The Financial Times of June 10th had a major analysis by Stephen Fidler of Al-Qaeda.  Fidler is usually a very reliable reporter, at least of what the security services wish to inform him about.

The article largely repeats the CIA analysis that Al-Qaeda has been pushed on the defensive as a result of a combination of the killing of key commanders, an alienation of support because of its violent tactics and the moral condemnation of scholars.

However, we should be cautious about taking any story on Al-Qaeda entirely at face value. After all, a journalist can be well briefed by the public relations team serving the security services but a great deal has to be taken on trust.

Neither Fidler nor any other Western journalist can easily give the Al-Qaeda Press Office a quick call to check facts and there will be no relationship nurtured over lunch at Al-Zawahiri's Club or in Le Gavroche.

We also know as a fact and not as an opinion that the security services are not past misdirection and even downright lies on occasions - and their own fact-checking procedures are not what they should be.

There is also the classic problem of whether someone who claims to speak for the services actually does so with authority rather than being some political warfare specialist charged with laundering data through a media washer. 

Journalists like Fidler and the BBC's Frank Gardner may be assumed to have learnt by now when they are getting an authentic source and when not, but a lot of garbage has gone through the media system to less scrupulous and decently maintained journalists.

On balance, this analysis looks as if it comes from reliable sources and it is being written up by a well respected journalist of considerable experience. But is it true?

Over the years, we have become fairly adept at seeing a political warfare campaign when we see one. Usually, we call it right - more on instinct than because of some access to the facts that others do not have. We know when to smell a rat.

Sometimes we have got it wrong.  For example, a day or so ago, we assumed that stories of Iranian attempts to pull all their funds out of Europe in anticipation of sanctions were placed by Western political warfare operatives in order to hurry along the Europeans on sanctions.

In fact, the Iranians have admitted that they are engaged, perfectly rationally, in such a process themselves, though the details remain obscure. We are fairly good at maintaining Keynes' dictum that 'when the facts change, I change my opinion'.

In the current wave of analysis of Al-Qaeda, we see the usual mix of genuine facts and directed interpretation that we have seen in many other political warfare-led operations. The test is whether the same themes appear within days and in different news outlets, as if planned.

The current interpretations of Al-Qaeda follow precisely this pattern - i.e. briefings of several separate outlets on broadly the same themes over a few days. We have to believe that a 'line' is being promoted. But what is the line, why now and how close to the facts is it?

Politicised security services have been such inveterate liers in the recent past that it is easy to dismiss the facts that are being offered. 

In fact, though highly selected, it might be better to assume that the facts are now honestly presented because the long term costs of lying are far too politically expensive - and, to be cynical, constant lying gets in the way of the really important lie when it is required.

We should be more interested in interpretation and the 'silences' between the facts. What, as outsiders, we can never know is what facts have been excluded that might allow us to develop our own, possibly different, interpretation of the strength and importance of Al-Qaeda.

Our assessment is that the propagandists have worked out that there must be a public relations consequence to there having been no major incidents against the US in 2001 and in Europe since 2005.

Left to themselves, these facts (even if there is another major incident) suggest that either Al-Qaeda was never really the threat it was claimed to be (and so was more easily contained by basic police action than initially realized) or the West is now gallantly defeating it.

If the former, then why spend all this effort on security service resources and on legislation that may be politically damaging to governments? The latter proposition (that Islamist extremism has been defeated is not yet credible. So, something has to be 'triangulated'.

Only last year, we were still being treated to the firm line that Al-Qaeda was a serious threat to Western civilization. Academics and analysts (whose funding should really be investigated) were falling over themselves to frighten us.

The ‘triangulation’ issue is one between the need to sustain the ‘war’ (the authorities judge Al-Qaeda to be a primary threat to states rather than peoples despite the rhetoric) and public skepticism about the threat

This is done partly by pointing up the sterling work of the security forces in rolling up plots and seeking convictions (which, frankly, are not always what they seem) and suggesting that the threat is less because of Western activity and not because Al-Qaeda was smaller than claimed.

