The massacre in Nice on July 14 could have happened just about anywhere. The modus operandi and the choice of target could be readily transposed to any number of locations: an individual with murderous intent drives a truck into a crowd celebrating a national holiday in a large city that is also a magnet for tourism.
The attack serves as a reminder that terrorists tend to march to their own drum: they do not strike simply because we in the west believe that an event — this summer’s Euro 2016 football championship in France, for example — is important. Their concern is to maximise the chances of their operation being successful according to their own criteria — hence the choice of venues that are not under heavy protection.
Some of the lessons of the Nice attack are of general application, therefore. First, as was the case in the recent terror operations in Paris, Brussels and Istanbul, this was a low-cost operation from the perpetrator’s standpoint. The occupation of Mosul or Raqqa by Isis has little effect on a terrorist’s ability to carry out such massacres. Liberating these cities will be important for the fate of the enslaved local populations and will limit the training opportunities for foreign terrorist “fighters”, but how much training does it take to drive a truck?
Isis may also be weakened as a result of having embraced what now appears to be a losing strategy of territorial conquest. But this will work to the advantage of other, no less dreadful, competitors in the “marketplace” of jihadi terrorism.
Western and Russian military intervention in the Middle East may not have triggered the latest spate of jihadi terrorism — after all, France was declared an enemy by al-Qaeda in the previous decade, notwithstanding Paris’s refusal to participate in the invasion of Iraq. Western military operations in the region are of limited relevance to the attempt to prevent homegrown terrorism carried out on a shoestring by radicals, whether of an Islamist persuasion or coming from the extreme-right (as in Norway in 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Oslo and on the island of Utoya).
Second, as the examples of Nice and Norway demonstrate, the ability of an individual to kill large numbers is now a feature of the terrorist threat. There are also limits to what protective measures can be adopted in order to stop such outrages. Backpacks can be banned and handbags searched in closed areas such as airports or shopping malls. But what about busy city streets or public parades?
Security policy will have to emphasise intelligence and surveillance to an even greater degree than before. And this will involve extra spending and human resources. Civil liberties may also suffer as a consequence.
The ability of an individual to kill large numbers is a feature of the terrorist threat. There are limits to what protective measures can be adopted to stop such outrages
The Bastille Day attack will have significant implications specific to France, not least because the country is clearly a priority target for the jihadis. The initial response of the French authorities appeared to be influenced by the line in the film Casablanca about rounding up the “usual suspects”.
Emergency legislation introduced after the Paris attacks in November last year was still in force when the atrocity in Nice occurred. François Hollande, the French president, announced that the state of emergency would be extended, despite the fact that it failed to prevent this massacre.
Although the deployment after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015 of some 10,000 soldiers serving as police auxiliaries has created more problems than it has solved, Mr Hollande announced that part of France’s operational military reserve would be mobilised in the wake of this latest attack. Such knee-jerk responses are unlikely to reassure the public; nor are they are they likely to be particularly effective.
A week before the terrible events in Nice, Bernard Cazeneuve, minister of the interior, had dismissed the bipartisan report issued by a parliamentary commission set up after the November attacks. Mr Cazeneuve refused to discuss alleged “failures by the security services”. It did not help that the commission was organised against the wishes of the government, which has also consistently opposed the launching of a national inquiry.
The report, written by Sébastien Pietrasanta, a Socialist MP, criticised the state of emergency, proposed the establishment of a national counter-terrorism centre such as those that exist in the US or the UK and called for the comprehensive reorganisation of intelligence-gathering at the community level. This is an area in which great damage was done during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy and which the current administration has not done enough to repair.
It does not follow from this that the leader of the far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, will be the principal political beneficiary of Mr Hollande’s flat-footed response to the terrorist threat. The National Front did less well than it or others expected after the events of last November. But we do at least know who the losers in electoral terms will be: Mr Hollande and Manuel Valls, his prime minister.
But the real losers are the people who were killed or maimed in Nice, their families and with them all those who share the universal values for which France stands.
The writer is special adviser at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique
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