France and the rest of Europe have endured this near state-of-siege before. Older Europeans can recall a time when communists, nationalists, anarchists, Islamists, and international criminals wrought havoc on the continent. Palestinian terrorists shattered the harmony of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, taking hostage and murdering 11 Israeli athletes. Italian communists kidnapped and murdered a former prime minister in 1978. In 1988, Libyan terrorists brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, warring Palestinian factions and Iranian revolutionaries turned Europe into a battleground for settling internal feuds and assassinating enemies, opening fire on the Rome check-in counter for the Israeli airline El Al, and hijacking planes. In France itself, an Algerian Islamist group that had fought the Algerian government during the civil war in 1991 bombed Paris metro stations, a Jewish school, and L’Arc de Triomphe. Hezbollah, as part of its declared aim to expel any French or American presence from Lebanon, conducted at least five bombings on French soil between 1985 and 1986. Armenian terrorists, seeking vengeance for the Armenian Genocide, struck the Orly airport in 1983, killing at least five people. [...]
But the lessons of TREVI seem not to have stuck. Across the continent, security agencies are once again starting to communicate and share information. For the most part. Josef Janning, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and long-time expert on European policy and global affairs, said that the new slate of threats is “something Europeans are ready to live with as a fact of life.” Since the coordinated attacks by ISIS in November, French secret service officers have launched their own operations in Brussels, the nerve center for the November plot and home to many of its attackers. But officials have stopped short of sharing everything they’ve uncovered with the Belgians, Janning said. [...]
In the past, local informants and amnesty programs worked with law enforcement and intelligence officials to root out militants, helping bring down groups like the Red Brigades, a left-wing Italian militia. Modern terror cells would be dismantled in the same way that underground organized crime rings are, Janning said, with law enforcement drilling down into communities and neighborhoods and working their local connections to gather intelligence. Ideologies would need to be combatted in classrooms and online chatrooms. Agencies, he said, would need to talk to each other to track the movement of people, goods, and weapons, across districts, cities, and borders. But this all remains a work in progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment