SHORTLY AFTER the Madrid bombings in March 2004, British security services seized a 1,000-pound cache of fertilizer used to make explosives in a raid on a self-storage facility in West London. This discovery prompted the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Home Office jointly to undertake a detailed examination--entitled "Young Muslims and Extremism" and leaked to the London Times--of the security risks posed by the UK's 1.6 million-strong Muslim population. The study drew heavily on the assessments of MI5, the UK's domestic intelligence agency.

The study's findings were highly disheartening from Her Majesty's Government's point of view. They revealed that jihadi groups were heavily recruiting educated British Muslims. Also cited were Muslims' social marginalization and a perceived anti-Islamic bias of British foreign and security policies--especially with respect to the UK's participation in the U.S.-led Iraq War and the police authorities' disproportionate arrests and detentions of Muslims--as key contributors to the inclination of some toward extremism and violence. The study identified two extremist recruiting organizations with high profiles in Britain: Hizb ut-Tahrir and its offshoot, Al-Muhajiroun. Both call for the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate. Al-Muhajiroun has additionally designated as apostate any Muslim entering the employ of the British state, extolled the 9/11 bombers as the "Magnificent 19", and endorsed the hostage-taking and massacre of children in Beslan.1 Further, the FCO/Home Office paper cited two primary policy goals: first, "to isolate extremists within the Muslim community, and to provide support to moderates", and second, "to help prevent young Muslims from becoming ensnared or bullied into participation in terrorist or extremist activity." At the time the study was leaked, the UK government had already taken some measures to implement these policies. These included ministerial outreach to British Muslim community groups, briefings to Muslim representatives, and discussions with Muslim youth and student organizations; rigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws; distribution of a (purportedly) well-received "think again" CD-ROM explaining UK policies and other "mainstreaming" literature; training programs for foreign imams to give them a better understanding of problems faced by British Muslims; and tailoring financial instruments to Islamic strictures to facilitate property ownership. The British government, however, decided that UK policy needed "further consideration", which meant a concerted program with covert as well as overt elements that was "fundamentally cross-governmental . . . and properly costed and resourced", to both integrate and co-opt British Muslims and reduce their threat. A program emerged, codenamed Operation Contest.

The idea was that MI5 would lead an all-out interagency effort to win Muslim hearts and minds while also more directly preventing imminent radicalization. The FCO and the Home Office continued to conduct very public community relations and anti-discrimination efforts and added focus groups to their repertoire. But MI5 and other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies also dispatched hundreds of undercover officers in regional "intelligence cells" or "Muslim Contact Units" to monitor suspected terrorists and mapped the "terrorist career path" in order to develop a comprehensive "interventions strategy" whereby government agencies would confront Muslims at "key trigger points" before they were drawn into the radical fold. The heightened British effort did not stop the horrific terrorist bombings in London on July 7 or the attempted bombings on July 21, both of which were committed by upstart groups composed mainly of British Muslims who subscribe to the worldview of Osama bin Laden. Still, there is little doubt that the mobilization of MI5 has better prepared the UK to deal with a security problem that, given the concentration of Muslims in Europe and their ability to navigate the region quietly and relatively unobtrusively, stands to become even more acute. Europe, including the UK, is nearing a tipping point at which localized Muslim insurgencies could become a fact of life. After all, the population of the European Union includes roughly 15 million Muslims (about 4 percent), and that component is set to double by 2025--a consequence of both immigration and high fertility rates.

Europe's Crisis

EUROPEAN MUSLIM terrorists are increasingly homegrown, and European intelligence agencies generally agree that most European jihadists (roughly two-thirds) are upwardly mobile. Consistent with this consensus, the UK's study notes that while extremist recruits can be underachievers who may have resorted to criminality, the other likely pool consists of university undergraduates with technical qualifications. Historically, university students have typically been the first to be radicalized--even in groups like the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Red Brigades that style themselves as proletarian. In the British context, where the central problem is social marginalization, Muslims moving up the social ladder are more likely to run into significant discrimination or racism as they venture outside their own religious and ethnic circles.

