Last Friday, Paris was again struck by Jihadist terrorists. A series of coordinated attacks left roughly 130 dead and hundreds more wounded. The attacks follow the January assault on the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish grocery. Friday’s attacks dwarfed the 17 killed in the January outrage. Indeed, they marked the most deadly terrorist incident in Western Europe since the Madrid train bombing of 2004. It appears that seven of the eight terrorists involved in the attacks are dead. Efforts by France and other countries to identify and apprehend additional plotters continue.
ISIS claimed credit after the attack. French President François Hollande has explicitly named the group as responsible and declared that the attacks constitute an “act of war.” Working with the United States, France has already launched retaliatory airstrikes against ISIS in Syria.
The attacks reveal, yet again, the extreme vulnerability of cities to terrorist attacks. It is easy – terrifyingly easy – to inflict mass casualties in crowded urban venues, like the Bataclan Theatre where the majority of the deaths in Paris occurred. All it takes are automatic weapons and terrorists willing to use them. Neither, tragically, appears to be in short supply.
The French government will presumably again intensify its already substantial efforts to identify and neutralize terrorists, whether home grown or not. France will face the perennial and excruciating dilemma of undertaking effective anti-terrorist policies while avoiding further alienation of its sizeable Muslim population. Moreover, Hollande’s Socialist government must do so against the backdrop of upcoming local elections where the strongly anti-immigrant National Front party is already expected to do well.
There may well be further resistance elsewhere in Europe to accepting additional Middle Eastern refugees. According to press reports, at least one of the terrorists appears to have entered Europe as part of the recent surge of refugees; if true, this will strengthen the arguments of those already opposed to accepting the hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners attempting to find refuge in Europe. Of course, the vast majority of those refugees want nothing to do with ISIS; indeed, most fled their homes precisely because of the kind of violence we saw Friday in Paris. But the attacks will give political traction to those who believe that Muslim migration represents a threat to their countries’ security.
Will France respond militarily beyond additional airstrikes? Hollande has said that his country will be “ruthless.” France is unlikely to introduce substantial ground troops into the Syrian civil war; it would almost certainly not do so without full cooperation from the United States. President Barack Obama clearly remains extremely wary of further plunging the United States into the chaos that is Syria. He is right to be cautious: the number of troops required to end the fighting and then pacify the country would require a commitment along the lines of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Anything less than a full commitment risks U.S. casualties and expenditures without the prospect of a decisive outcome.
The struggle against ISIS may have entered a new stage. The organization appears willing and able to take the war to countries that, like France, have joined the U.S.-led effort to destroy it. Combined with the possibility that ISIS was, in fact, responsible for the destruction of a Russian airliner over Sinai a few weeks ago, we may be facing a period of heightened international threat. Ironically, that threat might actually increase if ISIS experiences further battlefield reverses, such as Kurdish forces capturing the strategically important Iraqi city of Sinjar last week. Should ISIS see its position deteriorate in Syria or Iraq, it might well seek to offset these losses by attacking soft targets in the West.
What of the United States? Our cities surely teem with the sort of crowded venues that make mass casualties all too easy. True, we have undoubtedly increased our counterterrorism capacity since Sept. 11. The Parisian attacks will no doubt cause our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to redouble their efforts to detect nascent terrorist plots against the United States. But our intelligence is not perfect, and our ability to protect a diverse and open society of more than 300 million residents is limited.
This is not reason to panic. There is much the United States – working with others – can do to minimize the terrorist threat to the West. But we must be realistic as well. The probability of further terrorist attacks by ISIS or other Jihadist groups is very high – and that includes targets in the United States.
Joe Barnes is the Bonner Means Baker Fellow at the Baker Institute. He previously served as a career diplomat with the U.S. State Department, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.