In terror war there are no coincidences

The near simultaneous Islamist terror attack on three continents last Friday — at Lyons in France, on a beach in Tunisia, the only Arab country where “Arab spring” has succeeded, and inside a Shia mosque in Kuwait — may be entirely a coincidence, but it would be unprofessional of them if leading security agencies took that complacent view and offered up chance as an explanation.

To complicate matters, even if the leading European and Arab security outfits, with assistance from the Americans, struck firm leads and found a reasonable way to figure out what transpired, there is nothing in the track record of anti-terrorist outfits to suggest that they have the first clue about what actions to take to head off such coincidences from occurring in future, especially when small attacks are involved, possibly mounted in a coordinated way by sleeper cells, even if their cumulative impact is not insubstantial. The tri-continental strike took upward of 60 lives.

There is just so little point sending enough resources to chase individual terror targets on a routine basis, and the Westerners — obsessed with sophisticated weaponry — have found themselves wholly incapable of effectively using political and social means as a counter offensive against Islamist terrorism. Their failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, in particular, are ringing testimonies.

First there was only Al Qaeda, and now there is ISIS as well, besides the many regional Islamist threats (such as the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba) that coordinate with Al Qaeda and ISIS even as the latter two compete in some theatres. So, the problem has proliferated, not diminished. Billions of US dollars spent in pursuit of false and faulty strategies to claim the soul of moderation in Muslim lands have too little to show over the years.

There is a single broad political reason for this — chasing the wrong target. For a decade and a half the Westerners, especially the Americans, have bombed innocents in Afghanistan but done all too little to fight terrorists on Pakistan soil because they didn’t wish to annoy Pakistan.

Elsewhere, there has been insufficient appreciation that rooting out the ISIS and negating its hold over territory is crucial to defeat international terrorism. ISIS’ continuing successes breeds the negative Islamist ideology around the world. But America, and western Europe, are shy of acknowledging that so long as their strategic aim in West Asia is to finish Bashar al-Assad in Syria, ISIS will continue its triumphal march and “small” but thoroughly effective attacks of the kind we saw last Friday will not cease, and quantity (many small attacks) will morph into quality, and spectacular attacks will follow.

The West, so far, has succeeded through its actions in failing to fight Islamist terrorism and also failing to prevent its by-product — the rise of prejudice against Islam.