Europe Is Again at War

Its time to admit the extent of Europes problem with Islamic

radicalism. This isnt mere terrorism any longer, this is guerrilla war.
By John R. Schindler 03/23/16 12:00pm

We Are at War reads the headline on a newspaper in Berlin, one day after
over 30 people were killed in Brussels bombings at Zaventem Airport and
on a metro train.
It has happened again. Jihadists have struck in the heart of Europe, spreading terror
while murdering dozens and maiming hundreds of innocents. Yesterdays
coordinated attacks on Brussels have woken Europeans, yet again, to the threat that
exists in their midsta grave danger politicians seem to have no idea how to
handle.
The bombings at Zaventem airport and the Brussels metro at current count killed
31 and injured 270over 300 casualties in all. Belgium is not accustomed to such
a bloodbath. Its army contingent in Afghanistan suffered only 15 casualties, with
just one killed, during that U.S.-led war. Its been over 60 years since Belgians died
violently in any numbers. Their battalion serving in Korea lost 101 killed and 478
wounded in action between 1950 and 1953. This is a distant memory today.
Belgium is a small country. Relative to population, this would be equivalent to 900
dead Americans and a staggering 7,800 wounded. To say nothing of the symbolism
of yesterdays attack on the metro near Maelbeek station in downtown Brussels,
right next to the offices of the European Union. Striking at the very heart of the
European project, revealing its vulnerability to even a handful of ardent madmen,
sends a powerful message that nobody can miss.
At this hour, two suicide bombers, brothers, have been identified while the
surviving member of this evil triumvirate is in custody, although not yet positively
identified. The Islamic State, the notorious ISIS, has claimed responsibility for the

attacks, and theres no reason to doubt their claim, nor that the attacks were linked
to ISIS in some fashion. As always, the killers will have a support system in their
community too. After all, Belgium is an outlier of a toxic kind, its angry Muslim
population producing jihadists eager to fight for ISIS out of all proportion to its
size.
Yet its very status as a Jihadistan of sorts gave Belgium a degree of protection until
very recently. While mass-casualty attacks struck across Europe since 9/11
Madrid in 2004 (191 dead), London in 2005 (53 dead) and Paris twice last year (17
dead in January and 137 in November)Belgium was left nearly unscathed.
Radicals appreciated that Brussels, being lax in security matters, was granting them
de facto sanctuary to plot attacks elsewhere. This was a deal that the terrorists
sensibly saw no point in disrupting.

Belgiums chronically dysfunctional politics have

played a toxic role, as has the general Western
European tendency to avert eyes and hope for the
best.
None of this is new. A quarter century ago, back in the early 1990s, Belgium
developed robust clandestine networks of jihadists, heavily of North African
origin, dedicated to supporting the Armed Islamic Group (GIA, an early joiner with
Osama Bin Ladens global movement) and its bloody war back in Algeria. Belgian
intelligence paid less attention to GIA networks than later seemed warranted
because the jihadists were plotting terrorism elsewhereseldom if ever in Belgium
and Belgian spies knew that GIA ratlines in their country were heavily
watched, and at times manipulated by Algerian intelligence, which had no interest
in blowing up Belgium.
Thus when Belgian-based terrorists caused mayhem in France in the mid-1990s,
including a wave of bombings in Paris, Brussels helped French intelligence catch

the bad guys but undertook no serious dismantling of jihadist networks in Belgium.
Over time this problem metastasized, and with the rise of ISIS in recent years,
including hundreds of Belgian citizens going to the Middle East to wage holy war
for the Islamic State, the threat has grown exponentially.
The game changer was last Novembers horrific attacks in Paris, the bloodiest
events on French soil since the Second World War. These turned out to have a
significant Belgian footprint, with several of the attackers linked to Molenbeek, a
notorious Brussels suburb thats half-Muslim and known to authorities as a hotbed
of radicalism. For the police, Molenbeek has been a no-go area of sorts for years,
leaving jihadists free rein to raise funds, collect arms, and plot mayhem elsewhere.
It was thus no surprise that Molenbeek was where the police last week finally
caught up with Salah Abdeslam, the last of the Paris attackers still on the run. It
was also no surprise that many Muslims in that community were less than
supportive of the authorities in their efforts to find the wanted man. Mr. Abdeslam
has already been linked to yesterdays attacks and their execution only four days
after his capture hardly seems like happenstance.

The depressing bottom line is that even the best

intelligence cannot compensate for political failings
on an epic scale.
Cops and spies will now roll up any members of Mr. Abdeslams network that they
can track down. But their crackdown on Molenbeek last weekcombined with the
current manhunt for anybody linked to the Brussels bombingsmeans Belgium is
no longer a safe haven for jihadists. Radicals will now attack Belgium as they have
everywhere else, and the sheer number of jihadists in the country makes that a
terrifying prospect.

