The U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had issued an apology Sunday for the deaths of 12 civilians who were killed in Marjah, saying that an American rocket “failed to hit intended target” and struck a house 300 yards away. U.S. and Afghan forces in a mixed unit had come under sustained fire before American troops fired the rocket.

However, Afghanistan’s interior minister, Hanif Atmar, gave a different account Monday, saying the dead civilians were being held as hostages.

“The Taliban were attacking [the soldiers] from five places. We took a decision to hit the fort [house] but we didn’t know they had civilian hostages,” Atmar said at a news conference in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province.

The ISAF later suggested that the coalition’s initial apology had been in error. Coalition investigators now believe that the rocket hit its target and two insurgents died in the strike in addition to the 12 civilians, ISAF officials said. They are trying to determine whether those Taliban were holding the civilians prisoner.

Before the operation began, the ISAF had picked up some intelligence that the Taliban planned to detain civilians at gunpoint, ISAF officials said. Now, anecdotal evidence suggests that the Taliban in Marjah are trying to force their way into civilian homes.

There were further indications that Taliban fighters may be taking refuge in homes and setting the residents up as human shields. The ISAF announced Monday that it had killed three other civilians accidentally in the previous 48 hours in Operation Moshtarak, which means “together” in the Dari language. One of the dead men was “inside a building that was used by insurgents” during an engagement, the ISAF said.

The U.S.-led international force has targeted erroneously before but has tried to minimize civilian casualties to win popular support for its campaign.

Separately, an airstrike Monday against suspected militants in neighboring Kandahar province instead killed five civilians, the ISAF said.

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Officials at the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) say the focus of the coalition will shift from Helmand to Kandahar — the big prize for both the Taliban and the coalition. Kandahar city is home to around 1 million people, while Marjah, the target of the massive ongoing offensive in Helmand, is an obscure dusty town of 85,000 inhabitants that had turned into a Taliban stronghold.

A senior ISAF official, who didn’t want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said: “This moves to Kandahar. That’s the next main objective.”

Kandahar is Afghanistan’s political powerhouse. It was the seat of the former Afghan royal family and the base for Taliban founder Mullah Omar during his movement’s reign from the mid-’90s to 2001. President Hamid Karzai’s family also comes from Kandahar, where his controversial brother Ahmad Wali Karzai heads the provincial council.

The Taliban’s priority is to take Kandahar, and the ISAF has been slow to counter it up to now, fielding a severely under-manned presence many experts believe was a strategic mistake.

Yet until recent months, a combat force of only 1,000 Canadian troops was in place to defend Kandahar. That allowed the Taliban to control large parts of the province and reach into the provincial capital with a step-by-step plan to capture Kandahar city. Districts around Kandahar, including Zhari and Panjwai, also have a strong Taliban presence, with their shadow courts and other extremist institutions.

The troop deployment in Kandahar is being ramped up rapidly and should reach some 6,000 this spring. Thousands more likely would be deployed to begin a major offensive in the province in early summer.

Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the Army’s Central Command and oversees U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that the Marjah campaign is only “the initial salvo” in a larger 12- to 18-month offensive that aims to drive out the Taliban and “clear, hold and build” stability in those areas.

There are 15,000 troops involved in the Marjah offensive, the largest of the war. Capt. Scott Costen, a spokesman for the ISAF’s regional command in the south, confirmed that an operation for Kandahar was being designed.

“The scale of what you will see in the Kandahar operation will be comparable to the scale you see in Helmand,” said Costen. “We’re still in the planning stages.”

Some experts believe the Kandahar offensive would need to be even bigger than the current operation in Helmand, because the Taliban are much more spread out in Kandahar and more integrated into the community.

Unlike Marjah, which was almost entirely in the hands of the Taliban, the situation in Kandahar is much more contested, with both government and insurgents present. Kandahar city is ostensibly in government hands, but the Taliban run a campaign of assassination and intimidation there and periodically stage attacks.

