Excellent after-action report by a well respected, retired US intelligence analyst, writing in the New York Observer
http://observer.com/2015/11/jihadists-at...horrified/
Some of the highlights:
While Al-Qa’ida was calling for Mumbai-style attacks on Europe five years ago, in a break from their usual pattern of preferring “big weddings” like 9/11 when they strike out at the West, no such attacks actually happened (though, to be fair, several complex mass-casualty attacks have been averted, notably in New York in 2009). And now it has happened.
Pinning down who exactly executed this outrage will take time...
That said, there’s no doubt that jihadists were behind this attack, given the modus operandi and reported shouts of “Allahu akbar” (God is great) and similar Islamist taunts by the murderers...
Whether ISIS is really behind the Paris atrocity, as appears likely, will take time to determine with precision...
Regardless, recent comments by President Obama that his highly diffident war against ISIS is going well, and the Islamic State has been “contained,” now seem woefully wrong.
Based on recent jihadist attacks in France, it’s also likely that the murderers were a mix of self-starters and trained killers...
In real life, unlike the movies, intelligence is never perfect...
Caution regarding hasty assessment is therefore in order...
Friday night Paris witnessed its first curfew since the Second World War, some 1,500 troops have been deployed in the streets of the capital, while borders are going up again in France and all across Europe in response to the latest horror in the City of Lights...
The impact of these attacks on the European Union is likely to be deep and long-lasting...
The Schengen Agreement, which gave the EU open borders, was already ailing under the impact of vast numbers of refugees surging into Europe from Asia and Africa. The Paris attacks may functionally end Schengen altogether...
In response to the Paris attacks, Poland has signaled it plans to reject the migrant quota the EU had given Warsaw, and it would be naïve to expect Poland to be the last to do so, given how unhappy many Eastern European states were with the quota arrangement already...
Despite strict laws in France regarding guns, terrorists have no trouble getting AK-47s...
Even if all such weapons and explosives could be stopped from entering the EU tomorrow, there remains the problem that Europe has so many would-be jihadists already. The number of “watchable” suspects, meaning potential terrorists who need monitoring by the security services, in France alone exceeds 5,000, according to Paris...
The the stark reality is that there is no intelligence or law enforcement fix to the threat that Europe now faces from the global jihad...
France has very competent security services, among the best in Europe at countering terrorism, but the number of potential jihadists is now so vast that no intelligence agency can reliably track and deter them all... suspects on watch-lists go missing. In real life, unlike the movies, intelligence is never perfect.
Unless Paris is willing to contemplate harsher measures, such as the internment of potential jihadists, known Islamist radicals, we should expect more attacks. There is democratic precedent for this. In October 1970, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a liberal icon, declared martial law, deployed the army in the streets, and rounded up nearly 500 extremists, thereby crushing the nascent terror threat in Quebec. Bleeding hearts objected but Trudeau’s famous response, “go on and bleed,” was telling—and he won.
If Hollande has the gumption to do something similar, France can still turn the tide against the jihadists and save many lives. “We know who they are, we usually know where they are,” explained a French counterterrorism official, an old friend, to me in the hours after the Paris attacks: “But will Paris let the gloves come off now? I don’t know.”
In truth, no experts in European jihadism were surprised by this latest atrocity. Given French and EU realities, it was only a matter of time. No experts will be surprised by the next jihadist attack in Europe either. Whether that happens is now up to the Europeans, with France in the lead. Although President Obama can help by doing something more meaningful than sending James Taylor to Paris to sing. Calling the enemy what it actually is would be a start. The fate of a continent is at stake.
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