London's gruesome attack and the rising threat of lone-wolf terrorism

British intelligence officials are treating Wednesday's brutal murder of an off-duty soldier on a London street as an act of terrorism by lone wolves. The suspects are believed to be Islamist extremists inspired by al Qaeda but with no formal ties to any organized group. Similarly, the Boston Marathon bombing suspects — the Tsarnaev brothers — were believed to have had contact with radical Islamists, but plotted the April attack on their own.

With al Qaeda's leadership and network severely weakened by more than a decade of war with the U.S. and its allies, do lone wolves now pose the greatest threat to Western cities?

The U.K.'s intelligence service, MI5, has long feared that lone-wolf terrorists pose a major danger. And Tom Whitehead, security editor at Britain's Telegraph, notes that this danger is one that even experienced counter-terrorism experts are essentially powerless to stop. "The nature of the new threat is often such attacks can come out of nowhere," Whitehead says, "with no network or obvious plot for MI5 or the police to pick up on in advance."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The reason for that is that lone wolves don't do things intelligences services can spot, such as contacting known terrorists or visiting countries where al Qaeda has training camps. They simply get radicalized by jihadist internet sites and cook up their own plots, then strike without warning. Clive Irving says at The Daily Beast that it's possible the London attackers — who struck in broad daylight and then stuck around to declare war while witnesses videotaped them with cell phone cameras — was just a one-off. But, he said, it could also be the West's new worst nightmare.

But is this really lone-wolf terrorism? Tom Chivers at Britain's Telegraph warns that calling this a new and effective form of terrorism — instead of treating it as the kind of murder that happens every day in big cities — might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Giving these killers a soapbox for the religious zealotry, Chivers says, will just make other extremists want to follow their example.

So what's the best way to respond? The editors of the London Evening Standard suggest that we all ought to show the world that the terrorists — whether they were lone wolves or part of an al Qaeda cell — can't win. Some Britons are proposing that soldiers should not wear uniforms in public, so they won't be targeted, but that's the wrong approach, the Evening Standard says. Investigators believe the off-duty victim was singled out because he was wearing a T-shirt from Help for Heroes, a charity that helps British soldiers wounded at war. People should wear those widely to show which side they are on, the editorial says.