In districts around the city, a particularly violent group of young Taliban commanders terrorize locals, including the 23-year shadow district governor of Zhari, Mullah Esmat, also known as Mullah Zerghai, and the 22-year-old shadow district police chief of Zhari, Mullah Gul Mohammad.

“The younger generation [of Taliban] are very ruthless people,” said Hajji Mohammad Khan, a tribal elder from Zhari district. “The Americans don’t recognize them. They just stand there when the Americans pass.”

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Instead the conference has united the international community for a further commitment to Afghanistan’s future – albeit for a shortened period.

Even more significant, there is broad agreement that talking to the Taliban is the only way to bring the insurgency to an end.

No longer are the US, Nato or Afghanistan’s neighbours talking about militarily defeating the Taliban, rebuilding the country from top to bottom or promoting democracy. nstead there is a single purpose in mind – how to provide sufficient security for development while at the same time allowing foreign forces to leave.

Six months ago major stakeholders such as Russia, India and Iran were against such a strategy – now no longer.

Stalemate

The turnaround has happened not because Nato is winning, but because Nato is perceived to be “not winning” or at best in a stalemate in the war against the Taliban. What every country fears in an even more prolonged conflict is a collapse of will at home (in Europe and the US) and in Kabul to resist the Taliban.

Talk and fight is the new mantra.

The turnaround was so astonishing that the conference communiqué was swiftly overtaken by reports that Kai Eide, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, had already met with Taliban leaders in Dubai on 8 January.

UN officials tell me the report was false and that Mr Eide was in New York at the time.

The London conference clearly stipulates that any talks will be led by the Afghan government, which has already been quietly talking to Taliban representatives through the good offices of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis are now demanding that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar give a clear commitment in writing that he is breaking with al-Qaeda – something the Taliban have only hinted at in several of their communiqués.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has had close relations with the Afghan Taliban, since they were given sanctuary by Pakistan’s military regime after their defeat in 2001.

The ISI are the gate-keepers for access to most Taliban leaders, giving it considerable clout in any future negotiations – something that is resented by the Kabul regime and some Taliban.

However there has also been considerable Western contact with the Taliban.

Disturbed

According to my last count and information, diplomats or intelligence agents from Britain, Norway and Germany as well as several humanitarian agencies such as the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have met with Taliban officials either in Pakistan or Afghanistan over the past 12 months. For humanitarian agencies it has been a question of making sure that their staff are not attacked, persuading the Taliban to allow medical and food distribution and immunisation campaigns to be carried out in areas they control.

Humanitarian agencies are not holding peace talks with the Taliban but trying to improve the quality of life for ordinary Afghans no matter where or who they are.

The UN has been particularly disturbed as to why the Taliban are now targeting its offices and killing UN personnel in both Pakistan and Afghanistan – something they have never done since they appeared in 1994.

There is widespread suspicion that such attacks have been launched by al-Qaeda and its allies, rather than the real Taliban under the leadership of Mullah Mohammed Omar.

For European states contacts with the Taliban have been limited to trying to discover where their nationals are – nationals who may have trained or fought with al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are about to launch suicide attacks in their home countries.

The London conference was also all about making it clear that the West’s intensive commitment to Afghanistan is going to be short-lived.

In 18 months US troops will start handing over responsibility to the Afghan army, province by province, and start withdrawing.

Tough call

Some European contingents are likely to make an even quicker dash for the exit.

Although there will be substantial long term Western funding for building Afghan security forces and economic development, the Afghans will essentially be on their own after 10 years of hand-feeding by the West.

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Family and comrades of Lance Sergeant David Walker honour the memory of a ‘terrific’ family man and ‘rock-hard’ soldier

Tributes have been paid to Lance Sergeant David Walker, of 1st Battalion Scots Guards, who was killed in Afghanistan while fighting the Taliban.

Walker, 36, died on Thursday in Nad-e-Ali, an insurgent stronghold in Helmand province. He was the third British solder killed while taking part in Operation Moshtarak – a joint UK, US and Afghan assault against the Taliban.

His family released a statement which read: “We are devastated by the loss of David, who was a terrific husband and father.

