The Copenhagen shooting yesterday fit a familiar pattern of known jihadists who are known to police but who become active in terrorist incidents. The true “lone wolf” attacks, as in the case of the Muslim limousine driver at LAX in 2002, are becoming less common, at least in Europe.
The French intelligence services have a well deserved reputation for competence but they are up against a volume problem. There has been some discussion of the problem.
France already has lost the capacity to police part of its territory, which means that it cannot conduct effective counter-terror operations.”
This is misleading: the practice of intelligence agencies through most of history has relied on the vulnerability of criminals in order to monitor threats to the state. Intelligence services rely on informants for information. It is more common in the cinema than in real life for security services to sucessfully infiltrate undercover operatives into terrorist organizations.
The security services tolerate a certain level of criminal operations in return for information on graver threats. That is not only the case in state security matters; consider the relationship of the FBI, for example, to the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger over many years.
The French are now dealing with a huge problem of radical jihadi Muslims and do not have the forces to control them.
I do not know the specifics of the Kouachi case, but it is highly probable that Said and Cherif Kouachi were subject to regular monitoring by informants of the French government. The security services do not have powers of preemptive arrest. Unlike the security services of most Arab countries, they cannot indefinitely detain individuals who constitute a risk of future terrorist activity in advance of such activity.
Under the circumstances, the security services rely on networks of informants drawn in many cases from the criminal milieu. This has enabled French intelligence to preempt a number of terrorist attacks in the past. The disintegration of Syria and parts of Iraq during the past two years has overwhelmed the means by which intelligence services have coped with such threats in the past.
On October 16, 2013, the French daily Le Monde warned of a large number of jihadists returning from overseas wars and their prospective threat to France. This was noted by English-language intelligence analysts such as the XX Committee blog.
As the number of jihadi Muslim young men grows in Europe, it will be increasingly impossible to monitor them all.
If there was an ‘intelligence failure’ here, and we can be sure that embarrassed Paris politicos will be looking for one, it was small-scale. The real problem is that French politicians, as in all Western countries, have absolutely no idea what to do with the burgeoning numbers of aspiring jihadist killers in their midst.”
The disintegration of Levant with hundreds of thousands debt and millions displaced has honed the desperation of prospective jihadists. The ability of the intelligence services to keep the upper hand in the delicate balance has broken down. There are now a large number of jihadists in Europe – perhaps several thousands – prepared to undertake what they perceive as martyrdom in a situation which they view in apocalyptic terms. Weapons are easy to obtain; Bloomberg News reported on January 7 that the street price of a Kalashnikov automatic assault rifle of Eastern European manufacture is about 1,000 euros (US$1,185), and that is roughly accurate.
It is not in the shadow world of intelligence operations but in the daylight of public policy that solutions must be found to the terrorist threat.
I’m not sure we have an administration that is capable of this.
It’s been a tough week for anyone seeking to defend President Obama’s record, particularly in foreign policy, against rising accusations of fecklessness. Seven days ago, the White House unveiled its overdue National Security Strategy, five years after its last edition, to understated fanfare, with National Security Adviser Susan Rice mostly complaining that nobody understands how great things are going globally — minor incidents like the rise of the Islamic State and the aggressive war waged by Russia against Ukraine notwithstanding — and that national security is, you know, a tough job.
The mantra attached to the new NSS is Strategic Patience, which was met with guffaws, since it seems to be more a rationalization of Obama’s (in)actions over the last six years than any bona fide strategy. Mostly, it appears to be “don’t do stupid shit,” the administration previous foreign policy mantra, dressed up in grad school IR cliches.
If anyone is interested in how this ends you might read this.
Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few centuries had attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model than the Wahhabis of 18th?century Arabia. They conquered most of what is now Saudi Arabia, and their strict practices survive in a diluted version of Sharia there. Haykel sees an important distinction between the groups, though: “The Wahhabis were not wanton in their violence.” They were surrounded by Muslims, and they conquered lands that were already Islamic; this stayed their hand. “ISIS, by contrast, is really reliving the early period.” Early Muslims were surrounded by non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri tendencies, considers itself to be in the same situation.
If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”
That’s a hint.