10 Lessons to Remember After a Terrorist Attack

The Paris attacks and the global response they have elicited evoke the days after the 9/11 attacks. I realize that the analogy to the July 7, 2005, bombings in the London Underground might be more apt (at least measured in number of deaths), and, for that matter, the recent yet less-heralded Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria are closer to the 9/11 in scale. But for whatever reason, the shock and global response of the Paris talks have more of a 9/11 feel about them.

In particular, it is striking how some of the things that were “obvious” in the days and weeks after 9/11, but then were gradually forgotten, have become obvious again:

• Terrorists succeed when they are abetted by intelligence failures. Or, put another way, terrorists only need to get lucky once to “succeed,” whereas counterterrorism has to be lucky all the time to “succeed.”
• Even robust intelligence and law enforcement may not guarantee 100 percent safety and security. By global standards — certainly by the standards of Western democracies — France has a particularly formidable counterterrorist structure. But it failed in this instance.
• When terrorists succeed in an attack, citizens demand that the government do more to protect them — even if they have already been doing a lot. And steps that would have seemed heavy handed before the attack, say aggressive surveillance of suspected terrorists or visible demonstrations of presence by the security forces, are deemed not just tolerable but necessary. Moreover, savvy political leaders will understand that one of the benefits of a stronger official response is that it is a hedge both against dangerously stronger vigilantism and also against additional pressure from some segments of the public to do more than is wise.
• Experts will find what the terrorists could be doing but have not yet done to be just as troubling as what they have already done. The “terror” in the terrorist attacks comes not from what already happened, but from the justifiable fear that it could happen again and again.
• Skeptics who claim that governments have hyped the threat and that the counter-terrorist measures are needless do not have much useful to say when the terrorists do strike. These skeptics still have not thought rigorously about the possibility that counter-terrorist measures have contributed to the fact that terrorists have not struck more often.
• It is hard to talk about the kinetic threat posed by the terrorists without talking about the ideology that motivates them — but it is also risky to talk about the ideology, since, carelessly done, this can play into the hands of the terrorists who want to frame this as a religious war. To that end, I still think the most remarkable thing about the last couple days that has not been much remarked on was that the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that France was “at war” with “radical Islamism.” The Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to avoid saying anything remotely similar to that, and I wonder if that formulation will prove unfortunate down the road.
• Even if your country or your city was not attacked, if your values were attacked, then you are a victim, too.
• It is possible to identify all sorts of foreign policy steps (and perhaps some missteps) that gave rise to the elevated terrorist threat, but conducting foreign policy as the terrorists wanted us to would not have been a viable way to prevent the attacks. Foreign policy may be more important for countering the problem than it was in fostering the problem.
• This problem is best understood using the language of war. Yes, it requires all of the tools of diplomacy, law enforcement, intelligence, and so on, but they are all components of a larger frame that is war.
• There are many steps that can be taken in the short run to improve security, but in the long run, we must address the roots of the problem — and the roots are found in the dysfunction of state governance in the Middle East.

Each of these truths has been forgotten (and some ridiculed by skeptics over the years), and yet they seem more obvious today than they were a week ago. How long before the memory fades again?

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