The terrorist threat facing Britain is self inflicted

Brown said UK troops were in Afghanistan “as a result of a hard-headed assessment of the terrorist threat facing Britain”.

Ministers have often claimed that three-quarters of the terrorist plots facing Britain emerge from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Ministers are less willing to discuss how many of those plots facing Britain were hatched before British troops were sent into Afghanistan. Or how many of those plots are motivated by what happens in Aghanistan or Iraq, but were actually thought up in the backstreets of Leeds or Birmingham. The 7/7 bombers did state their motivations clearly, but so far the UK government has refused to face up to it.