Day 1 - 5th Worldwide Security Conference

The opening session gave a state of play and also showed some of the problems in counter terrorism. Cemil Cicek, Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey appealed for more cooperation but failed to discuss some of the Turkish army's more contraversial actions against the Kurds, not least shelling Iraqi villages.

General Ehsan ul Haq, former chairman of the Pakistan Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a somber analysis of the success of a military based response to terrorism in Afghanistan, stating that al Qaeda has survived 6 years of military assaults and the difficulties terrorism has caused Pakistan.

Funnily enough he didn't mention Pakistan's building up of the Taliban and support for the training camps etc. He probably ran out of time.

The first session asked how good we have been at protecting against terror, where the threat is going and how to counter it.

Gilles de Kerchove, EU Counter Terrorism Coordinator said there havd been improvements in border security etc and called for more databases of personal details in cluding telecom, ISP records etc and the enhanced sharing of such databases throughout the EU. Possible downsides and impact of civil liberties weren't touched upon.

However he did point out that the current wave of potential terrorists were 'post Iraq, inspired by but not directed by al Qaeda.'

The second session asked how good have we been at countering extremism.

Basically the answer seems to be not very good at all and events like Iraq, Abu Graib have encouraged people to move towards extremist groups. It appears that the next wave of terrorists will be less coordinated, more spontaneous and Iraq, Abu Graib and Gitmo are events that may have tipped large numbers away from mere radicalism and into actual terrorism.

At this point I was tempted to ask why on earth the East West Institute decorated Tony Blair as Statesman of the Decade!

An interesting contribution was made by J Rami Mroz, about how terrorists use the internet. I asked how people could use the internet to counter extremism and how this could widen people's participation. After the chairman's 'pardon, Blair... what?' had elements of Lady windermere. The question was met with the promise of a whizz-bank jolly supper 'platform' they were developing.

I think it still might be a bit 'think-tanky' but there is a potential for widening it past policy wonks and bringing in global bloggers etc and using our networking skills to make this into something interesting and useful. I'll be discussing this more with them after the conference.

The third session was divided and I went to a presentation of a policy paper on the Security of Pakistan's Nuclear Facilities. The paper is short but concise and informative. I'll discuss it later, but if you can't wait grab it here .

The fourth session on measures to channel support away from extremist groups was disappointing, to put it mildly. The panellists were good, including Nasra Hassan from the UN information service and Mohammed mohammed Ali who is involved in reconstruction work in Iraq. I will cover him in more detail later.

Sadly the subject narrowed down to dealing with Arab suicide bombers and the session sufferred greatly for this.

I asked a question, posing a scenario of a town with mixed population and economic depravation, with immigrant communities feeling isolated after the 9/11 backlash and withdrawing into fuzzy froups and extremist preachers appearing. Against this I posited a white population increasingly voting for far-right groups, essentially the scenario unfolding all over europe - the pannelists nodded at this - and then said I am against this divisiveness and growing extremism, not for the 1% who might go on to terrorist acts but because of the effects on the 99%. I have a million dollars, how do I spend it?

No answer.

Sadly  one pannelist seemed obsessed with the micro-semantics of referring to islamic extremists, another on resolving the Palestine problem - as if this would have had any effect on the Shining Path, IRA, Ayran Nations etc.