Belgian intelligence has long been short of funds and personnel and above all any
political will to do anything substantive about the countrys vast jihadist problem.
Belgiums chronically dysfunctional politics have played a toxic role, as has the
general Western European tendency to avert eyes and hope for the best regarding
the growing radicalism of whole swathes of young people in the Muslim ghettos
that exist in most of their cities now.
As Ive explained before, there is no intelligence solution to this problem.
Although more funds and better information sharing will surely help prevent some
terrorismand especially catch terrorists after they kill innocentsthe threat is
now so great, with Europe possessing thousands of homegrown radicals bent on
murder, that mere spying cannot prevent all attacks left of boom as the
professionals put it.
Maintaining 24/7 human and technical surveillance on just one target requires
something like two dozen operatives, and even the larger European security
services can effectively watch only a few handfuls of would-be terrorists at one
time. Even then, mistakes will be made. To say nothing of the alarming progress
made by Europes jihadists recently in communications securitythis was a big
reason why Novembers Paris attackers were not stopped in timethat is blunting
the effective Western counterterrorism methods that have been honed since 9/11.
The depressing bottom line is that even the best intelligence cannot compensate for
political failings on an epic scale.
Simply put, Europe has imported a major threat into its countries, one that did not
exist a couple generations ago. It can be endlessly debated why this problem has
grown so serious so quicklyfor instance, how much is due to Europes failures at
assimilation of immigrants versus the innate aggression of some of those
immigrants (and their children)?but that the threat is large and growing can no
longer be denied by the sentient.
What, then, is to be done? Admitting the extent of this threat is the necessary first
step, albeit one that the EUs political class seems congenitally unable to address.

Instead, the public is treated to the now-customary clichs about religion having
nothing to do with terrorism, combined with ritual admonitions about
Islamophobia. One wonders how much more of this organized dishonesty the
European public can take.
Europe is now at war again. The threat today is less terrorism than a low-grade
insurgency, a guerrilla war of sorts, that hangs over much of the continent as
thousands of jihadists, made proficient killers by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, return
home with visions of killing infidels, their former neighbors. There will be no
parley or negotiation with such mass murderers. Parsing the death-cult ideology
that drives ISIS fighters, with the hope of making it less noxious, makes as much
sense as trying to divine the finer political points of the Manson family.
We should expect more guerrilla-like attacks like Brussels yesterday: moderate in
scale, relatively easy to plan and execute against soft targets, and utterly terrifying
to the public. At some point, angry Europeans, fed up with their supine political
class, will begin to strike back, and thats when the really terrifying scenarios come
into play. European security services worry deeply about the next Anders Breivik
targeting not fellow Europeans, but Muslim migrants. Were just one Baruch
Goldstein away from all-out war, explained a senior EU terrorism official, citing
the American-born Israeli terrorist, fed up with Palestinian violence, who walked
into a Hebron mosque in 1994, guns blazing, and murdered 29 innocent Muslims.
When that violence comes, a practically disarmed Europe will be all but powerless
to stop it. To take the case of Belgium, at the Cold Wars end a generation ago, its
army had seven brigades with 18 infantry battalions, plus some 30 more battalions
in the reserve. Today, Belgiums army has only two brigades and six infantry
battalions, some 3,000 bayonets in all. That tiny force would have trouble exerting
control over even one bumptious Brussels neighborhood in the event of serious
crisis.
Back in 2012, Switzerland conducted military exercises premised on conditions in
Europe getting out of control, between migration, radicalism and economic

decline. They repeated those exercises the following year, and since then the
Swiss, who have a knack for preparing for all contingencies, have warned that
Europes burgeoning interlinked crises may result in major war. Such warnings
were pooh-poohed by EU bien-pensants at the time; now they seem prescient.
What happens next is the main question. Its difficult to miss that Central Europe,
whose illiberal leaders have been castigated by Brussels for their unwillingness to
accept Muslim migrants, singularly lack the terrorism and radicalism problems of
their EU neighbors to the West. Their standing fast on the migration issue seems
wise now. Belgium, along with much of the EU, has given itself a political crisis
that lacks tolerable solutions. After the Cold War, with the birth of the European
Union, many Europeans believed they had achieved the end of history. Issues of
war and peace had been settled; henceforth Brussels would debate nothing more
worrisome than agricultural subsidies. But history has returned, as it always does.
And when politics fail, violence follows, and violence on a large scale becomes
war.