We can’t go back to business as usual

Western leaders have become preoccupied with the question of whether their radicalised citizens who went to fight for IS should be allowed to return. But the furore over ‘‘foreign fighters’’ and the potential for them to commit terrorist acts upon repatriation has obscured a far more troubling prospect: that following the apparent defeat of IS the failings of the Syrian and Iraqi states that drove populations in both countries to support insurgents in the first place will be put into diplomacy’s too-hard basket and left to fester, with results that anyone who remembers Afghanistan in the 1990s should know.

The governments of the Middle East and their friends in the wider world are already attempting to return to business as usual, and global attention to the region is fading, with US President Donald Trump leading the march to the exits and calling Syria a place of ‘‘sand and death’’ that was ‘‘lost long ago’’.

When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently visited Beijing and characterised China’s mass internment of Uighurs as a legitimate counter-terrorism measure, we were offered a glimpse of a future that looks worryingly like a return to brutal normalcy for repressive regimes. If we believe our own rhetoric about fighting terrorism, we cannot afford to see such a world rebuilt unchallenged. We must not turn away.