistani North-West Frontier Province could be subdued by a combination of targeted US drone attacks, special forces’ assaults and clearance by the Pakistani army, then the headquarters of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden himself will be finally eradicated. Against such fantasies the link with the Yemen in this Abdulmatallab case is ominous. The vast areas outside government control in the Yemen, as in other broken-backed States such as Somalia, offer limitless opportunities for the relocation of terrorism training beyond the reach of US military intervention. Sooner or later the West will be obliged to make a political settlement with Islam which removes occupation forces and treats the Middle East and central Asia, not as target zones for oil interests or for containment of China, but as regions for normalised political relationships. Till then the risk of atrocities and counter-atrocities will not go away.

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