The analytical model between (say) 2003 and 2005 was of an Al-Qaeda that was, indeed, small but capable of inspiring a movement.

This always begged the question of what precisely Al-Qaeda was if it had no central command structure and no extensive identifiable cell system like international communism.

The model was closer to pre-first world war anarchism. This could manage random and dangerous atrocities but was incapable of doing what the Muslim Brotherhood might do and the AKP has done, capture control of a government.

The current round of political warfare is simply the next stage in jettisoning the hysteria of neo-conservatism because it is alienating half the Western population and most of the populations of the rest of the world. Popular support for security policy is necessary rather than just desirable.

The security community and their political acolytes mobilized public and legislatures to give them the financial and legal tools, to do what they felt they had to do, through an adroit use of fear and anxiety. 

They now need to win moderate sensible support for the selective use of those tools.

The homeland security ‘hawks’, meanwhile, will lose a great deal of power in January 2009 even if John McCain becomes President, while the struggle over 42 days in London suggests a natural limit to authoritarian measures in the absence of an atrocity.

We are watching, as we write today, the politically violent struggle within the Labour Left over the 42 days vote. The actions of some key individuals may dictate not only the civil liberties agenda but what sort of Labour Party might emerge over the coming years.

Meanwhile, the CIA and other security networks are much more focused nowadays. We would like to say that they are more intelligent but it might be truer to say that they are beginning to remove political influences that stopped them from doing their job adequately.

Things have certainly got better. The Sunni extremist revolt in Iraq has been largely put down and the revolt in Algeria and the Sahara is still a local matter.

The chaos in North East Africa is a matter of police work to contain failed states and piracy rather than the suppression of a major strategic threat to anything except the sea lanes - and not even that, if we are to be honest.

South East Asia, though not necessarily North India and Western China, is regarded as relatively free of the threat of violent insurgency. The chaos in Sudan is no longer a matter of Islamism per se. Hamas and Hezbollah are relatively rational actors within a highly localised domain.

This leaves the Pathan ‘nationalist’ revolt which gives cover to Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-like groups in Waziristan. This is where the main security effort is concentrated, not Bradford or the suburbs of Paris.

The new analytical model is simply an attempt to build trust through a bit of honesty (though not entirely so). It states the truth - that Al-Qaeda is an important bit part localized player and network, more like an organized crime network than movement in its structures.

Islamic radicalism has not gone away but perhaps presents less of a direct threat in terms of violence to the West, and much more to certain regional states, than some have believed. Our alliances more than our own security dictate engagement against it.

In addition, the cleverer minds know that, at some stage, the West is going to have to deal with the equivalents of Sinn Fein in order to ensure that the equivalents of the IRA do not take up arms against the West directly.

In this context, the security services are not asking for more tools, just the tolerance of the public, including liberal critics, for the judicious use of those they have been granted.

It now suits the security forces to ‘spin’ that the enemy can be tightly defined and that levels of fear and anxiety can be reduced. And why? Because as much complaint has been directed at Government in seeking new tools as at any failures to deal with the threat itself.

Even the WMD risk (that Al-Qaeda could get WMD and use them to devastating effect) is being systematically played down – at last! – as certainly possible but highly improbable.

So, the message is that Al-Qaeda is no longer a strategic threat to the West, although the precautionary principle suggests continued deep intelligence operations, especially on WMD-related matters.

No doubt airport thrillers will continue to have our brave boys and girls foil an attempt to place a nuclear device under the Louvre with seconds to go but the reality is far more prosaic.

To succeed, dogged police work has to have the support of the Western liberal classes and the indifference of Islamic radicals. The support of the local bar room expert on asymmetrical warfare and Murdoch newspaper readers may now be taken as read.

www.tppr.co.uk