Al-Qaeda targets Europe - Volume 10, Issue 2 - March 2004

 

Before the terrorist bombings on Madrid's commuter railway system on 11 March 2004 that killed over 200 civilians, there had been no successful transnational Islamist terrorist attacks in North America or Europe since 11 September 2001. It appeared that the US and Europe had provisionally been able to deter al-Qaeda and its affiliates – at least to the extent of denying them access and opportunity. The Afghanistan intervention hobbled al-Qaeda offensively and forced it to seek soft targets elsewhere. Now it seems that al-Qaeda, having regrouped and been antagonised by the US-led intervention in Iraq, is back on the offensive and zoning in on Western targets. Escalating up the chain of American allies from tentative to strong – Saudi Arabia, Turkey and now Spain – al-Qaeda would logically next hit the United Kingdom. A major US operation must also be assumed to be on the cards. Until that is feasible, however, Europe is likely to remain the most prominent target in al-Qaeda's calculations in light of its historical, political and cultural alignment with the US. Accordingly, transatlantic cohesion has regained its geopolitical premium.

 

It became clear very soon after 11 September that there was an organic connection between US and European homeland security: improved American homeland security would make the US less vulnerable and Europe a commensurately more attractive target, and vice-versa. Indeed, the targeting primacy of the US as Islam's 'far enemy', combined with the relative freedom of action afforded Islamists in Europe, made it more useful to al-Qaeda as a recruitment, planning and staging ground – rather than a direct target – before 11 September. After that date, Europe and the US were more secure than any other region, owing to their superior counter-terrorism institutions and heightened alert towards transnational Islamist threats. Given the high political value of European targets, the fact that Europe was not hit until 30 months after 11 September suggests that, relatively speaking, it was not a soft target. Nevertheless, European jurisdictions – the UK most emphatically – have held that a major attack in Europe was a matter of 'when' rather than 'if'.

 

 

Madrid proved them ruefully correct. European security organisations – which are generally geared to act on emergent threats on the basis of current intelligence – may now have to move closer to the US vulnerability-based conception of homeland security, under which law-enforcement and intelligence agencies seek through preventive measures to minimise unspecified threats by denying terrorists access to territory and opportunities to act. Success in this enterprise is difficult to achieve under any circumstances, and has become more elusive as al-Qaeda has come to recruit from and operationally rely on local 'talent'. In Europe, the pool appears to be getting richer. European Muslims are increasingly susceptible to radicalisation on the basis of social and political marginalisation in their host countries. Conservative Muslims' outcry over France's recent ban on conspicuous religious symbols (including Muslim headscarves) in schools as anti-Islamic – as well as al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri's claim that it reflected 'Crusader envy' – is only the most manifest example of this 'universalisation' of grievances. Yet the fact that three of the five chief suspects in the Madrid operation are Moroccans – many of whom are hostile to Spain over its colonial predation in Morocco – suggests that terrorists also continue to be inspired by traditional 'diaspora' concerns relating to their homelands. With potentially two sources of aggrievement, European Muslims appear especially susceptible to Osama bin Laden's pan-Islamic agenda.

 

These circumstances paint a daunting picture of inchoate terrorist cells already in place. But the fact that Europe is now a target for Islamist terrorist attacks should not obscure its ongoing usefulness as a platform for attacks against the US, and certainly will not blind Washington to this reality. Although transatlantic law-enforcement and intelligence cooperation has become durably more robust since 11 September, European governments should expect more pressure from the US with respect to the pursuit and apprehension of suspected terrorists within Europe. Europe's proactive national law-enforcement and intelligence efforts as well as homeland-security measures are likely to become more vigorous and risk-averse. This could mean, for example, broader, possibly EU-wide, implementation of security standards akin to those reflected in the USA PATRIOT Act, according police greater detention powers, intelligence agencies access to pooled immigration data and better coordination of border security. Only two or three national European governments, most prominently Britain, have enacted laws comparable to the USA PATRIOT Act. But they are constrained in applying them – for instance, in detaining large numbers of terrorist suspects – by legitimate legal and political considerations that are more salient in Europe than the United States. Despite the domestic civil-libertarian condemnation of the British government's power to detain foreign terrorist suspects indefinitely, it has been applied to fewer than 20 people.

 

Nevertheless, European perceptions of the terrorist threat have broadly converged with American ones. The UK in particular, perhaps owing to its singularly close strategic alignment with the US, is hypersensitive to threats from weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or disruption. It has mobilised the military to guard against risks from surface-to-air missiles. The UK government emphasises civil defence and national resilience, having simulated a chemical attack in central London to sharpen its preparedness. In light of transnational Islamist terrorists' preference for mass casualties, British law-enforcement agencies are more inclined than they were when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was the main terrorist adversary to arrest suspects preventively. Since the Madrid bombings, British authorities have reiterated that a terrorist attack in the UK is 'inevitable'. They are probably as ready to deal with such an attack as any jurisdiction in Europe, having emphasised and bolstered civil defence and national resiliency since 11 September.

