LONDON — The recent terror attacks in Paris and arrest of suspected terrorists in Belgium clarify the dangerous reality of thousands of European radicals who go to fight with ISIS in Syria-Iraq and return to carry out attacks in their home countries. Europe may be repeating the same mistakes that George W. Bush made in the initial American-led global war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack in the United States.
The main problem in both cases is that countries or societies that see themselves as innocent victims of foreign terrorism have tended to respond with a broadly failed combination of massive military attacks, and jingoistic patriotism at home that touts one’s own fine values of liberty, pluralism, and freedom of speech, alongside a desk-pounding determination to be strong and to assert those values due to the terror threat.
This combination of responses is on show again these days after the Paris attacks and the arrest of suspected militants across Europe. The result is likely to repeat the counter-productive post-9/11 anti-terror policies, because this generation of militants in many ways was born as a consequence of the U.S.-led war on terror, which killed thousands of militants and civilians, disrupted terror networks, and unwittingly promoted the fastest growth of Islamist militancy and criminal behavior ever seen in modern history.
Recent studies say perhaps over 5,000 foreign militants from Western and Arab-Asian countries may be on the battlefield in Syria-Iraq alone. So we do face a real serious threat, but have we analyzed it accurately and responded appropriately?
Twenty-one member states of the coalition to fight ISIS met in London this week to discuss progress in the fight at hand and ways to reduce the blowback of Europeans who carry out terror attacks at home after returning from action with ISIS or Al-Qaeda. The indications from these deliberations are that the prevalent approach to fighting this threat will succeed in the very limited arena of containing the spread of ISIS in Syria-Iraq due to sustained foreign bombings combined with some ground attacks by local Kurdish and Arab forces — but it will not make Western and Middle Eastern countries any safer, because the underlying causes of the broad phenomenon and the specific criminal acts of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda will not have been defeated, or even, in many cases, addressed.
The dilemma that Europeans and Americans seem unwilling to confront is two-fold: Their own policies or actions are responsible to a significant degree for two out of the three elements that cause their own citizens to become radicalized, adopt terror, join ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and return to attack their own Western societies.
Those two are:
1) The socio-economic conditions and policing policies in countries like France, the United Kingdom and others that result in small numbers of very alienated, marginalized young men who see no future for themselves in their land of birth and citizenship, and so they gravitate to the extreme fringes; and,
2) Western states’ foreign policy actions that include ongoing warfare in Arab-Asian regions (Iraq, Afghanistan) that results in catastrophic collapses of society and the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
(The third and most important reason for this problem is the half-century of miserable, incompetent Arab governance and tyranny that humiliates hundreds of millions of men and women, some of whom respond by also moving to the extreme fringes and creating groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS).
The deadly combination of domestic and foreign policies by Western governments has been identified as causing the radicalization of many, many studied young men who joined terror groups and conducted criminal attacks at home. Any successful anti-terrorism policy must include a serious attempt to address all three Middle Eastern and Western drivers of transnational terror, including the reality of French, British and other Western citizens who were born and radicalized in their home countries, due in large part to their reactions to their own governments’ policies.
This is a tough pill to swallow, but the phenomenon must be seriously assessed if there is to be any chance of defeating terrorism by wiping out its root causes, rather than emotionally waving freedom flags, singing national anthems, pounding chests and committing to fight forever to defeat a phenomenon that cannot be defeated only militarily.
New York Times reporter Alan Cowell correctly noted earlier this week that, “As much as Western governments may clamor for enhanced powers to round up suspects or penetrate social media sites in their battle to ward off attacks, it seems that Europe has reached a tipping point where the distant killing fields of Syria and Iraq have fused with — and fueled — homegrown extremism.”
Unraveling and understanding that fusion of mind-altering domestic and foreign conditions that drive extremism is the critical first step to reducing blowback from home-grown French, British and other European terrorists. Let’s hope Europe does a better job on this than the Americans did.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 24 January 2015
Word Count: 820
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