“We are proud of the fact that David was prepared to do his duty helping the people of Afghanistan; he will be sadly missed by his wife Teresa and by all his family and friends.”

His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lincoln Jopp MC, said Walker was a “brilliant soldier” who was “quite simply, as tough as old boots”.

He added: “Unflinching, steady as a rock and just as hard. He was just what the world would expect when they hear the phrase, ‘a sergeant in the Scots Guards’.

“He died during a crucial operation as part of Operation Moshtarak, leading his men in their task of air assault, flying and landing beyond the IEDs in order to extend the reach of the government forces.

“A numb pride in his sacrifice is the only relief from the pain of his death.”

Major Iain Lindsay-German, company commander right flank, Scots Guards, added: “The company has lost one of its brightest stars. Lance Sergeant Walker was one of the most inspiring men I have ever met.”

The defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, expressed his “deepest condolences” to Walker’s family and friends.

A total of 263 British troops have now died since operations in Afghanistan began in October 2001.

Last night the MoD named another soldier killed in Operation Moshtarak. Lieutenant Douglas “Dougie” Dalzell, from Hamstead Marshall in Berkshire and a member of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards, died in an explosion in the Babaji area of Helmand province on Thursday.

The deaths were announced as the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said that Nato’s efforts to prevent civilian deaths during its operations were insufficient because innocent people were still being killed.

In a speech at the opening session of the Afghan parliament today, Karzai held up a picture of an eight-year-old girl who he said was the only one left to recover the bodies of her 12 relatives, all killed when two Nato rockets struck their home during the offensive in the southern town of Marjah. He called the incident a tragedy for all Afghanistan.

Karzai acknowledged that Nato has made some progress in reducing civilian casualties, and thanked Nato commander General Stanley McChrystal for “standing with us honestly in this effort”, but he added: “We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties. Our effort and our criticism will continue until we reach that goal.”

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Parliament has already decided the combat mission, involving about 2,500 troops centred around Kandahar, will end in 2011. The Department of National Defence has started preparing plans to bring the soldiers home.

But at various times over the past two years since that decision was made, there has been some discussion about using Canadian Forces personnel in a non-combat capacity or to station soldiers in a more peaceful part of the country.

Harper ruled out such a possibility.

“We will not be undertaking any kind of activity that requires a significant military force protection, so it will become a strictly civilian mission.

“We will continue to maintain humanitarian and development missions, as well as important diplomatic activity in Afghanistan. But we will not be undertaking any activities that require any kind of military presence, other than the odd guard guarding an embassy.”

Harper also said Canada and its NATO allies have lowered their objectives for the mission in Afghanistan.

“I think the reality is that all actors over the past few years have been downgrading their expectations of what can be achieved in Afghanistan,” Harper said.

“But it is still important that we have a viable, functioning state in Afghanistan that has some acceptable democratic and rule of law norms. If we don’t, we run the serious risk of returning in Afghanistan to what we had before. No matter what differences people have on the mission, everybody agrees that the mission has the purpose to ensure that Afghanistan does not return to being a failed state that is an incubator of terrorism.”

Since Canada established its military presence in Afghanistan in 2002, 138 soldiers have died there. Most recently, on Dec. 30, four soldiers and a journalist — the Calgary Herald’s Michelle Lang — died when their armoured vehicle hit an improvised explosive device four kilometres south of Kandahar city.

The mission has also claimed the lives of a Canadian diplomat and two aid workers.

Harper said there are still outstanding questions to be resolved about the role and purpose of Canadian aid officials and Canadian diplomats in Afghanistan after 2011.

“We have been working on those answers but the bottom line is that the military mission will end in 2011,” said the prime minister.

Harper also doused speculation he’s gunning for a general election soon.

“I have no desire to have a spring election and I don’t think anybody does. I certainly don’t think the public does,” he said.

Harper has made those kinds of statements before, though. In the fall of 2008, he went against the spirit of his own fixed election date law and asked Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean to dissolve Parliament, saying that the opposition parties were blocking any advance of his government’s agenda.

