An informative - and one hopes not unduly optimistic - piece by Kevin Toolis in today's Times:

The explosive they used, acetone peroxide, is proof that the enemy we face is home-grown. Their warped ideology, the cult of the suicide bomber, might be imported from the Middle East, but the instructions in how to make their bombs came from the internet. Acetone peroxide, whose base materials are easily purchased in most British hardware stores, is a lethally unstable compound with a shelf life of less than a week.

It is difficult to store and as it dries out it becomes even more unstable. It was just as likely to kill the bombmaker as the civilians at whom it was eventually targeted. Unscrew the cap the wrong way or drop the bottle and it will blow you and your bomb factory to smithereens. The only reason to use acetone peroxide for explosives is because you have no alternative.

Acetone peroxide is the base material of plots dreamt up in a two bed-room terrace in Beeston, not the training camps of Afghanistan where stable military explosives, such as C4, can be readily purchased for a few hundred dollars in the local bazaar. No money, and certainly no weapons and explosives, are being clandestinely shipped across the globe to Yorkshire from the wilds of Afghanistan.

Nor is it conceivable that a prolonged terrorist campaign could be sustained from within the Muslim communities of Britain. In order to survive as a terrorist group, such as the IRA, you need a community to swim in. You need a network of supporters and sympathisers prepared to hide and give succour, financial and otherwise for the cause. But the July 7 bombings have been universally condemned. A number of the victims are themselves Muslims. Cold-blooded murder on the Tube does not appear to play well in Beeston. And all of those communities now and in years to come are likely to be scrutinised intensely by Special Branch and MI5. There is no chance that Osama bin Laden’s British followers will be training in the Yorkshire hills in the near future.

Terrorism is normally the weapon of the weak, although as we discovered after July 7, it can also be the weapon of the ideologically deranged.

Counter-terrorism is the weapon of the state. And a state such as Britain is indeed powerful at stopping terrorists in their tracks. Once our defences are up and the intelligence community on high alert it becomes infinitely harder for the terrorists to strike again. The odds are on our side not theirs.

One has to hope that Toolis' argument that the Muslim community will not give sufficient succour to the terrorists to make a lengthy campaign viable is right. I have my doubts...