1. We still don’t understand ISIS.
Despite billions and billions spent on intelligence, we still fundamentally don’t understand ISIS. President Obama has taken most of the heat for his “JV Squad” and “containment” comments, but his views were a reflection of the experts who have been informing him. From what I can gather, most of the people in our intelligence and defense communities have thought Al-Qaeda was the group focused on exporting terrorism to the West, while ISIS was a bunch of extremist religious kooks who were focused on gaining territory in the Middle East. That view is spelled out in this long but compelling piece in The Atlantic, which was the basis for everything I (thought I) knew about ISIS.
After Paris, we now know there is no fundamental difference between Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Both are intent on taking the fight to the West. I don’t know if this has been a shift in policy for ISIS or if we just didn’t see it coming, but this is the reality we must face. Far from being a geographically-isolated group of kooks, we have recently learned Boko Haram in Nigeria has switched its affiliation from Al-Qaeda to ISIS, and there are apparently cells operating in Libya, Somalia, Mali, and several other countries.
Our inability to understand ISIS is even more frustrating, considering its entire strategy is spelled out in a handbook I just heard about called The Management of Savagery, which you can read here. If we want to know what ISIS plans to do, we should study that document, as they and Al-Qaeda seem to have been operating by it all along. That includes attacking the enemy wherever they are, causing as much terror in the streets as they can, attacking tourist sites to further damage our economies, and dragging us into a deeper war. If that document gets too boring, we could read ISIS’s slick magazine called Dabiq, which is also easily available online.
2. Intelligence seems futile.
Paris ringleader Abdelhamid Aboud was apparently in Syria as recently as the Monday before the attacks, going back and forth between Europe and Syria and even bragging online about his location. U.S. intelligence had apparently alerted French officials earlier this year that “something could happen,” but this is another case where we can say, “We should have known.”
Consequently, we are probably going to spend a lot more money on intelligence and military response. The problem is we are in a negative feedback loop in which we face the ever-increasing blowback of our military campaigns in the Middle East and North Africa, and it seems like the only way to deal with the blowback is more bombing. More bombing is exactly what ISIS wants, because in the long term it weakens us and helps them recruit more disaffected Muslims.
I believe the solution involves spending much more time, attention, and money on public diplomacy to repair our image in the Middle East and win the war for hearts and minds. Every bomb we drop undoes years of that tough work. Unfortunately, we are investing less and less in public diplomacy and more and more in military solutions. By that plan, we’ll never get out of this loop and we’ll just keep spending more money and more lives on it.
3. The CIA will use Paris to further erode civil liberties.
CIA director John Brennan has shamelessly and predictably used the attacks in Paris to call for an expansion in surveillance powers, despite the abject failure of intelligence in preventing the Paris attacks. One hot-button issue deals with encryption. According to those in the surveillance community, the Paris perpetrators were able to coordinate the attacks using commercially-available encryption software found on iPhones and other devices. That may or may not be true (but probably not).
Surveillance officials and rowdy John McCain have called for tech companies like Apple to build in a government “back door” on these devices so terrorists can’t encrypt their messages. Aside from everyone’s total lack of faith in the surveillance apparatus to act constitutionally, it’s just not possible. There is no such thing as a “government-only” backdoor. Any designed vulnerability can and will be exploited by hackers to steal credit card info and other sensitive data. Giving the government these powers may end up being worse for us in the long run than terrorists using the devices for encryption. Seems we may to have to invest in good old-fashioned human spies to infiltrate groups.
4. Russia is back, Assad is staying, and the Crimea is gone.
In recent weeks, Russia has been bombing eight times as often as the U.S. Vladimir Putin said they have been bombing ISIS targets, but we know that hasn’t been the case. Up to 80% of Russian airstrikes up to this point have targeted the Syrian rebel forces who have been fighting ISIS and the Russian-backed Assad regime.
Will Putin now shift to bombing ISIS, since the Russian plane was apparently brought down by ISIS over the Sinai? Russian bombing of the ISIS “capital” in Raqqa would indicate such a shift. However, the powerful proliferation of Russian bombing is not just about attacking ISIS. It is also about demonstrating Russia’s increasing military and political strength.