But when asked to assure Canadians that, so long as this spring’s budget gets the support of the House of Commons, he would not force an election, Harper said neither his party nor, he believes, the opposition parties want a campaign this spring.

“Canadians have given us a mandate — it is a minority mandate –we know we have to work in that context and we will continue to try to do so,” Harper said.

Parliament stands prorogued, or suspended, until March 3, when MPs will be recalled to hear a speech from the throne — Harper’s fifth since taking office in 2006 — which will be followed the next day by a federal budget.

The Commons votes on both the throne speech and the budget. The budget vote is always a matter of confidence and the vote on the speech from the throne is usually a matter of confidence as well. If the government loses a confidence vote at any time, a general election is the result. If not, the next fixed date for a federal election is in the fall of 2012.

Harper said both the budget and the throne speech will demonstrate his government’s commitment to follow through on the second and final year of its economic action plan, spending billions more to fight the lingering effects of the recession.

But he said both documents will also lay out some of the things his government will aim to do next year, once the stimulus spending plan is over, to deal with a significant budgetary deficit.

“We do have to cast our minds in terms of the economy, in terms of our budget, to tackling the deficit,” Harper said. “That will obviously be the next phase to ensure that the extraordinary measures we’ve had to undertake don’t result in a permanent deficits. Our focus will start to be on exit strategies from the extraordinary fiscal measures we’ve undertaken.”

The deficit this year will top $55 billion and is forecast at more than $45 billion for the fiscal year ending March 30, 2011.

Asked if he will announce new spending restraint programs in this budget, Harper declined to speculate, but said he had given each of his ministers new “comprehensive mandate letters” over the Christmas break instructing each to re-examine their priorities given the fact that resources will be limited.

“We’ll be talking about . . . how to continue to advance key economic priorities in a period of constrained spending growth which we will need to see in the next few years,” Harper said. “We still have to be able to advance key files that will continue to build the strength of the Canadian economy.”

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In a routine check of passengers scheduled to arrive in the country, Customs and Border Protection officers discovered Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was in a federal database of people who may have ties to terrorists and decided to interview him before allowing him admission to the U.S., the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

Still, Abdulmutallab wasn’t on the terrorist watch list or among the individuals the U.S. bars from flying, which is why he wasn’t stopped before he got on the Northwest airlines plane in Amsterdam on Dec. 25, the official said.

The failure to put Abdulmutallab on the “no-fly” list even though other information about him was known to intelligence agencies is one of the missteps President Barack Obama said resulted in authorities not detecting the 23-year-old as a threat.

The administration plans to release a preliminary report today prepared by Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano about the government’s mistakes in the case. Obama has promised changes in security and intelligence procedures and he is scheduled to make a statement on the attempted bombing at 3 p.m. Washington time.

The public will feel “a certain shock” when the report is made public, White House National Security Adviser James Jones said in an interview with USA Today.

Integrating Intelligence

Obama has said everyone on his security team has “taken responsibility” for the failure to “integrate and understand” the available intelligence. No one has resigned or been fired so far.

“I don’t know what the final outcome in terms of hiring and firing will be,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday. He said he didn’t expect any personnel changes today.

“This was a screw up that could have been disastrous,” Obama said during a Jan. 5 meeting in the White House situation room with intelligence and national security officials, according to the administration. “We dodged a bullet but just barely.”

Abdulmutallab was indicted yesterday by a federal grand jury in Detroit on six counts, including attempted murder. Authorities said he tried to destroy the plane carrying 290 people by using chemicals hidden under his clothing. The material failed to explode.

Collecting Information

The Central Intelligence Agency said it learned about Abdulmutallab in November when his father went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to seek help in finding him. Obama said Jan. 5 that some parts of the U.S. intelligence community were aware that Abdulmutallab had traveled to Yemen and linked up with extremists there. Other elements of the U.S. intelligence network knew that an al-Qaeda-affiliated group in Yemen was working with an individual to strike American targets, he said.

