published Aug 19, 2017 7:00:07 AM, by Tobin Harshaw
(Bloomberg View) —
Spaniards have long lamented that Las Ramblas, the winding main artery of Barcelona, has devolved over the years from the tree-lined strolling place of Catalan flaneurs into a tourist trap filled by kitsch vendors and a cheesy sex museum. Now it will be associated with the deaths of 13 people when a van driven by a jihadi terrorist smashed into the crowded walkway on Thursday. More than 100 people were injured. It was one of several attacks along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, including an explosion at a house suspected of being a bomb factory. Islamic State has claimed responsibilit

In the litany of European terrorist attacks over the last three years — Paris, Brussels, Manchester — the last three days in Spain were the least deadly. But in terms of European security — and the threat still posed by a terrorist group thought to be on its last legs in Syria — they are just as worrisome. And they are also just the tip of the iceberg: Last year, Europe suffered 47 terrorist attacks that killed 142 and injured 379. More than 90 other plots either failed or were foiled by police and security services. Nearly all were the work of Islamic extremists.

This data comes courtesy of a very timely report on trends in European terrorism from Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. While Cordesman and his team didn’t come up with the data — the figures come from IHS-Jane’s and the University of Maryland’s excellent center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (or Start) — their study provides crucial context of how the threat has changed over time, particularly between 2011 and 2016. On Friday I contacted Cordesman to see how the Catalonian attacks fit into those larger patterns.

Tony Cordesman is the reigning polymath of the defense-policy elite. He has written more than 50 books for both the professional and lay audiences, and in the last year alone he has put out reports on stabilizing Iraq after Islamic State; the dollar cost of America’s current wars; China’s emerging power; the Gulf’s new “Game of Thrones”; key metrics and developments in the Afghan War; the postwar rebuilding of Syria; hard choices in the war in Yemen; the national security economics of the Middle East — well, that only takes us back to March, but you get the idea. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion: Tobin Harshaw: Let’s start with Barcelona. I think this series of attacks in Spain caught most Americans by surprise. The 2004 Madrid bombings, as horrible as they were with 191 deaths and 1,800 injures, are a distant memory. Were you surprised to see the jihadists choose it this week?

Tony Cordesman: No one who looks at the data in detail over time sees clearly predictable patterns. If you look at trends from 1970 to 2016, you see just the opposite: sudden shifts in patterns of violence, targets, methods of attack, and weapons by country.

We also have no idea of how the Spanish counterterrorism forces saw the threat and reacted to the risk of vehicle attacks between the rise of this method in 2004 and the attacks in Barcelona.

A detailed review of the data on terrorism shows that terrorists innovate and adapt because they have to. It was clearly likely by mid-2016 that vehicle attacks would rise in every country with high political visibility and media coverage, but Spain is only one of many, and some early indicators show that the attacks in Barcelona suddenly shifted methods of attack and target locations when they lost their explosives.
We need to remember that we never saw Sept. 11 coming in the U.S. and largely forced terrorist to chose other targets and methods of attack afterwards. This isn’t a “war” you can “win” by predicting how it will change.

TH: Of course Spain has a lot of experience with terrorism — you logged 3,245 incidents since 1970, primarily by Basque separatists. How did this prepare the Spanish authorities, and people, for the latest murders? Are we worried about Islamic State and other jihadist groups possibly linking up with established non-Muslim groups in other countries?
TC: If you look at the data, you see all too clearly that the patterns of locations of terrorism keep changing, and that this is an ongoing struggle that reaches far beyond ISIS. Historically, terrorist and extremists have also always been willing to find strange bedfellows, ranging from outside governments to drug lords.

The real risk, however, is that some movement or figure can unite extremist and jihadist movements on a broad enough level to be truly dangerous. The ideological core here is a level of extremism at the far margins of Islam, just like extremism in Israel, and Christian extremism in the U.S. and Europe.

Historically, such movements tend to fragment and limit themselves, and there are literally well over a hundred jihadist movements recognized by the State Department. Some, like ISIS, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, however, are already far larger than others. No one can predict whether a truly charismatic leader will unify many such movements, and this is the most serious threat

TH: Looking more broadly at your data of both completed and failed incidents from 2011 through 2016, the U.K. is far and away the most common target, including more than half last year. We know it has a large Muslim population, but so do France, Germany and the Low Countries. Why is Britain so vulnerable?

TC: Part of the problem is reporting. Britain is particularly honest about its national statistics, although scarcely perfect. The other key issue, however, is that the number of incidents does not measure the number of casualties or killed, or track Islamic terrorism.

The incident-by-incident chronology in the Start database shows extensive low-level terrorism in Northern Ireland, and a few “nationalist” incidents in Scotland and possibly Wales. Many have unknown perpetrators, and some are absurdist actions by groups like the Earth Liberation Movement — although none quite reach the level of two of the 14 pre-Barcelona incidents in Spain between 2011 and 2014 — which Start classify as “anti-clerical, pro-sex toy.”

