Battle against terrorism has only just begun

There's the old joke about a man who walks the streets of the capital with weird equipment strapped to his back, claiming to anyone who'll listen that it kills rogue elephants. "But there are no rogue elephants in London," protest his listeners. "See - it works," the man replies.

The Home Secretary and the security services cannot help sounding like the elephant man. If we do suffer some great outrage, then this will, of course, prove that the new powers he has just taken were ineffective. If, on the other hand, there are no large-scale terrorist attacks on Britain in the next couple of years, then there will be many who will complain that the measures were completely unnecessary - an absurd overreaction to an exaggerated threat. Even today, with Kabul fallen, it all seems so excessive, darling. They say he's coming over all American.

There are some amazingly smug people in Britain, and a lot of them - as Chelsea Clinton has been finding out - labour serenely among the groves of academe. These are the refined, educated anti-Americans who whisper that the Yanks had 11 September coming to them (they know about geopolitics, having once read half a book by Noam Chomsky), and say more loudly that our transatlantic cousins are odd, emotional folk, given to dangerous fits of neuralgia.

There has, for instance, been a donnish controversy going on in recent editions of the London Review of Books. Following 11 September, a number of contributors - most of whose expertise in the fields of international relations and counterterrorism was, to the say the least, slight - were asked for their views. A distressing number appeared to blame the victim for the crime (a very English trait, that), and seemed more concerned about America's reaction than about the event itself. Unsurprisingly, a couple of US academics objected. Then all hell (or the academic version of it) broke loose.

One argument above all, however, stood out - these Americans just can't take it. Academic A wrote that "The US has until recent times been largely untouched by terrorism, whereas the UK has put up with it for 30 years." And another pointed out that, "in Britain ... we have lived with the knowledge (of the effects of random terrorism) for the past 30 years." And (they implied) we hadn't felt the need to bomb Afghanistan, curtail civil liberties and stop flying to faraway countries. We're stoical and the Yanks are wimps with rockets.

HOW this stinks! In the past two decades American soldiers have several times been the victims of suicide attacks that our own forces have never faced. The explosion at Oklahoma City in 1995 dwarfed any outrage the UK experienced during the Troubles. And on 11 September something happened in New York that was almost incomprehensibly dreadful - certainly something that no one in this country had seen or heard since the worst nights of the Blitz. Few of the smug dons, needless to say, were even alive then.

Nor were we always stoical during the IRA campaign. After the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings there was a poisonous mood, much of which was anti-Irish. I recall student-union meetings of 2,000 people, where the hard Left sympathisers with Irish republicanism came face to face with the unsilent majority and were nearly lynched. The worst of this spirit spilled over into the courts, giving us the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. Even in peacetime, where were the stoics after Paddington, when thousands deserted the safe railways and took to their (far more dangerous) cars? And what about "Britain Under Water" just last autumn when minor floods were treated like a visitation from the four horsemen?

So if David Blunkett's state of emergency sounds over the top and a response to something we cannot see or feel, just ask yourself how we in London would react to a busload of explosives being driven into a packed football stadium. Or to the NatWest Tower and everyone in it folding back into the City in an inferno of flame and dust. We could well be living through the Phoney War of the campaign against terrorism - the calm, stupid phase before the dying begins.

The Americans now know something that a lot of us would rather deny, which is that we are genuinely threatened. The very success of the 11 September attack makes its attempted repetition much more likely. We are now aware of people who will try to give ultimate, ecstatic meaning to their own lives (and deaths) while denying all meaning to the lives of hundreds or thousands of others. That's a real kind of power, and it doesn't require making demands and abjures such niceties as warnings.

But what does our don say? Another contributor to the London Review of Books wrote from Cambridge to reassure us that: "Anyone who has scratched the surface of early Christianity will realise that fullblown martyrs are a rare commodity, much more numerous in the imagination than on the ground." Yet this is an assurance that is simply unjustified, and that is arrogant - even for a star Cambridge don accustomed to passing on unchallenged wisdom to her admiring undergraduates. You don't need very many suicide bombers, professor. Sixteen can, on a good, apocalyptic day, kill 4,000 people, cause a hundred billion dollars' worth of damage, spark an international recession and send soldiers across two continents.

As to the question, "Will they do it here?" surely the answer is that they will if they can, and I can no more guess how than I could have imagined those planes full of passengers flying into the Twin Towers. As Bin Laden is hunted down in what remains of Taliban- controlled Afghanistan, his successors and imitators will, for a time, try harder. If they succeed, then you can forget stiff upper lips and all that nonsense. No. We are not even at the end of the beginning.