Abdulmutallab was on the government’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, list which has about 550,000 names of those with possible terrorist links. He hadn’t been moved to a terrorist watch list, or to the “selectee” list of about 14,000 names that triggers additional screening at airports, or to the “no-fly” list, which has about 4,000 names.

U.S. lawmakers have questioned why Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t revoked after he was first linked to terrorist groups.

Links to Extremists

Yemeni and U.K. officials are trading charges over where Abdulmutallab was recruited by extremists. Abdulmutallab studied engineering and business at University College London from 2005 to 2008. Obama has said Abdulmutallab was trained and equipped by an al-Qaeda group in Yemen.

Deputy Premier for Defense and Security Affairs Rashad al- Alimi said Yemen’s investigation shows he joined al-Qaeda while in London. U.K. Home Secretary Alan Johnson told the House of Commons on Jan. 5 that while “people supporting violent extremism” have tried to recruit at U.K. colleges and universities, “Abdulmutallab’s family believes he turned to violent extremism after leaving the U.K.”

In addition to ordering the report, the president said he has directed department and agency chiefs to provide specific recommendation to fix the shortcomings exposed by the attempted terrorist attack.

The U.S. also is stepping up screening of air passengers bound for America from 14 countries including Algeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, putting more explosives detection teams at airports and dispatching more air marshals on flights.

As part of the new procedures, visa information will be included in State Department warnings on people with suspected terrorist ties.

–With assistance from Roger Runningen in Washington, Caroline Alexander in London, Andrew M. Harris at the U.S. Courthouse in Detroit and Margaret Cronin Fisk in Southfield, Michigan. Editors: Joe Sobczyk, Robin Meszoly

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After Alan Johnson, the UK Home Secretary, announced yesterday that full-body scanners would be introduced at Heathrow Airport in about three weeks, many in the UK have grown concerned that a full-body scan of a child would break laws against child pornography. The law in question is the Protection of Children Act from 1978, which prohibits creating an indecent image or “psuedo-image” of a child.

“They do not have the legal power to use full body scanners in this way,” said Terri Dowty of the group Action for Rights of Children. Although she admitted the child porn laws do make an exception for preventing and investigating criminal activity, it’s unclear whether broad screening by airport security personnel falls under this exception.

A spokesperson for the UK Department of Transport said he “understand[s] the concerns expressed about privacy in relation to the deployment of body scanners.”

“It is vital staff are properly trained and we are developing a code of practice to ensure these concerns are properly taken into account,” he said.

We’ll keep you posted on the legal challenges that are sure to arise in the coming weeks and months.

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Janet Napolitano says the system worked. No, we were brave and lucky.

A U.S. government that has barred the phrase “war on terror” has nonetheless acknowledged that a failed Christmas day bomb attack on an airliner was a terrorist attempt. Can we all now drop the pretense that we stopped fighting a war once Dick Cheney and George W. Bush left the White House?

The attempt by 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab follows the alleged murders in Ft. Hood, Texas by Islamist-inspired Major Nidal Hasan in November. Brian Jenkins, who studies terrorism for the Rand Corporation, says there were more terror incidents (12), including thwarted plots, on U.S. soil in 2009 than in any year since 2001. The jihadists don’t seem to like Americans any better because we’re closing down Guantanamo. This increasing terror tempo makes the Obama Administration’s reflexive impulse to treat terrorists like routine criminal suspects all the more worrisome. It immediately indicted Mr. Abdulmutallab on criminal charges of trying to destroy an aircraft, despite reports that he told officials he had ties to al Qaeda and had picked up his PETN explosive in Yemen. The charges mean the Nigerian can only be interrogated like any other defendant in a criminal case, subject to having a lawyer present and his Miranda rights read.

Yet he is precisely the kind of illegal enemy combatant who should be interrogated first with the goal of preventing future attacks and learning more about terror networks rather than gaining a single conviction. We now have to hope he cooperates voluntarily.

