RUTHFULLY YOURS

Part of the problem of dealing with the range of security challenges which our societies face today is that any concerted focus is kept on them for such a startlingly short space of time.

It is only a week since the attack in Barcelona and already the story has slipped from the news schedules in most of Europe.  It has already disappeared in the background noise of life in modern Europe’s cities.  But the details which have come out make a number of things very clear.

First is the clear fact that a far worse terrorist atrocity was only narrowly averted.  It is only because one explosion went off early, alerted the authorities to a threat and that the truck attacker then also appears to have gone off early, that far worse devastation was averted.  It would seem that the cell which was planning these attacks intended to create explosions at major landmarks in Barcelona, causing a level of architectural and infrastructure devastation – in addition to the human devastation – of a kind not seen for many years.

Secondly it seems clear that a local imam was involved in the cell.  For the Spanish authorities this presents one of the most embarrassing as well as challenging facets of this investigation and its consequences.  It seems that Abdelbaki Essati, the shadowy imam who was connected to last week’s cell was also associated with the cell who blew up the Madrid trains in 2004.  Nevertheless he was able to appear in the town of Ripoll a couple of years ago and seems to have set about setting up a cell.  His actions were straight out of the al-Qaeda playbook, and he appears to have used well known tactics of selections and grooming to put together the cell which plotted devastation against Spain last week.

All of this raises profound questions for Spain and all other Western democracies.  Some experts are saying that the ease with which Essati moved even when he should have been on the radar of law enforcement agencies speaks to a lack of communication between Spanish law enforcement and judiciary and the regional (Catalan) branches of the same.  In reality such claims only aspire to answer a tiny part of the problem.  What would the authorities have done had they been more joined up?  And what could they have done?

Spain, like the rest of Europe, is currently in a period of attempting to police this problem.  But across the continent there is a growing sense that the policing approach – with its minimalist interventions – is not up to the job.  Or rather that it is itself being let down by the unwillingness to address the problems raised at a much higher as well as wider governmental and societal level.  If the Spanish authorities interpret the results of last week as presenting only a problem of intra-security cooperation then they risk failing to learn yet another lesson in this long war for the West.