Clearly, while Muslims in Europe are disproportionately unemployed, imprisoned and undereducated, government programs maintaining a high level of education will not necessarily diminish terrorism. European jihadism turns on more deeply rooted structural factors. After World War II, Muslims immigrated to Europe to meet reconstruction labor needs on the Continent and found life agreeable enough to encourage their extended families to join them. But the increased pressure on European states to employ and house this second wave made many Europeans wary of the Muslim diaspora. When decolonization produced another surge of Muslim immigrants, this attitude combined with colonial condescension and cultural prejudice to raise the social barriers to integration and assimilation. Segregation and underachievement ensued. Furthermore, ties between many second- and third-generation Muslims and their home countries have attenuated. They find themselves in an unsettling limbo, whereby they are not fully integrated into Europe but have no affinity for their ancestral language, culture or politics. Older European Muslims might have simply become insular, but younger ones--like the London bombers--are more prone to search for alternative identities that feel more authentic. More recent Muslim economic migrants to Europe--as several of the Madrid bombers appeared to be--may encounter more depressed material prospects than anticipated, as well as bias, and experience a similar feeling of anomie.

Finding their home countries either unavailable or politically or economically unaccommodating and their host countries inhospitable, then, many European Muslims seek a home in the umma (that is, the notional single nation comprising Muslim believers worldwide), where Bin Laden's worldview now flourishes independently of his personal fate or actions. While it is true that the Al-Qaeda leadership gave the Madrid and London bombings its blessing because of Spanish and British participation in the Iraq War, more significant is the likelihood that the bombings would have occurred regardless of that leadership's specific sanction.

On top of adding high-octane fuel to the jihadi argument that Western bellicosity warrants the mobilization of Muslims, the Iraq issue has led many Middle Eastern governments worried about their respective "streets" to distance themselves publicly from the United States and its allies and has stoked secular European anti-American anger and rejection of war. Iraq, then, is a triply potent motivational factor for European Muslims, among whom the war has been broadly and deeply unpopular. The irony is that the European political bond against the war has now crossed ethnic lines. It is true, as French scholar Olivier Roy has noted, that other conflicts (for example, Israel and Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya) and more general circumstances (structural marginalization) gave rise to European Muslims' radicalization and violent activity before the Iraq War occurred; non-Muslim European anti-Americanism also predated Iraq. But Iraq confirms and intensifies the jihadi narrative of Muslim humiliation and subjugation by presenting the acute antagonism of Americans killing Arabs and offering the possibility of a triumphant moment during which a Muslim can kill an American in battle. So far, at most only 200 to 300 European Muslims are believed to have joined the jihad in Iraq, and few returnees have surfaced back in Europe. Those who do return, however, will have unique cachet and likely will increase terrorist recruitment, capability and activity.

America's Advantage--and Risk

AS A GROUP, Muslims in the United States have shown no sign of violent protest, let alone terrorism. The U.S. Muslim population, though multi-ethnic and variable in terms of income, is generally prosperous and assimilated. Whereas European Muslims' average income is generally below the poverty line, that of American Muslims is slightly above the national average. Their reaction to September 11 was, on balance, positive and patriotic. Nevertheless, the domestic aftermath of the attacks also seemed to imply that a low religious profile was better for their health, that they couldn't take their civil rights for granted and that their interests were contingent on the absence of serious future attacks within the United States. They view the war in Iraq skeptically, believing that it was not about weapons of mass destruction but rather about punishing Arabs for September 11, finding an easy target, oil, replacing Saudi Arabia as a regional platform for hegemonic U.S. power, and strengthening support for Israel. While most U.S. Muslims voted for President George W. Bush in 2000, they swung decisively to Senator John Kerry in 2004. U.S. Muslims now perceive the implementation of the Patriot Act as draconian, regard the influence of Jews on U.S. foreign policy as inordinate, and lament the absence of official American sympathy for the victimization of Muslims generally. To American Muslims, U.S. democracy promotion is hypocritical and lacks credibility, given that many U.S. Muslims have been denied due process in the name of counter-terrorism and that the United States has tolerated illiberal Muslim autocrats like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Nevertheless, diaspora American Muslims have not tilted toward insularity and violence. Indeed, they have generally come around to the view that terrorist-related activity is impious because it hurts the wider Muslim community. They are not mobilizing in mass dissent.

Despite the quiescence of the U.S. Muslim community, the U.S. government should not be complacent. The United States could still wind up with a "fifth column" problem if the government fails to adopt the appropriate policies. While Muslim violence within the United States seems more likely to come from foreigners, in the short term there remains a dangerous possibility that foreign terrorists will gain operational support from radical pockets of the indigenous Muslim community. At least at the margin, Islamist radicalism is on the rise in the United States as well as Europe. The United States needs to focus more than it has on reversing this trend, lest the problem in America reach the near-critical mass that it has in Europe. Yet the evolving attitudes of non-Muslim Americans toward their Muslim neighbors are likely to spur rather than discourage radicalism. A poll released in December 2004 by Cornell University indicated that nearly half of all Americans believe that Muslim Americans "are a threat and their civil liberties should be curtailed." The Cornell study also revealed that 27 percent of 1,000 respondents supported requiring all Muslim Americans to register their home addresses with the federal government and 29 percent believed undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim civic organizations. Since September 11, Muslims have been the targets of increased vandalism, racism, employment discrimination and harassment. They have been singled out for searches at airports and other public places. High-profile federal prosecutions based on meager evidence, flawed procedure or misidentification have only intensified their fears.