In two years, Moscow has gone from irrelevant pariah to “grand central,” as one analyst put it. Francois Hollande, Bibi Netanyahu, and leaders of several Gulf States are all making their way to Moscow to seek Russia’s support. To paraphrase Ethel Merman, everything’s coming up Putin.
Consequently, the U.S. and E.U. have no will, no capacity, and no leverage to fight Putin on the Crimea anymore. Ukraine can kiss it goodbye, because we will be willing to let it go in exchange for bringing Putin in line to fight ISIS. Similarly, the U.S. and its allies now seem resigned to letting the Assad regime stay in power in Syria because of his Russian backing. Perhaps Bashar al-Assad will have to step aside, but the next ruler will likely be someone within his circle or perhaps even his own family. This is a terrible outcome for the Syrian people, an outcome which will likely prolong the conflict.
5. Terrorism isn’t just for the poor and disaffected.
Conventional wisdom has held that people become terrorists because they are disaffected, poor, and uneducated. Paris has shown us (again) that this is not necessarily true. The ringleaders of the most recent attacks were apparently well-adjusted, well-educated, and not impoverished. However, I heard another reporter who interviewed jailed former ISIS fighters. These young Iraqi men were functionally illiterate and motived more by personal anger against the U.S.
I think we are seeing a vortex which will tilt all of these factors in favor of radicalization. We need to realize radicalization is not just about falling for “radical Islam.” In my opinion, it’s not even primarily about religion. It is a political worldview with religious accoutrements that Americans are barely even able to perceive. This is not to say by any stretch that most people in the Global South are anti-Western radicals, or that indiscriminate killing is an appropriate response. I am saying many people in the Global South simply have a much different view of the U.S. and the West than we have. We have been unable or unwilling to attune ourselves to their perspectives, and that’s part of our problem. We don’t need to agree with them or validate them, but we at least need to understand them – especially if we are going to overcome terrorism.
6. Our lax gun control laws now pose a threat to our national security.
Belgium is under fire in the wake of the Paris attacks for its intelligence failures and lax gun control laws. Belgium has the most relaxed gun laws in Europe, and the homicide rate from firearms is seven times that of Great Britain, which has one of the strictest. Several of these recent attacks and attempted attacks have involved gun purchases in Belgium, and the perpetrators of the Paris attacks seem to have acquired their weapons there.
If terrorists do sneak into the US on visas, etc., it will be easy for them to acquire the weapons they need. Just take as an example the way the Aurora, Colorado theater shooter got his weapons – by ordering them online, no questions asked. One would think the bijillion gun-related deaths every year in America would be horrific enough to motivate stronger protections. But now we can anticipate a day in which a terrorist enters the U.S. illegally, is able to arm himself to the teeth, and kill us with weapons made and sold in the United States.
7. This will be the end of the Schengen Zone in Europe.
The Schengen Area is an area that spans several countries in Europe. The countries in this zone have formed an agreement that allows travelers to pass from one country to the next without intense passport checks at each border. It has been a major accomplishment, mostly led by Germany and France, after decades of war and suspicion from one country to the next. That agreement will likely end now due to security concerns. Walls will go up, and Europe will enter a new era of border scrutiny.
8. The refugee issue is a red herring.
We’ve argued all week about whether or not refugees pose any significant chance of turning out to be terrorists. I’m not saying it could never happen, but entering the United States as a refugee to commit terrorist attacks is absurd on its face. Refugees cannot even pick which country will accept them. If someone seriously wants to do us harm, why would he get in line behind four million other people, undergo intense scrutiny for two to three years, and then not even know which country he is being resettled in? There are plenty of easier ways to get into America. We need to devote our attention to shoring up visas and other avenues rather than cracking down on families with little kids who have been traumatized by terrorists. Unfortunately, short-sighted politicians are using the issue to score political points, not realizing the irreparable damage they are doing to our ability to win a war. See more in my next post about "radical Islam."