David Goldman | On March 22, 2016
European security has collapsed,
perhaps irretrievably. So many prospective terrorists are now operating in
Europe that security services have lost the capacity to monitor potential
threats. There is no historical yardstick against which to gauge the
breakdown of law enforcement in Europe. Most remarkably, the wound is
self-inflicted.
Two suicide bombers today shut down
Brussels, home to NATO as well as the European Union, killing at least 21
bystanders and severely injured 35 at the city’s airport and the Maelbeek metro
station. Air and rail transportation has stopped and mobile telephone networks
are saturated. The authorities presume that today’s attacks avenged the capture
of Salah Abdeslam, the last man at large from the cell that executed the Paris
attacks last Nov. 13.
Several thousand trained terrorists
reached Europe among more than a million migrants in 2015–4,000 by one
account in the UK media, or 1,500 according
to NATO Commander Gen.
Philip Breedlove in Congressional testimony
March 1. In fact, security services have no possible way to verify the bona fides of migrants. The cost
of a Syrian passport and passage to Europe is about US
$3,000. ISIS and other terrorist organizations can send as many terrorists as
they wish to Europe, and a very small cell can shut down a major city.
That leaves the West with unpleasant
choices. America has had few large-scale terrorist incidents since Sept. 11,
2001 because it spends $80 billion a year on intelligence operations, including
intensive monitoring of Muslims living in the United States, and because it
admits very few immigrants from prospective centers of terrorism. American
public opinion overwhelming favors less immigration. One
poll shows that a majority of Americans
support Donald Trump’s proposal for a temporary ban on all Muslim immigration
by a margin of 46% to 40% (with 14% undecided). Today’s events are good news
for the Trump presidential campaign.
Europe continues to favor mass
immigration on humanitarian grounds. Despite the electoral gains of the
anti-immigration Allianz für Deutschland earlier this month, more
than three-quarters of German voters favored candidates who support Angela
Merkel’s immigration policies. The German authorities do not know who the
refugees are, and in many cases where they are. According to Germany’s Die
Welt, thousands of migrants have left
refugee camps; at least 7,000 are missing from reception centers in the state
of Brandenburg alone. Very few of these are prospective terrorists, to be sure,
but the collapse of controls makes it impossible for security authorities to
track prospective terrorists.
This does not necessarily imply that
ISIS and other terrorists will conduct a major attack every week. The point is
that the frequency of attacks is now a matter of the terrorists’ choice. Mass
attacks like the November atrocity in Paris and today’s suicide bombings in
Brussels establish ISIS’ credibility. But ISIS does not want to provoke a
European reaction; it wants to establish a foothold in Europe so tenable that
European authorities will not be able to dislodge it in the future.
Europe has the simple choice of
allowing humanitarian disasters to occur on its borders, or losing control of
its own security. Germany has already chosen the second alternative, and
today’s events will have no effect on Berlin’s attitude towards migrants.
The
opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily
reflect the view of Asia Times.
http://affluentinvestor.com/2016/03/europe-is-a-sitting-duck-for-terrorists/
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