We’re no longer threatened by terrorists as we used to be
Here’s a nagging worry for officials in the U.S., Europe and the wider West: Is post-Gaza and post-Moscow also preOlympics? I’m talking about the threat of terrorism, especially in anticipation of soft targets such as the upcoming summer games in Paris.
The sadistic attack by Hamas against Israel on Oct. 7 was so “successful” from a jihadist’s point of view, it might re-energize other terrorist groups. The death and suffering in the Gaza Strip caused by the massive Israeli retaliation are now radicalizing a new generation of Muslims, some of whom may enlist in whatever form terrorist jihadism takes.
The terrorist threats
The recent and deadly assault on a concert hall in Moscow by ISIS-K, opened yet another front in the global jihadist threat. Some American top brass believe that the U.S. “remains target No. 1” for this group.
If terrorism was Washington’s priority in the years following Sept. 11, 2001, it has in recent years lost salience relative to other national-security threats, especially the more traditional menace of hostile states with armies and nukes, such as China, Russia or North Korea.
In this year’s Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, terrorism shows up on page 38 out of 40, behind problems such as fentanyl, money laundering, cyber crime and human trafficking.
That is proof not of neglect but of the West’s relative success. The U.S. and its allies spent years degrading networks such as AlQaeda and the Islamic State and killing their leaders. The latter no longer controls any territory in
its former cradle of Iraq and Syria, even if offshoots such as ISIS-K carry on elsewhere.
Intelligence services have also become much more adept at spying out and disrupting plots. (The U.S., as well as Iran, warned the Kremlin about the ISIS-K plot, but was ignored.)
Nobody can rule out a resurgence of terrorism. That said, a lot suggests that jihadism, at least in the West, will keep evolving into a manageable threat, thinks Barak Mendelsohn of Haverford College. Even if the number of Islamist terrorist groups is growing, he told me, they’re also more fragmented than networks such as Al-Qaeda used to be in the 1990s, and often hate one another as much as they execrate the U.S.
ISIS-K hates everyone
Take ISIS-K again. It loathes the Taliban, its rivals for power in Afghanistan. It also hates all groups affiliated with Shia Islam, from Yemen’s Houthis to Lebanon’s
Hezbollah and Iran’s mullahs, all of whom it considers apostates.
It detests all states it views as hostile to Sunnis, including Russia (which has propped up a Shia dictator in Syria and partnered with Tehran) as well as China (which brutally suppresses the Sunni Uyghurs in its Xinjiang Province). And it hates what Mendelsohn calls the “near enemy” — that is, the local regimes in places such as Tajikistan that it wants to conquer and convert to its caliphate.
The “far enemy” in the U.S. thus has a lot of competition as a target. For ISIS-K, it’s far easier to attack Iran, say, as it did in January. (The U.S. had tipped off Tehran about that strike too, just as it recently alerted Moscow.)
So the trend is away from transnational or global terrorism, in which jihadis try to build large networks to go after big targets, including the U.S. Instead, terrorist attacks in the West will probably be smaller in scale, executed by sleeper cells or “lone wolves” — an alienated Muslim in Brussels, say, or Michigan.
In regions such as Africa’s Sahel, meanwhile, jihadist violence will metastasize. In the power vacuum of this region’s failed states, a variety of groups, only loosely affiliated with transnational networks such as the Islamic State, are fighting sundry enemies, ranging from local regimes or juntas to rival clans, tribes and warlords. The strategic threat to the West is more likely to take the form of continued mass migration out of Africa than of cataclysmic terrorist attacks.
The geopolitical trend from unipolarity in the 1990s to multipolarity in this century should also diffuse the jihadists’ former focus on the U.S. Russia, China and Iran are at least as much in some terrorists’ crosshairs as we are.
Splintering jihadism
The splintering of global jihadism presents one opportunity for the West to keep terrorism relatively manageable. The common threat against all major powers, including U.S. adversaries such as Russia and China, offers another.
If Beijing, say, can be persuaded to cooperate against terrorism, this reciprocity could potentially build trust for future talks about nuclear arms control or threat reduction in the Taiwan Strait. That’s another reason for Washington to continue warning even enemies about terrorist plots against them.
Like other evils, from white Supremacy to fentanyl, terrorism must be permanently contained and managed. But the old pattern of cycling between complacency and overreaction appears to be broken.