Media coverage has dwelled on the violence associated with radical Islam and ignored the respectable lifestyles of the vast majority of American Muslims. For example, an estimated $1 million, year-long Chicago Tribune series titled "The Struggle for the Soul of Islam" in 2004 included at least a dozen stories focusing on radical Islamic trends around the world. The Muslim community--as well as prominent non-Muslim scholars of Islamic studies--condemned the series for its narrow view, historical misrepresentations and simplistic portrayal of Islam and Muslims. Such coverage, as well as rhetoric of the Christian Right casting the War on Terror as a clash of religions, contributes to the public's misunderstanding of Islam. Non-Muslim homeowners have fiercely opposed Muslim petitions for licenses to build mosques in their communities in fear, without substantiation, of homegrown terrorists. Anti-Muslim positions are becoming entrenched among American evangelical Christians, who in turn are becoming increasingly influential in the U.S. military and on U.S. foreign policy. This failure of many Americans to distinguish terrorists from law-abiding Muslims is driving them to adopt an unwholesome form of identity politics that has further eroded the melting-pot ideal of the postwar period.

American Muslims are not, at this stage, even talking about political violence. As in Europe and most other places, however, college-age U.S. Muslims remain the most susceptible to radical influences. Younger Muslims appear increasingly to be choosing not to assimilate into American society. Ominously mimicking a pattern prevalent in the UK, Muslim student associations on college campuses are growing rapidly as sanctuaries for Muslims who prefer not to interact socially with non-Muslims. Muslims are building Islamic schools as an alternative to uncomfortable public school systems. To thwart media bias, they are developing their own radio programs and publications. On Radio Islam in Chicago, Muslims are told each evening that it is time for them to speak for themselves to prevent their religion from being defined by misinformed outsiders. Granted, these initiatives resemble those taken by other religious and ethnic groups in the United States since the 19th century to promote acceptance and assimilation. But Muslims' present situation differs in that many perceive their nation's foreign and domestic policy agenda as a campaign against their faith. Defensive behavior could thus become a separatist impulse that finds the potential for political violence in radical ideology, readily available on the Internet and emphasizing the irreconcilability of Muslims and non-Muslims. The United States needs to nip this societal hazard in the bud.

7/7 and U.S. Homeland Security

THE BUSH Administration's post-9/11 approach to counter-terrorism has not stressed proactive domestic policy. Indeed, U.S. intervention in an Arab Muslim country has reinforced Bin Laden's mantra of America as anti-Muslim hegemon and encouraged Muslim radicalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe may soon become, as it was before 9/11, a platform from which to plan, man and stage terrorist attacks on the United States. There will, of course, always be some arguable confirmation of the jihadi narrative (it was once Somalia) and therefore a possible catalyst for Islamist terrorism. The challenge is to blunt the potential of whatever comes along by conditioning its Muslim audience to be skeptical. U.S. policymakers should view the increasingly radical tilt of Islam in Europe as fair warning that America may soon face the same dangers if it does not do more to make Muslim citizens feel more integral to American society. What lessons from the British experience might be applied to the U.S. situation?

Operation Contest, for all its foresight, was insufficient to meet the terrorist threats that had materialized in the UK. Unlike a near-critical mass of European Muslims, however, American Muslims are fewer and better assimilated and are not collectively on the verge of insurgency. Moreover, perhaps the most daunting challenge for the British--the wholesale economic and political marginalization of the indigenous Muslim population--is absent in the United States, and American naturalization laws have long been considerably more assimilative in terms of language and cultural requirements. Thus, something closely akin to Operation Contest may well be just the right fit for the U.S. domestic security environment. But the U.S. government is not doing anything comparable to what the UK has done. Obviously the government cannot control thought or speech in a free society. Following the findings of the UK's study, though, the government can place greater weight in its foreign and domestic security policies on achieving a better accommodation with the Muslim community. Washington's rhetorical acknowledgment of the need to sharpen public diplomacy in the Muslim world and to re-engage resolutely in brokering a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--to cite two especially important policy goals--needs to be followed up with decisive substantive action.