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, told CNN yesterday that “one thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked.” Yet the terrorist screening system seems to have failed in at least two crucial ways: first, in failing to revoke a visa to the U.S. that Mr. Abdulmutallab had obtained last June despite a later warning to U.S. consular officials from his own father that he was becoming radicalized and might have terror network ties; and second, in not adding him to a no-fly list from a lower-level watch list.

The episode is a reminder that the fight against terrorism requires even more interagency cooperation, and Congress should investigate whether such communication was lacking in this case. No one should leap to conclusions about who is responsible for any mistakes, but Ms. Napolitano isn’t reassuring when she utters happy talk that it all “went very smoothly.” The day was saved not because of the antiterror “system” but because the explosive failed to ignite and because a Dutch passenger and flight attendants acted heroically to subdue the man, put out the fire and detach the explosive.

The lesson here is the same as Flight 93 on 9/11 and shoe-bomber Richard Reid, which is that civilians willing to act in their own self-defense are a crucial part of “homeland security.” The willingness of passengers and crew to identify potential threats seems more useful than more onerous airport screening, which only gives terrorists the satisfaction of knowing they have made air travel even more unbearable. The new rule to keep passengers in their seats in the final hour of some flights seems all too typical of arbitrary rules that inconvenience innocents but not terrorists.

On that score, the settlement reportedly won earlier this year by the so-called flying imams against a U.S. airline for knocking them off a flight in 2006 sends exactly the wrong message. The interests of nonradical Muslims will hardly be served if political correctness allows the next terror attack to succeed.

Mr. Abdulmutallab’s alleged links to Yemen also raise questions about why the Administration is now returning Guantanamo detainees to that unstable Middle East nation. Pentagon officials have raised alarms about Yemen as an emerging al Qaeda sanctuary for at least a year, and now we may have the first case of a terrorist trained there to strike at U.S. airline or domestic targets. The Yemen government says it is cooperating with the U.S., and the CIA is said to be providing intelligence for some of Aden’s anti-al Qaeda efforts. But at this point the repatriation of Gitmo detainees to Yemen seems dangerous, and recklessly so.

No doubt in the days ahead we’ll learn more about how the young Nigerian became radicalized. Like many of the 9/11 murderers, he came from an affluent family and was highly educated. We know by now that the poverty-causes-terrorism school is false, but this is one more reminder. Authorities will also want to know how he was recruited—whether in person during a trip to Yemen or other sanctuary, through al Qaeda agents elsewhere, or perhaps via the Internet like Major Hasan. The report that the Nigerian turned more radical only in the last 18 months shows that our antiterror vigilance will have to continue for years, if not decades, to come.

Such vigilance is easier to sustain, and likelier to succeed in deterring attacks, if we understand that we are still fighting a multifront war against the various elements of radical Islam. This time, thanks to luck and bravery, the 278 passengers and crew of Northwest Flight 253 avoided death. We’d rather take the luck out of it.

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Fears that al-Qaeda is planning a wave of suicide attacks with syringe bombs have been heightened after it emerged that a Somali man tried to board an aircraft last month carrying the same type of device as that used by the Detroit bomber.

Police in Somalia said the terrorist was caught “red handed” in Mogadishu trying to take powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe onto a commercial airliner bound for Dubai. The suspect had 1kg of chemical powder – more than 12 times as much as the Detroit bomber – though the exact composition of the chemicals is not yet known.

Although investigators have not yet established a link to al-Qaeda, the Somali case is so similar to the method used by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in the Christmas Day attack that security agencies are braced for the possibility of further attacks. The news will increase pressure on Britain to introduce full body scanners at all airports, following an announcement that the Dutch government is to install scanners at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport – where Abdulmutallab caught the plane to Detroit – within three weeks.

As US investigators continued to question Abdulmutallab, Somali police revealed details of the arrest of the unnamed Somali national who was held as he tried to board a Daallo Airlines flight on November 13.

Police spokesman Abdulahi Hassan Barise said: “We don’t know whether he’s linked with al-Qaeda or other foreign organizations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught him red-handed.”

