European Union: Struggling to counter the terrorist threat

Belgium has been turned upside down, said Christophe Berti in Le Soir (Belgium). A week after suicide bombers killed 32 people and injured hundreds more in Brussels, the repercussions could be felt in almost every corner of the historic city. On the central Place de la Bourse, the Brussels Philharmonic was playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, a European anthem, to commemorate the victims; at a tram stop in the Schaerbeek neighborhood, police shot a suspected terrorist in the leg, believing he had a bomb in his backpack; and at the Palace of the Nation, the interior, justice, and foreign ministers appeared before Parliament and admitted to “gross negligence” over their departments’ failure to stop the attacks. All that happened on a single day in Brussels. It was at once a moment of mourning, of criminal investigation, and of investigation of that investigation. “It’s a lot. It’s too much.”

Tiny Belgium obviously can’t cope, said Ali Soufan in The Guardian (U.K.). More than 500 Belgians have gone to wage jihad in Syria and Iraq, and the country’s inept, understaffed, and jealously competitive security services can’t possibly monitor all those who return. Indeed, they can’t even explain why Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, a Belgian citizen and one of the Brussels suicide bombers, was not arrested after Turkey deported him back to Europe last summer on suspicion of terrorism and notified the Belgian authorities. Belgium will need help from other countries’ intelligence services “to construct a threat matrix for each individual foreign fighter.” The European Union’s justice and security ministers have already called for greater intelligence sharing—now they need to make that happen. At the moment, “terrorists can cross borders more easily than information can.” European privacy laws often prevent authorities in one country from sharing information about their own citizens with other nations.

But sharing information across the continent carries its own risks, said Heribert Prantl in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). EU countries that have efficient security services “are not about to toss their sensitive and valuable data into a 28-state pot if there is a chance that other states will play fast and loose with it.” Given the egregious state of governance in newer member states like Romania and Bulgaria, sensitive police data could easily “find its way into the hands of organized criminals.” That’s why there’s no chance that we can create an EU-wide intelligence service that operates like the FBI in the U.S. Instead, we may have to set up a small counterterrorism center among only the “core European nations.” Yet even they have little common ground, said Michael Smith in the EUObserver.com. All our major crises—the Eurozone, refugees, and Islamist extremism— stem from “profound disagreement among EU member states,” particularly the big three: the U.K., France, and Germany. Until those nations agree to pool their resources to tackle terrorism, “we can only expect things to get worse.”