At home, the government needs to raise again the firm hand that it raised against anti-Muslim bias immediately after 9/11. This means according clear and full procedural rights to detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, launching and supporting public information and awareness campaigns correcting popular misapprehensions about Muslims, and galvanizing legal authorities at all levels of government to enforce anti-bias and other relevant criminal statutes rigorously.

Furthermore, the U.S. administration ought to consult American Muslims directly and earnestly on foreign policy issues. So far, the U.S. government has not manifested trust in the nation's Muslims, having made no serious effort, for example, to recruit Muslims for confirmable policy positions. Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, who has primary responsibility for U.S. public diplomacy in the Muslim world, is reported to have only one Muslim on her staff. Small wonder that when Abu Ghraib and the alleged Koran desecration prompted Washington to ask U.S. Muslims to step up for their government, they declined. They would have been between a rock and a hard place--labeled obsequious by other Muslims if they defended the government, disregarded by the government if they opposed it. If Muslims were accorded more official authority, however, pro-government positions would gain credibility in both camps.

In the past, of course, administrations have frequently sought advice from politically important minority constituencies on external affairs--for example, American Jews with respect to Israel, Irish Americans on Northern Ireland, and Greek Americans as to Turkey and Cyprus. The difference here is that American Muslims are too disparate in terms of ethnic and national origin to coalesce quickly into a unitary political factor and are not in a position to punish the administration at the polls. But unless American Muslims are embraced soon by the U.S. political leadership, they (especially young Muslims) could become vulnerable to an ideology of confrontation that is being disseminated transnationally from myriad directions. This consideration overrides the traditional electoral priorities of domestic politics.

There is also a "hard security" piece of homeland security that merits urgent attention. The London bombings only confirm that governments need to understand the campaign against transnational Islamist terrorism as an internal security problem--as the UK, ironically, seems to have done--to a much greater extent than they have so far. While MI5 has statutory authority to collect intelligence and engage in covert activities internally that the FBI does not, the powers of the two agencies have converged since September 11 and the passage of the Patriot Act. The FBI, however, appears to have been unable to augment its culture of law enforcement with an energetic terrorism-prevention perspective. Law enforcement calls mainly for gathering evidence for criminal convictions, while effective counter-terrorism requires more comprehensive intelligence. Yet despite its expanded mandate, the FBI has developed few of its own domestic intelligence sources or analytic capacities with respect to Islamist terrorist threats. In 2004 only six among over 11,000 special agents were Muslims. The UK's Metropolitan Police, by contrast, includes 300 Muslim officers and is actively seeking more. The FBI has primarily used the resources of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to develop leads and make arrests. The FBI's approach is simply to enforce a zero-tolerance immigration policy with respect to the Muslim community. The bureau's organizational attitude--essentially that "a crime is a crime" and that law enforcement therefore requires no special cultural knowledge--is an unsophisticated apprehension of religiously inspired political violence. The implied impartiality of that stance is also disingenuous, since the bureau itself subjects the Muslim community to more rigorous enforcement of the immigration laws than any other community. A Washington Post investigative report revealed that of 330 persons investigated for terrorism- and national security-related crimes from 9/11 to mid-2005, only 39 were actually convicted of such crimes. Such statistics can only increase Muslims' sense of persecution.

The FBI's law-enforcement approach, then, has the doubly perverse quality of being both ineffective in counter-terrorism terms and alienating with respect to Muslim Americans. In light of this dysfunction, it may be necessary to consider investing a full-scale domestic intelligence capability in a new agency or within the FBI. Indeed, being up-front about such a capability would probably be politically more palatable than developing a domestic intelligence arm via less overt and more suspicious means, like the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness plan, which Congress torpedoed, or the skewed enforcement of immigration statutes. The costs of so profound a change are admittedly serious: In focusing overt and wholesale government attention on a distinct and sensitive population, we risk alienating it further and weakening our civil libertarian traditions. But taking this risk before crisis takes hold, when measures can be more moderate and nuanced, may be necessary to ensure that Islamist radicalization does not gain the traction that it has in the UK and other European countries--at which point even more intrusive security practices, fulfilling even gloomier prophecies, would be required. Even if more robust domestic intelligence operations don't gain currency, greater and more constructive government attention to the domestic Muslim community would make the United States palpably more secure.

Steven Simon is the coauthor, with Daniel Benjamin, of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and the Strategy for Getting it Right (2005). He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Jonathan Stevenson is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.