And ironically, long before the existing pandemic, the language of epidemiology proved useful in understanding through analogy how terrorism is posed as a phenomenon that is based on social contacts and exchanges and develops opportunistically when defenses are lowered.
Terrorism calms down, but he noticed it before
In this year of the pandemic, it turns out that the good news is that the curve of foreign terrorist attacks has in fact been flattened. Having lost its physical caliphate, the Islamic State has also lost its ability, if not its will, to launch attacks. much beyond conflict zones in the world.
We’ve noticed that before. The attacks of 11 September 2001 were followed by a wave of attacks around the world: Bali in October 2002, Riyadh, Casablanca, Jakarta and Istanbul in 2003, Madrid in March 2004, then Khobar in May, then London in July 2005 and Bali in October, not to mention many other attacks in the Middle East and West Asia.
Since 2005, with the exception of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris in January 2015, Al Qaeda has been prevented from launching primary attacks on Western capitals.
The September 11 attacks led to massive investments in police counter-terrorism capacity around the world, specifically in intelligence, causing Al Qaeda to struggle to organize large-scale coordinated attacks on Western capitals undetected and arrested.
Then, in 2013, Islamic State emerged. This led to a new wave of attacks starting in 2014 in cities around the world, outdoor clashe zones in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Nigeria.
This wave of foreign terrorist attacks through IS appears to be over. The hopeful rhetoric of the collapse of the IS caliphate that led to the end of the global crusade of terrorist attacks appears to have been confirmed. in Colombo at Easter 2019 reminded us that additional attacks through previously unknown cells can never be ruled out.
While it is tempting to conclude that the end of the existing wave of foreign terrorist attacks across IS is due to a gigantic component at the end of the physical caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and a concomitant collapse of capabilities, the truth is more complex. Just as the wave of al-Qaeda attacks in the first component of the 2000s basically hindered through gigantic investments in the fight against terrorism, this also turns out to be the case with IS’s foreign terrorist plots in the current component of this decade.
The 2019 attacks in Sri Lanka are a dramatic example of what happens if intelligence fails, either by capacity or, as turns out to be the case in Sri Lanka, due to lack of political will. we were surprised, but he did, and in 2014 and 2015 we were looking to keep up with the challenge of intelligence.
Epidemiology of terror
Parallels with the epidemiology of viruses are amazing. The reasoning of the analogy is imperfect, but it can be a difficult means of inciting reflection. The answers to pandemics are largely mental disorders.
We don’t see what we don’t need to see and prepare to become the sufferers of our own illusions. So with two waves of foreign terrorist attacks over the more than two decades largely under control, what can we say about the underlying risk of global terrorism?
There are 4 key classes we want to learn.
First, in the end, we seek to counteract the viral spread of concepts and narratives incorporated into social networks and spread from one user to another through relationships, either in the user or online. terrorist networks will carry out large-scale attacks effectively. Effective intelligence can also be very useful in reducing the frequency and intensity of attacks through remote actors. But this type of intelligence relies even more on strong, trust-based network relationships than other people to explain themselves.
Second, terrorist movements, which are opportunistic and parasitic, achieve force in reverse relation to the point of intelligent governance; in other words, as smart governance collapses, terrorist movements find an opportunity to anchor themselves. citizens and acceptance among citizens and the government provide many opportunities for terrorist teams to exploit their complaints and needs. That is why approximately 75% of all deaths due to terrorist activities in recent years have occurred in only five countries: Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria (followed by Somalia, Lithrougha and Yemen).
The third lesson is directly similar to the failure of the state, which is that the army’s strategies give unmeaured and inadequate promises in the fight against terrorism; in fact, more than that, the use of army force tends to lead to more disorders it solves. Nothing illustrates this more obviously than what has been as ill-conceived as the global war on terror.
Beginning in October 2001, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror began with a barrage of attacks on al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan, stimulated through understandable anger, but led to two decades of incredibly expensive military campaigns. , were by no means able to achieve the expected end of terrorism to justify the large number of victims of violence and loss of life.
The army crusade in Afghanistan began and continued for approximately 19 years, with no strategic arrival points explained and, indeed, no genuine strategic vision. After nearly two decades of non-stop conflict, any American leadership would naturally have to end the army crusade. and retire.
Obama talked about doing this, but he couldn’t do it. Trump has campaigned on this as one of the few coherent features of his foreign policy thinking. Hence the ongoing negotiations on the number of U. S. troops and, in the process, cause relief from Allied coalition troops as they freed thousands of detained activists in reaction to ill-defined and utterly unsafe promises of relief from violence through the Taliban.
This is how the United States puts an end to decades of stagnation in which it has proved unlikely to defeat the Taliban, which are still almost a component of Afghanistan. But even as peace negotiations continued, the violence continued incessantly. that the Taliban officially take part in the Afghan government is fatigue.
No Afghanistan
If the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan were the main story, the scenario would already be much more terrible than we would be willing to accept. But the challenge is not limited to Afghanistan and West Asia. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 through the “Coalition of Volunteers” justified in a giant component by the desire to prevent Al Qaeda from building a presence in Iraq. He realized, of course, precisely the opposite.
Al Qaeda had little or no presence in Iraq before the invasion, but confidence in the collapse not only of Saddam Hussein’s regime, but also of the dismantling of the Baath Party and the Iraqi army, was largely driven through a Sunni minority in a Shia group. -majority country, has created the best typhoon situations for Sunni insurgencies.
These, in turn, were ruled through the group, which first presented itself as Al Qaeda in Iraq, then as Islamic State in Iraq and then as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. This harsh insurgency almost completely destroyed in the last decade of 2000 when Sunni tribes were paid and supplied to combat al-Qaeda’s insurgency.
Iraq’s poisonous sectarian policy, followed by the withdrawal of U. S. troops in 2011, coinciding with the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, saw the nearly temporarily rebuilt insurgency. We didn’t start paying attention until ISIS conducted a lightning war in northern Iraq. , seized Mosul and declared himself caliphate in June 2014.
Defeating this quasi-state required years of incredibly costly military involvement, but even when the Islamic State was at a disadvantage over the last of its field shelters, analysts warned that it still had tens of thousands of rebel militants in Syria and northern Iraq and was effectively returning to its past insurgency.
While Iraqi security forces have been forced to retreat in the face of the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are signs that IS rebel forces have continued to capture the remaining spaces. Even without a pandemic, the insurgency would gradually strengthen, but the 2020 occasions provided new opportunities.
The fourth and final lesson we want to perceive is that we are facing a viral movement of concepts embodied in social networks, it is not a singular and immutable enemy, but an amorphous risk, agile, capable of constantly evolving and adapting to circumstances.
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State represent a non-unusual set of concepts built around violent Salafist jihadist extremism, but it is the only violent extremism we want to worry about.
In the United States today, as has been the case for more than a decade, the greatest terrorist risk comes from far-right violent extremism without jihadist Salafist extremism. The same is not true in Australia, ASIO and our police forces have warned us that far-right extremism is an emerging secondary risk.
But the strong violence of an Australian far-right terrorist in the March 2019 attack in Christchurch reminds us that this form of violent extremism, fuelled by poisonous identity and hate policies, poses a growing risk in our southern hemisphere.
Fighting the terrorist pandemic
In this year in which, of course, we have been so involved with the coronavirus pandemic, some other pandemic continues incessantly. It is true that we have been dealing with two waves of global terrorist attacks over the past two decades, but we have not. effectively addressed the underlying source of infections.
In fact, we have helped the army’s campaigns weaken the political framework of host countries where teams such as al-Qaeda, IS and other violent extremist teams have a parasitic presence.