Twenty-five years ago, the murderous attack came literally out of the blue. There had been premonitions before, but they had been mere flickers in the corner of the world’s eye.
Indeed, there had been an attack on the World Trade Center before, a truck bomb in 1993 that killed six people but did no structural damage, by a loosely organised group of Islamist terrorists.
There had been the attacks by al-Qaeda, a better-organised group of such terrorists, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224. President Bill Clinton was mocked when he struck sites in Sudan and Afghanistan in response – he was accused of trying to divert attention from his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
When the first plane hit one of the towers on 11 September 2001, it was assumed to be a terrible accident. Seventeen minutes later, when the second plane went into the other tower, we knew, and the world changed.
One of the striking things that was said by Tony Blair at the time was true: “They killed 3,000. But if they could have killed 30,000 or 300,000 they would have rejoiced in it.”
There was much that The Independent opposed about the response of Mr Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, and the United Kingdom government in the years that followed 9/11, but that Islamist terrorism was a new and dangerous threat was not in doubt.
We should therefore listen closely when the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, warns that the “mass-casualty terrorist ambition endures” and adds that “the terrorist threat now sits alongside strategic national security threats posed by capable states”, principally Russia and China.
Sir Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, writes exclusively for The Independent today, saying: “This is my call to arms after 25 years: government, business, academia, and the public must treat national security not as the specialist concern of a handful of agencies, but as a shared national endeavour.”
We agree. The threat from Islamist terrorism has been contained over the past quarter-century, largely thanks to good and often unsung intelligence work, as opposed to the disastrous and counterproductive war in Iraq. But Sir Ken is right that this threat, which is still real, has been compounded by new dangers. These include threats from states such as Russia and, at a lower level of intensity, China, as well as the longstanding risk of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons proliferation. And the newest of them all, the threat from artificial intelligence, which may intersect in unforeseen ways with the dangers of weapons of mass destruction.
That is why The Independent takes the view that defence spending, broadly defined to include all spending on national security, including on intelligence, should be increased. We recognise that the risk of a direct attack on Britain by Vladimir Putin’s regime is low, but his war in Ukraine is an indirect threat to the whole of western Europe, and the Russian threat to undersea cables and other critical infrastructure cannot be easily dismissed.
We must take Sir Ken’s warning seriously when he writes: “We must resist the temptation to admire the defences we built yesterday and instead build the ones we will need tomorrow.”
That is the sombre context for this week’s party-political spat at Prime Minister’s Questions between Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch. The Conservative leader is right that the prime minister’s refusal to commit to spending 3 per cent of national income by 2030 is disappointing – and according to John Healey, the chancellor, when he was defence secretary only a few weeks ago, it makes us less safe.
But we would rather focus on capabilities than on arbitrary spending targets. Do we have enough capacity to protect ourselves against the many threats we face?
And we urge the politicians to move on from the sterile argument over whether the increase in defence spending should be paid for by “cutting welfare” or not. Mr Burnham used some injudicious language in the Commons on Wednesday about national security not coming “at the expense of social security”, but he did make clear that he wanted to spend less on welfare – as any responsible leader would. He is right that a “crude” transfer of resources from benefits to national security may not be the best option, although he would shy away from the logical conclusion, which is that, if necessary, an increase in defence spending should be paid for by increasing income tax.
It may not come to that, but if necessary, the government should be prepared, as we reflect on the lessons of the past 25 years, to do what it takes to fulfil its first duty – that of protecting the British people.