All I am saying / is give bureaucracy a chance

Prowling the corridors of an unfamiliar building the other day, seeking a cryptically numbered meeting room, I glanced in through the glass wall of an office and saw what I at first thought was one of those security service posters of terror suspect mugshots. I normally only see these affixed to the cubicle of a passport control desk (and in the brief moment of having my particulars scrutinised can usually identify at least one individual who looks a lot like me).

It wasn't one of those posters, but an organisational chart, depicting all those senior bods in the structure who have it in their objectives to circulate among their staff and get to know what it is they do, but never quite get around to it. So they settle for having their face in the organogram. By the way, doesn't 'organogram' sound like a cross between the strippergram the lads get Dave for his fortieth and that bloke on the ambulance service motorbike with the freshly harvested kidney in an ice-box on the pannier?

The similarity of these posters is striking in terms of the occupants of the boxes above the names. Neither suspects nor directors want to be in front of the camera, all look puzzled, miserable or suspicious. The manager of strategy, performance and corporate relations appears to have spent a full morning being waterboarded, while the business development coordinator clearly has electrodes attached to his genitals at the moment of photographic capture. Just as an aside, there is an important cultural difference here in that the inhabitants of corporate charts across the atlantic generally look as perky and shiny as a row of freshly rubbed buttons, smiling with their lips pulled back like salaried lupines to reveal a row of glaring halogen bulbs in the approximate shape of teeth. So anyone not familiar with the dowdier UK version will have no clue what the flip I'm talking about, but that's never bothered me before, so on I go...

What this led me to think was that there is an opportunity here for the Great War On Terror to become more sophisticated in its methods (or 'get smarter' if one has to be vulgar about it). For comparatively little resource the evil-doers and wrong 'uns can be effectively thwarted with one of these organisational charts. Here's how.

To begin with, I hope I am not being merely charitable in assuming that the security services have already infiltrated Al Qaida at various levels. I was speaking to someone who works in marketing the other day and he said that his firm already has half a dozen guys in there on secondment. They're developing a campaign to put costumed distributors onto the site of the next atrocity with free samples of a new carbonated lemon juice drink before the emergency services arrive. Similarly the British Army in Helmand, a lucrative market segment representing high impulse spend opportunities, might want to consider why they keep seeing gigantic images cut into the poppy fields advertising X-Boxes, Lynx deodorant, and FHM magazine everytime they fly over Taliban-held territory. My sources tell me Gilette are interested in the viral marketing possibilities of those video clips of beheadings. All you have to do is turn up, really.

So let's assume our spooks are in and they're passing information out. What I suggest is a shift to the proactive. Never mind bunker-busters and other noisy crudities, if someone were to introduce a root and branch reform of Al Q's cellular command structure their activities could be halted by, well, the end of the financial year. It all starts with the organisational chart. No-one will question the wisdom of putting the internal command structure down on paper because they'll be too busy squabbling about what the poster's background should look like ('Blue is authoritative.' 'Yes, but pistachio is nicer.' 'What about an intricate repetitive pattern - with bits that look like crescent moons but only if you squint.' 'Yes, it could be like one of those magic eye pictures!' 'No, that's naughty, it has to be plain and pious.'). If they ever get past the swatches they can move onto the power struggles, but these are less important than an institutional collapse from the foundations upward.

Because once you let an organisational chart into your concern, a bureaucratic oblivion soon follows. Corporatist interference in ongoing and forthcoming activities is now sanctioned. Martyrdom operations have to be cancelled because everyone has back-to-back meetings all day, or is on maternity/paternity leave (AQ being by now an Equal Opportunities employer) or is on a training course. Of the latter category, 'Health and Safety', 'Motivation and Teambuilding with Will Carling', and 'Diversity and Cultural Awareness for Public, Voluntary and Community Sector Professionals', are likely to be mandatory.

Whereas before WMD and associated components could be obtained on the spur of the moment down at the market, they will now have to be bought from approved suppliers, using the prescribed procurement system. These suppliers never have the thing you want in stock, or at least not in the right colour, and in any case filling out the forms and getting them approved takes ages. How can you obtain clearance for a dozen snazzy new surface-to-air missiles when your counter-signing officer is in Belmarsh, your budget holder is in Guantanamo, and your line manager is holidaying in the Atlas mountains for the summer? After a while all this will no longer matter as operatives will have become too distracted by the contents of the stationery catalogue to have time for purchasing weaponry. Under the new priorities a gun that can fire 300 rounds a minute is one thing, but a stapler that can clip through 50 sheets of paper, now that's quite a compelling piece of kit.

Transport of goods and fugitives across the Hindu Kush then grinds to a halt because no-one can work out how to get their donkey hire expenses approved on SAP. Furthering the descent into chaos, Al Quaida establishes a central Help Desk based in Bolton. Imagine a Baghdad insurgent attempting to prime his improvised landmine with two minutes left before the biggest Blackwater / Haliburton / Bectel convoy ever comes through, under lethargic wheezing instruction via sat-phone from a Johnny Vegas sound-a-like.

And so peace, a vaguely frustrated but increasingly ennervated peace, breaks out.