US "slow" to tackle homegrown jihadism Are the US authorities doing enough to identify Islamist extremists growing up within their society and stop them moving towards terrorist violence before it is too late? As they examine the implications of the Boston bombings, the question is much on the minds of British security experts, who see the event as one that contrasts the different ways in which the UK and the US approach counter-terrorism. On July 7 2005, a group of four British Muslims, all of whom had led apparently normal lives in the UK, bombed London's transport system and killed 52 people. Since then, successive UK governments have significantly increased public spending on counter-terrorism operations. No successful terrorist attack has taken place in the UK in the past seven years, although jihadist plots by UK nationals are regularly discovered. Much of the additional spending has gone on hard-edged intelligence work by MI5, the domestic security service, and the police. Another important strand of the British effort is what the UK government calls the "Prevent" strategy. This involves the police and local authorities working with Muslim organisations and communities to ensure that British nationals who become radicalised are identified and encouraged to channel their anger before they resort to violence. Professor Michael Clarke, an expert on counter-terrorism at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank, says the strategy has had some success. "It is about getting the Muslim community to accept responsibility for people in their midst, helping to identify those who are radicalised and working with the police and local authorities to stop them before they plan attacks," he says. Professor Clarke says officials at the UK Home Office privately tell him that they have intervened in "500 to 600 specific cases" in which UK nationals or citizens were becoming radicalised, and had "diverted them to a different path." But he warns that there is no way of knowing whether the UK Prevent strategy would have uncovered the activities of the Boston bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsernaev. There is no evidence that they had active links with dangerous groups; they looked to the outside world like they were downloading a bit of jihadist material, that is all. There is nothing that would have suggested a progression of activity that could lead to them mounting attacks. Still, like a number of UK experts, he argues that the US has been slow to tackle "homegrown" jihadism pre-emptively. The Americans find it hard to accept that jihadism can arise from within their own society. They still feel the phenomenon is pushed into the US by outside forces or foreign actors. Experts say there are several reasons why the UK needs to be far more proactive than the US over Muslim radicalisation. One factor is population size. According to the 2010 Pew Report, 0.8 per cent of US citizens are Muslims compared with 4.6 per cent in the UK. Experts also point out that a large part of the Pakistani population in the UK is of Kashmiri origin, the focus of fierce conflict between India and Pakistan. Even so, the US is no stranger to homegrown Islamist terrorism. In November 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire on a crowd of soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Born in Virginia to Palestinian parents, he had felt a conflict between his duty as an American soldier and his allegiance to Islam. In 2010 Faisal Shahzad, a graduate of the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, tried to bomb Times Square in New York after being drawn into radical Islam. Valentina Soria, a terrorism expert at IHS Jane's Consulting, believes the case of the Tsernaev brothers should now trigger a deeper debate in the US on whether the authorities are doing enough to prevent home-grow terrorism. "If it is shown that the brothers had no specific overseas links then this will really add to the sense that a trend is now emerging," she says. In that event, there needs to be a debate after Boston on how American national and local authorities deal with this.