What can Europe do to prevent Islamic extremism leading to terrorist outrages? Jonathan Eyal weighs the options
'It's not a question of reinventing the wheel in relation to how we deal with terrorism, it's a question of making the wheel turn a bit faster," the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen said yesterday, as the EU Interior Ministers met in emergency session in Brussels.
And so it turned out: although the EU agreed on new measures designed to tighten co-ordination in the fight against international terrorism, the initiatives were, quite rightly, modest. Patient hard work is what is required now, not a set of spectacular initiatives. And much of the work against terrorism does not actually involve the security services.
It is understandable that, in the aftermath of one of Europe's most gruesome atrocities in Spain, demands for the creation of a new pan-European agency charged with fighting terrorism should have surfaced. According to the original German and Belgian proposal, such an agency should be designed to act as a clearing house for intelligence material from EU states. The assumption behind this proposal is that intelligence information currently does not flow smoothly, allowing potential terrorists to escape detection. That Britain's security services appear to have had some material on the people arrested in Spain on suspicion of planting the Madrid bombs is given as just such an example. Yet, matters are not so simple, and much of the criticism against the alleged failures of Europe's intelligence services is either premature, or simply unfair.
Although evidence now points to an Islamic fundamentalist connection in the Madrid bombings, this is by no means conclusive, and the possibility of an involvement by the Basque separatist organisation, ETA, cannot yet be completely ruled out. True, no previous ETA atrocity has been on a similar scale. But ETA possesses both the technical ability and the necessary resources to mount such attacks. Spanish police have only recently seized half a tonne of explosives. More interestingly, Spanish security services have foiled two potential attacks against trains - precisely the targets of the Madrid tragedy.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, the then Spanish government was clearly wrong to put the blame squarely on ETA. So, the people of Spain may have been right to punish their leaders at the ballot box soon thereafter. Nevertheless, there was something reassuring in the sight of a European government refusing to believe automatically that a terrorist attack of such a magnitude must have been perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists.
The idea, which is now taking root on the continent, that our own terrorist organisations are somewhat more "rational" and more "merciful", and that only shadowy Islamic organisations can blow up ordinary civilians in large numbers is nonsense. Europe's terrorists are just as resourceful, just as cruel and often just as irrational as those who may be descending upon us from other continents. The basis of any coherent anti- terrorist policy is to refuse stereotyping of any kind, to keep all avenues of investigation open. The Spanish government may have erred in one direction; this does not mean that, from now on, we must ascribe any politically-motivated murder in Europe to unseen "Islamists".
But what if, as so many people believe, the murders in Madrid were committed by elements related to al-Qaeda? This does not necessarily mean that intelligence co-operation in Europe, as currently constituted, has completely failed. The reality remains that, when it comes to terrorism, Europe's intelligence community has co-operated for years, and usually very well. True, this co-operation mostly has been informal, although formal (but secret) agreements between agencies exist. Yet, there are very good reasons why a formalised umbrella structure for co-ordinating intelligence Europe-wide may not be such a good idea.
First, there are differences in size: the relatively large intelligence services of, say, Britain or France, routinely collect large quantities of material world-wide, and may be reluctant to share everything on a routine basis. Second, some of the material which reaches national intelligence agencies was originally obtained by governments outside Europe altogether, and may be governed by specific agreements which forbid its disclosure to third parties. And, finally, various intelligence agencies have different priorities: the countries of Eastern Europe, soon to join the EU, still devote relatively large resources to countering Russian spying activities, or monitoring internal racist or xenophobic organisations - necessary tasks, but not immediately the most relevant to the fight against international terrorism.
None of these facts negates the need for tighter intelligence co-ordination. But it is wrong to assume the creation of a Europe-wide agency would somehow resolve these difficulties, or force individual states to change their priorities; at best, a newly created agency will make no appreciable difference and, at worst, it would simply add another bureaucratic and politically unaccountable layer, which nobody needs.
In the aftermath of almost every terrorist attack, it turns out that security services had some information, however fragmentary, which may have been relevant to the atrocity. This has been the case with most of the terrorist attacks in Ireland or Britain, and even with the attacks on the US in September, 2001. If the people charged yesterday in Spain are the perpetrators of the carnage, and if it turns out the British security services, as well as the spying community in Spain, had some records on them, this would not necessarily point to another intelligence failure.
It is the business of these services to collect seemingly irrelevant information, and to store it in the hope that it may prove useful at a later stage. It is now clear the suspects detained in Spain should have deserved greater attention. But this comes with the benefit of hindsight. The idea that every lead must be pursued and every suspect must be followed belongs to cheap thriller novels, rather than the real world of intelligence. For all of Europe's spies, the danger of being overloaded by information is just as big as the danger of not acting on available leads. Sometimes the decisions they take turn out to be correct; sometimes result in a terrible missed opportunity. No Europe-wide agency is able to prevent such choices.
So, does this mean that nothing needs to be done in the current fight against international terrorism? Clearly not, for a great deal needs to be accomplished. The first, and probably the most urgent task, is to improve the flow of information, not so much between European governments, but within national governments. For entirely understandable democratic considerations about the sanctity of privacy, individual government departments sit on information which may be useful in the fight against terrorism, but which is often ignored. The classic cases in this respect are the immigration control departments of European states, organisations which collect huge amounts of data on foreigners, but end up using most of it for the purpose of just tracking or expelling illegal immigrants. The connection between the presence of such individuals and a potential threat to national security is now widely acknowledged, but the system still does not work well; this was the case with the al-Qaeda strikes on the US, and may well prove to be the case with the Madrid bombings.
The second area where a great deal of co-ordination is required is in the handling of Europe's Muslim population, in order to sap the potential pool of recruits for any future fundamentalist activity. For decades, all European governments have shied away from interfering in the educational and cultural activities of Europe's Muslims. Yet the result has often been that clerics from Arab countries or Pakistan, usually espousing the most narrow, boorish interpretation of Islam and sometimes openly advocating violence, have been allowed to take over some Muslim cultural centres or places of worship. There is nothing wrong with Islam. Nor is there anything in the Islamic faith which advocates wanton violence. But it is still a fact that, under the guise of flourishing multi-culturalism without government interference, men of violence have been allowed to operate. A programme of promoting clerics from within Europe's Muslim population - rather than the importation of such clerics from other countries, as is the case today - must surely rank as one of the key priorities for the continent, in order to isolate the tiny number of Europe's Muslims who may be tempted to resort to violence.
As Cowen has pointed out, none of the initiatives which are being considered amounts to the reinvention of the wheel. Terrorism, of whatever kind, cannot be eliminated completely. But what Europe needs now is a variety of small steps, persistently followed and constantly improved, rather than new grand initiatives.
Jonthan Eyal is director of studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London