The suspect, who tried to bribe the security team that detained him, was carrying a white shampoo bottle with a black acid-like substance in it, and a clear plastic bag with a “light green chalky substance” and a syringe containing a green liquid. A security official said the powder “had the strong scent of ammonia”. Samples have been sent to London for testing.

If the Somali case is linked to al-Qaeda, it will be the third time the terrorist group has tried to launch an attack using powdered explosives and a syringe. As well as the Detroit attack, a similar device was used in August in a failed assassination attempt on Prince Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, by a senior al-Qaeda terrorist who had smuggled the device into Saudi Arabia from Yemen. He hid the device in his groin area and detonated it during a pre-arranged meeting with the Prince, killing himself and injuring the Prince, who had been tricked into agreeing to the meeting.

Abdulmutallab has told investigators he was trained in bomb-making by al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen, which lies across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia. Large parts of Somalia are controlled by an insurgent group, al-Shabab, which has ties to al-Qaeda. Hundreds extremists are known to have sailed from Somalia to Yemen, where many are thought to have received explosives training.

Dozens of Britons have also travelled to Yemen in recent months, where MI5 fear they have joined al-Qaeda training camps, and Abdulmutallab told his captors that there were “many more like me” in Yemen waiting to launch similar attacks.

The Yemeni government announced its forces had stormed an al-Qaeda hideout in the Hudaydah province, in western Yemen, leading to the arrest of at least one terrorist suspect, in the first of what are likely to be a series of raids in the wake of the Detroit bomb attack.

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Britain has been accused of being a “menace to the outside world” as American anger over the UK’s perceived failure to tackle Islamic extremism intensified.

Senior policymakers in the United States said the attempted suicide bomb attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is thought to have become radicalised in London, was further evidence that one of the biggest threats to US security came from Britain, where the capital has been dubbed “Londonistan” by critics.

There was also criticism of the “ghettoisation” of British Muslims, compared with the “assimilation” of Muslims in America. Muslim immigrants to the US were much better integrated in society and considered themselves Americans “within a generation” because the US embraced the “melting pot” concept, said Marc Thiessen, former chief speechwriter for President George W Bush and a former Pentagon aide.

“That doesn’t exist in Europe in the same way and particularly in Britain, which is a more socially stratified society than the US,” he said. “They live in Muslim ghettoes and feel alienated from the larger society and not accepted.”

Abdulmutallab was president of the Islamic Society at University College London between 2006 and 2007, while he was studying for an engineering degree. UCL, together with many other British universities, has been accused of failing to stop radical preachers giving talks on campus for fear of being accused of Islamophobia.

Daniel Pipes, a scholar on radical Islam and former adviser to Rudolph Giuliani during his presidential campaign, said: “The UK is a menace to the outside world. It’s been a problem for years now. This is just one more example.”

The Home Office refused Abdulmutallab a student visa in May and put him on an immigration watch list but did not pass this information to the US. While some officials have said the information could have helped American agencies, others have more fundamental worries about Britain and Europe.

“We are in grave danger as a result of the fact that we are lowering our defences by doing away with vital tools in the war on terror that have proven successful – all in response to the hue and cry from the European Left and to appease European opinion,” said Mr Thiessen. “You are still in the law enforcement approach to terrorism in Britain – the one that we seem to be returning to here in the US.

“The fact is there is no shame in aggressively interrogating terrorists or treating them as enemy combatants as opposed to criminals. What was attempted in Detroit, what was done to you on the London Underground, these were not crimes, they were acts of war.”

Charles Allen, a recently-retired veteran CIA officer who was intelligence chief at the Department of Homeland Security under Mr Bush, said: “The British have an immense problem. There are more challenges in Muslim immigrants integrating into British society than there is in America, a lack of assimilation, a great deal of alienation.”

As a result, al-Qaeda had “worked much harder to get Westerners, people who live in the West, who may be citizens of the West” to become recruits and train in places like the tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen. “The British have the most immediate and serious problem.”

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1. London breeding Islamic terrorists
2. Detroit terror attack: suspect president of university Islamic society
3. Taliban target Britain on ‘orders’ from al-Qaeda