Britain's new counter-terrorism strategy...

How can they fight terror if they don't understand it...

The Government will tomorrow launch a new counter-terrorism strategy, called Contest 2. For those who missed Contest 1, a brief explanation is in order. It has four strands: to protect, to pursue, to prepare and to prevent.

Which of these would you consider the most important? I would hazard a guess that most of us would suggest preventing a terrorist attack happening at all is the most crucial aspect of such a strategy. We should be ready, of course, to resist them; and we should track down those who perpetrate them. We should also protect people with straightforward security measures and with good intelligence. But, if we can stop them happening, that would be best.

So it was somewhat odd that when Gordon Brown outlined this updated approach in a newspaper article yesterday, the "prevent" bit seemed less prominent than one imagined it might be. There was talk about "murderous agents of hate" and of "core al-Qaeda" – spook-speak for the central command that is based in the lawless borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"Terrorists remain intent on inflicting mass casualties without warning, including through suicide bombings," Mr Brown said. Tens of thousands of security guards and store managers have now apparently been "trained and equipped to deal with an incident and know what to watch for" (though this was news to my local shop manager when I went to get the papers yesterday). The strategy will also "address the longer-term causes – understanding what leads people to become radicalised, so we can stop the process". And that was about it for prevent.

There was not a single mention of the undeniable truth that the extremists who will actually carry out atrocities live among us and need to be confronted here and now. According to Mr Brown, "we are developing a strategy to tackle the terrorist threat by tackling the underlying causes, the extremist madrassas and the lawless spaces in which terrorists recruit or train". Not here, mind you, but in Pakistan. His only mention that this may have anything to do with British-based radical Islamism was a reference to "a violent extremist ideology based on a false reading of religion".

Is it not imperative, if we are to tackle this menace, that we should at least be honest about what is driving it? The Government is reluctant to call the threat Islamist and prefers to refer to it as "international terrorism". It clearly has an international dimension, but most of the 80 or so people convicted and jailed for terrorist offences in the past three years or so are British or have lived here – as, indeed, were the perpetrators of the July 7 atrocities in 2005.