We must never forget that terrorism occurs for a wide range of reasons in free societies — many of which cause no casualties. Even in the U.S., Islamist terrorism killed more Americans than hate crimes between 2011 and 2016, but hate crimes physically injured far more Americans and innocent Muslims than terrorism. As Charlottesville shows, we need to look far beyond Islam or at least look far more closely and see ourselves in the mirror.

TH: As you compiled the data for your study, did anything strike you as surprising?
TC: No. Having worked with U.S. officials, I was all too aware that the statistics involved are far too uncertain when they have to be estimated from unclassified reporting, and the data are usually sharply contradictory if they are based on independent estimates.

One critical failure in the U.S. is that our National Counterterrorism Center abandoned the effort to create a meaningful unclassified estimate, and we now rely on highly uncertain media sources. The uncertainty level can easily reach 50 percent in some countries or categories. There is exactly zero presidential and congressional responsibility or effort to publicly ensure that we have accurate data, and real transparency that attempts to accurately measure the global patterns in terrorism, or measure the effectiveness of our counterterrorism efforts.

You have to do the best you can with the data available, and you have to realize that they can be grossly different or wrong.
TH: The terrorists who rammed into the crowds along Las Ramblas in Barcelona eventually jumped out of the van and attempted to kill passersby with knives. We saw a similar approach in the London Bridge attack in March and on Friday in Turku, Finland. All told, use of firearms dropped from 57 incidents in 2015 to just six last year. Why the change in tactics?
TC: Statistically, many incidents reflect a change in tactics from cases to case. Two incidents don’t set a pattern. The U.K. also has the best gun controls in Europe and knives have become the weapon of choice.

The data on the Barcelona attacks to date indicate that the perpetrators were originally seeking to use explosives and suddenly had to shift when they lost their explosives in another area. They may have rushed into van and knife attacks in a hurry, or realized that knifings were quick and give far less of a “signature” locating the terrorist than gunfire. We’ll have to wait and see what more evidence surfaces.

TH: The data show that France is the only country in which arrests have increased over the last three years. Is that because there are more plotters, or are the security services getting better?

TC: French law permits much more active surveillance than in many other countries, and France has experience dating back to the days of the Algerian crisis in the 1950s and 1960s, and that was updated when a series of largely Arab and Islamic riots took place around Paris. Moreover, French politics led the government to be far more willing to act than in most other European governments, and some arrests may have been more for political visibility that practical reasons.

The key question is whether the arrests did more to fight terrorism than provoke anger and resentment and cause more alienation and terrorism. Overreaction doesn’t simply lead to human-rights abuses; it often feeds extremism and terrorism, and it is a key reason why extremist movements like ISIS and al-Qaeda use it to try to breed Islamophobia and hatred between the Muslim world and the West.

Valid and effective counterterrorism is critical to our security. Overreaction for the sake of politics, and hatred and prejudice undermine it.

TH: In the aftermath of the Bataclan attack in Paris in 2015, airport/metro attack in Brussels in 2016, and Manchester concert attack this May, there was much concern over poor counterterrorism coordination between European countries and the various police and security agencies within them, as well as Europol. Do you feel this is a major problem? Will Brexit potentially make things worse?

TC: European officials and experts make it all too clear in private that the level of coordination is still far too poor even within given countries, and coordination between Britain and other European states was too weak even before Brexit. There is still far too much to be done.

The problem is that nothing could be more sensitive politically or reflect the real-world differences between states. The EU and many national officials are trying, but it is not easy to cross security and jurisdictional lines at the best of times, and many aspects of actual coordination affect serious differences in legal systems and views of human rights.
TH: Finally, with Islamic State dead in Mosul and on the verge of defeat in Syria, do you think the terrorist threat to Europe and the U.S. will diminish or expand?

TC: The defeat of the physical “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria will remove the threat of what would have been the equivalent of a terrorist state, but it will also disperse thousands of experienced local and foreign fighters with a strong incentive to strike at the West. At least in the short run, it could increase such attacks.

ISIS is also only a small part of the problem today. The Start database used by the U.S. State Department in its annual country reports on counterterrorism indicates that ISIS was responsible for 4,343 incidents in 2011 to 2016 — from its rise to the end of last year. This was 6.1 percent of the world total during the same period and 7.2 percent of the total in the Middle East and North Africa. Defeating the ISIS caliphate will not begin to defeat terrorism.

More than that, it will do nothing to reduce the causes of terrorism in the Islamic and other parts of the world: massive population growth; economic development and major unemployment problems; resentment of secular governments that favor a few and are intensely corrupt; the feeling that state-supported religious figures support the state and not religion; and deep internal sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions in many states.

There are good reasons why almost no one actually involved in the fight against terrorism believes this will be over in less than a couple of decades, and the current impact of the ISIS caliphate must be kept in perspective.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Tobin Harshaw writes editorials on national security, education and food for Bloomberg View. He was an editor with the op-ed page of the New York Times and the paper’s letters editor.
To contact the author of this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net
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