 

Yet local and regional officials – through the Emergency Planning Society – have criticised the UK's level of civil-defence preparedness, noting that its first responders could handle a limited IRA-style operation but not a no-warning mass-casualty attack of the order of the Madrid bombings. Although the UK's civil-defence budget has increased by 35% over pre-2001 levels, it is still only £35 million per annum. Comprehensive preventive means do not appear to be in place to compensate for any first-response deficiencies. For instance, the UK's 11,000-mile, 2,500-station rail network, which is used by five million people a day, is vulnerable. Metal detectors and baggage scanners are used only on the Eurostar service running between London and Brussels and London and Paris. Universal airport-style security checks would be impractical and forbiddingly expensive. Notwithstanding a generally more pronounced emphasis on homeland security in the United States, security for land-based transportation there before the Madrid attacks did not appear to be markedly better than Europe's, although first-response capabilities may have been.

 

In the wake of the Madrid attack, Europeans and Americans are all the more liable to apprehend the same world of terrorist risks. The danger is not a potential discrepancy in threat perceptions or 'hard' counter-terrorism responses to emergent day-to-day threats, but rather a divergence in Europe's political approach to counter-terrorism premised on a European assessment that a close strategic alignment with the US is a security liability rather than an asset. In this vein, the Spanish electorate's ouster of the ruling Popular Party in the national elections that occurred three days after the Madrid attacks was ominous. The result appeared to reflect, at least in part, a collective judgment that outgoing Prime Minister José Maria Aznar's government was rash to support the US in Iraq because the intervention needlessly antagonised Islamist terrorists and made Spain a more inviting target, and derogated the democratic process by ignoring the 90% majority of the Spanish people who opposed Spain's participation in the intervention. The electorate was also reacting to what it perceived as Aznar's cynicism in insisting that the Basque separatist group Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) was the prime suspect in the bombings, despite the fact that no-warning mass-casualty attacks were roundly inconsistent with ETA's tactics and political agenda. But incoming Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has vowed that Spain will loosen its alliance with the US, and withdraw troops from Iraq by July.

 

Taken a few steps further, this policy tilt could arguably ripen into a kind of 'sanctuary doctrine', whereby a government implicitly foregoes robust counter-terrorism enforcement in exchange for the terrorists' exclusion of the country from its target list. The declaration of a truce in Spain by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades – the apparent if dubious al-Qaeda affiliate that claimed credit for the Madrid attacks – seems intended to establish such an incentive. France, which now has a very tough counter-terrorism profile, flirted with the sanctuary doctrine with respect to the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in the 1970s and 1980s. But cascading capitulation is not likely in Europe, where half a dozen countries have resisted stubborn terrorist movements over several decades. Indeed, shortly after the Madrid bombings, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw firmly rejected the notion that 'somehow we can opt out of the war against Islamic terrorism'.

 

The Spanish election does suggest, however, that relative transatlantic harmony on tough counter-terrorism approaches, while still broadly intact and the strongest element of the global counter-terrorism coalition, could be diluted. British Prime Minister Tony Blair also bucked popular opinion in taking the UK into Iraq alongside the US. Although adverse opinion in Britain was not as overwhelming as it was in Spain, the Blair government's operational and diplomatic commitments have been far more extensive than Spain's, and its human and economic losses more substantial. On balance, Blair is subject to political risk comparable to that faced by Aznar. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government has also supported the US on Iraq, and may face similar domestic challenges.

 

Given these constraining developments, the Madrid bombings may prompt Washington to exercise greater foresight as to the impact that US diplomacy may have on the counter-terrorism coalition's stability. The Bush administration has, of course, shown sensitivity to the domestic Islamist pressures that other partners – such as the Saudi, Pakistani and Indonesian governments – face. European allies now may also require more nuanced American understanding of their wary publics. Washington could not be expected to cease urging European governments to back controversial American counter-terrorism initiatives simply because domestic populations feel aggrieved. But the US may find it prudent to provide more political support to governments that have taken risks on the coalition's behalf. For example, had the US been publicly more confessional about intelligence failures with respect to Iraq's WMD, and more candid about the unexpected difficulties of the occupation – thus willingly taking more of the international community's heat – the Spanish people might have forgiven Aznar his perceived transgression.

 

In fact, even before Madrid, the fallout over the Iraq crisis seemed to be slowly pushing the US towards a more consultative diplomatic approach. In increasingly seeking partners on the ground and the UN's diplomatic expertise and political imprimatur, the Bush administration had implicitly begun to moderate any perceived American unilateralism on Iraq. It was too little not soon enough to save Spain's Popular Party. But if Washington imbued its gradual substantive shift with more explicit and conciliatory rhetoric, Spain and other European governments could glean the political cover they need to tighten the bilateral relationships with Washington – politically if not operationally weakened by Iraq – on which the global counter-terrorism coalition rests. The Madrid attacks, and the negative implications of a more vulnerable Europe for US security, may serve to consolidate this understanding in Washington.