Britain is ill-prepared for this deadly new world David Cameron was supposed to have spent yesterday morning delivering his much-delayed speech on the future of Britain's relationship with Europe. Instead, he had to make his way to the House of Commons for an emergency statement on the Algerian hostage crisis. Having started the week by offering to provide France with two C-17 transport planes to assist with its intervention in Mali, Mr Cameron ended it anxiously trying to discover the fate of the British hostages taken captive after the attack by Islamist terrorists on BP's In Amenas gas field. Mr Cameron's primary concern, as he told the Commons, has been to establish the identity and ensure the safety of the British nationals involved. To this end, he offered to provide the Algerian government with technical and intelligence support - including SAS units - to achieve a successful resolution of the crisis. To judge by Algeria's uncompromising military response, which was launched without prior consultation with Mr Cameron, defeating the kidnappers seems to have taken priority over the hostages" security. The result is that many of the captives are believed to have perished, while the fate of others remains unclear. Irrespective of how this particular incident is resolved, Mr Cameron is right to highlight the fact that we can expect more such attacks in the years to come. In particular, he believes that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other north African terrorist groups, which thrive in the ungoverned space of failed states, now have the capacity to pose a "large and existential threat" to our well-being - particularly in Mali, where large tracts of the country have already become a safe haven for militants. By seizing on long-standing local conflicts for their own ends, al-Qaeda and its allies have added a fresh and disturbing dimension to the turmoil in the area, posing a threat far beyond the region itself. The situation is complicated by the recent seismic changes to the political landscape of the Middle East and north Africa; in the wake of the Arab Spring, Islamists have attempted - largely successfully - to assert their influence in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and are playing an increasingly prominent role in Syria (undermining William Hague's argument that the West should arm the opposition there). The overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi has had particularly problematic consequences, leading to a collapse of government in Libya's remoter regions, and flooding the rest of the region (not least Mali) with looted arms and ammunition. While Britain will be wary of further entanglements after the controversies of Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no doubt that our Armed Forces will - as in Mali - be called upon to play a part in containing the Islamist threat, though the tangled alliances, shifting frontiers and guerrilla tactics that our forces will encounter could make it alarmingly hard to develop the necessary clarity about our aims, tactics and (perhaps most importantly) our exit strategy. Yet if these are the frontiers of the future, the sight of one of our precious C-17s marooned on a French runway was hardly the best omen. As Con Coughlin pointed out on these pages yesterday, Britain has only eight of these aircraft, and France none; America has roughly 200. It is a handy shorthand for our respective military approaches - Britain running down its forces, banking the dividend from leaving Afghanistan and relying on reservists to fill the gaps in its ranks; the US turning to the Pacific and increasingly perturbed (as General Stanley McChrystal, the former Nato commander in Afghanistan, and Leon Panetta, the outgoing defence secretary, have made clear) by the way we have chosen to limit our capabilities, even as our responsibilities grow. At the time of the Government's Strategic Defence and Security Review, there were warnings that it left Britain perilously ill-prepared to face the uncertainties of an increasingly chaotic world. That analysis holds. If Mr Cameron is serious about confronting the threat posed by Islamist terrorists, he should make sure our Armed Forces have the resources and manpower to deny them the safe havens they crave.