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For all its horrors, the attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was as predictable as it was outrageous. While the number of Islamic terrorists at large in France and, indeed, the West, may be minute in absolute numbers, extremist groups remain capable of launching deadly operations against civilian targets. Charlie Hebdo — a magazine that has routinely mocked Islam, among other religions — was in many ways an obvious choice for one of those targets. Indeed, it had been firebombed in 2011 following an announcement that the magazine’s next issue would feature the Prophet Muhammad as its “guest editor.”
Wednesday’s attack was particularly egregious. It was not just a murderous assault that left 12 dead; it was also a strike against freedom of speech. Whatever one may think of the magazine’s scabrous cartoons, they embody precisely the sort of untrammeled expression that is one of the bulwarks of a free society. If I were French, I might not want to read Charlie Hebdo, but I would most assuredly want to live in a country that permitted its publication. We can only hope that the attack does not exercise a chilling effect on such free expression in France or elsewhere.
The full fallout of Wednesday’s attack is unclear. The French government — and perhaps others in Europe — will likely institute new measures aimed at further cracking down on terrorist groups. Part of this will be a straightforward response to the possible weaknesses in intelligence-gathering that the attack has revealed; some will reflect a political attempt to pre-empt the continent’s resurgent anti-immigrant right.
One thing is certain: We in the West will find ourselves here again. By “here” I mean yet another moment of shock, horror and anger. The precise circumstances will not be the same. There will be a different target, a different terrorist modus operandi, a different list of casualties. But terrorists will strike again.
We must understand an ugly truth. Islamic extremism is not an enemy that we will vanquish. It is a problem we will be forced to manage. We may wish that it were otherwise. It would be wonderful if there were some perfect combination of policies that would forever relieve countries and their citizens of the terrible burden that the threat of terrorism represents. No such combination unfortunately exists today, nor will it in the near future. Like it or not, Islamic extremism is a fact of contemporary life. And its religious, political and sociological sources defy easy remedies, especially by outsiders.
This is not to counsel despair. There is much that governments can do to minimize the frequency and severity of such attacks — through better law enforcement, more accurate intelligence, closer cooperation with moderates in domestic Muslim communities and more effective coordination with like-minded states. Governments can also avoid measures — however appealing they may be in an environment of justified outrage and understandable calls for decisive action — that unnecessarily risk driving even more Muslims into sympathy for extremist movements. Terrorists thrive on such overreaction; it only increases the pool of potential converts to their cause.
Balancing the imperative of effective policies against terrorism and the possibility of “blowback” is a complex calculus facing not just the French government but also our own. We need only think of the U.S. drone program. Whatever the program’s effectiveness in killing terrorists, it also risks alienating local populations. At a minimum, potential blowback needs to be an important consideration in assessing any antiterrorist policy. Governments must be very wary of doing terrorists’ recruitment for them.
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
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