Peter Rhodes: A simple war for the low-tech terrorists

A few days ago news emerged from Iraq of a strange encounter. A US Patriot missile intercepted and destroyed a drone launched by Islamic State. The drone cost 200 dollars. The Patriot cost 3.5 million dollars.

They call it asymmetric warfare, a conflict between a big-bucks, high-technology army and a dirt-cheap enemy.

And that’s what we saw in London on Wednesday. In a few seconds, at minimal expense, a single “lone wolf” defeated Britain’s multi-billion pound security network and killed four people, including a police officer, before being shot dead.

At first, it looks like a bizarre, doomed attack. If you ever wanted a quick route to Paradise and the Islamists’ dream of eternal bliss with those 72 dark-eyed virgins, carrying out a terrorist attack in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament is perfect.

Few places in Britain have such a concentration of armed police. From the moment the screaming began on Westminster Bridge on Wednesday, the attacker must have known that every assault rifle within earshot was being cocked.

And while the deaths of the innocents are appalling tragedies, what did this attack actually achieve?

Wednesday’s attack was shocking but it was not mass murder on the scale of Paris, Nice or Brussels. Nor did the killer penetrate the Palace of Westminster or harm a single politician – presumably his prime targets.

By chance this attack came in the week when Vera Lynn turned 100 and Martin McGuinness died. These are reminders that London is a huge, resilient city. It survived the worst that Adolf Hitler in the 1940s and the IRA in the 1980s could hurl at it. It is hardly going to be thrown into terminal decline by a one-off attack like this.

So why do it? The answer is that the fundamentalists do it because they can.

The problem with any major terrorist conspiracy, taking orders directly from foreign commanders, is that it requires meetings, phone calls, emails, accommodation and materials. Even if the awesome spy power of GCHQ doesn’t uncover your scheme, all it takes is one suspicious shopkeeper or neighbour or a co-conspirator getting cold feet to land you all in Belmarsh.

The lone-wolf attack, in contrast, requires little or no contacts. He may not even be known to the terrorist warlords he so admires. He just gets a knife or a vehicle and does the deed. And it works, time and again, through sheer simplicity.

Britain’s anti-terror forces are rightly braced for the city-wrecking worst that international terrorism can bring, from 9/11-type attacks on skyscrapers to “dirty” bombs spreading radioactive materials or the latest generation of laptop-computer bombs banned from some airlines only this week.

But who is going to spot the lone warrior, the solitary psychopath with his mind full of hate and a machete in his bag or maybe just a car key in his pocket?

On the grisly global scale of terrorism, Wednesday’s attack was no spectacular. If it were mimicked by other extremists, the fabric of London might hardly be touched. Even so, the capital’s reputation and commercial life could be badly damaged.

The drip-drip effect of isolated attacks like this every few weeks could be profound. And even if the list of dead and wounded is relatively small, the financial impact could be enormous.

It was reported last month that the number of tourists in the Paris region fell by 1.5 million between 2015 and 2016, largely as a result of the fear of terror attacks. That fear is reckoned to have cost the area a staggering 1.3 billion euros.

There may be no Bataclan-style massacre on the cards for London but the tourist season is just beginning and who knows how many would-be trippers have cancelled their London break since Wednesday?

In Iraq, Britain and its allies are pursuing a “smart” war, using bulls-eye missiles against Islamic State. But who is to say in the long term that IS and its supporters are not waging an even smarter war against us?

In Westminster, a terror attack of some sort has been predicted and rehearsed for and yet still the killer got through, using nothing more sophisticated than a car and a knife.

The ultimate nightmare for Britain, the one we hardly dare mention, is not a lone wolf driving a car into the crowds at well-defended Westminster. It is another loner unleashing his rage on an English town, village, beach or concert hall far from the capital, with not an armed cop in sight.

In this 21st century asymmetric war, old rules apply and a knife can be as deadly as a Patriot missile

As Kipling observed 130 years ago in his poem, Arithmetic on the Frontier: “Strike hard who cares - shoot straight who can / The odds are on the cheaper man.”