Reaping a bitter harvest

This year has been very testing for France because, after the deadly January 7 attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo, on November 13, Paris witnessed the worst human tragedy since WW-II, but perpetrators of this tragedy were European nationals of Arab origin who returned from Syria a year after France joined the US in bombing the Syrian hideouts of Islamic State (IS) and Daesh.
Six monstrous acts committed almost simultaneously in various parts of Paris that led to imposition of a state of emergency, manifested how, in today's "enlightened" world, humans turn into monsters and kill fellow human beings without any distinction. Initial findings suggest that a group that had recently returned from Syria, committed these violent acts, but what is odd is that they were able to bring with them their weapons.
In January, after the Charlie Hebdo affair, French government's estimates suggested that about a thousand Frenchmen had either left to fight for IS, had already returned, or were on their way back to France. The only explanation for the French authorities' failure can be the massive inflow of asylum-seekers from the Middle East, which diluted their scrutiny procedures.
On November 16, addressing a joint session of the parliament, President Francois Hollande promised to create 5,000 jobs in the security forces, 2,500 in prison service staff, and zero cut in defence spending before 2019 because "France is at war", and also sought 3-month extension in the state of emergency declared to give security forces sweeping powers to detain suspects.
He also called upon the US and Russia to join a global coalition to destroy IS although the Western strategy for isolating Iran forced Iran to mobilise Shia minorities in the Arab states in response to which the US and its Middle Eastern allies created IS and Daesh that fuelled a sectarian divide throughout the Middle East and triggered the un-ending inflow of asylum-seeks in Europe.
According to a press report, during the G20 heads of state meeting in Antalya, the Russian President shared intelligence reports that identified "individuals" in 40 countries (including some G20 states) who were financing IS. That Libya's terrorists who grabbed power after invasion of Libya, are earning huge sums by exporting Libya's oil, is no secret.
Europe had a history of home-grown terrorist outfits like the Britain's IRA, Germany' Red Brigade, Spain's Eta, and several in Italy, but by the mid-1990sthis menace had largely been eliminated. Thereafter, the only major terrorist attack taking place in France was the 1995 Paris bombing - spill over of the French role in Algeria's post-independence civil war.
But the post-9/11 European support for US invasion of Iraq began fuelling anti-European sentiments in the Middle East; what compounded it was European backing for the "Arab Spring" which was seen as a ploy for re-colonising the Middle East, although it ended up inspiring the disenfranchised to turn into terrorists for what they inhumanly conceive to be a "just" response.
It seems that history no longer teaches any lessons; Western leadership still doesn't realise that the post-9/11 "war-on-terror" waged by the US and its Nato allies, and the subsequent Arab Spring have been failures because their stated aim of democratising Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria didn't materialise; all this long war unleashed brutality and terrorism on a global scale.
Everyone now accepts that Iraq under Saddam, Libya under Qadhafi and Syria under Bashar Al Asad (until the Western backed revolt against him) were stable states. But with few exceptions, none in the Western leadership accepts this reality because doing so implies accepting a colossal failure and mandates trial for war crimes committed by those who caused this instability.
On November 17, Adm. James Stavrids (former Supreme Commander of Nato forces) admitted in a BBC TV interview that the use of "hard power" provides temporary results; what works in the long run is use of "soft power" ie economic uplift of the downtrodden that turns them into terrorists - a belated realisation, and that too among a handful who can do precious little.
In a book authored by former US President George H W Bush (to be launched shortly), he says that if George W Bush had chosen General Colin Powell (instead of Dick Cheney) as his Vice President, America's post-9/11 response wouldn't have ended the nation-building process in Afghanistan, nor would America invade Iraq because General Powell opposed this invasion.
Here it is worth mentioning that the former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin had refused French participation in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. But we saw a total policy reversal when, along with Italy, France agreed to participate in the invasion of Libya, which strengthened the view that this war was to re-colonise the resource-rich Middle Eastern countries.
In an article by Villepin in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo affair, he had defined IS as "the deformed child" of Western policy, and that Western wars in the Middle East nourish new conflicts and terrorism because the West sees only "the Islamist symptom" therein, nothing else. Villepin was the only European leader who was so forthright on this sensitive issue.
Even if every US ally didn't seek to re-colonize the Middle Eastern states, the assumption that turning the Arab world into a battlefield to secure the existence of a blatantly racist Israel despite its naked terrorism against the Palestinians won't have its fallout on the US and its allies, was a blunder of incalculable proportions, and now the Europeans know it.
In spite thereof, the present European leadership, especially the leftist French President François Hollande, agreed to back new terrorist groups tasked with fuelling sectarian divide in the Muslim world, which was bound to cause a backlash wherein youth in the Muslim minority populations in European states - still segregated in many ways - could get involved.
What European regimes also ignore are the consequences of unbridled freedom of expression in a Europe that has millions of Muslims although the fallout from publication of cartoons insulting the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) by Denmark's Jayllands Posten and then by Charlie Hebdo proved that such acts could anger even the peaceful and loyal Muslim minorities in Europe.
While Western intervention in the Middle East remains the wrecker of global peace, risk of Europe's Muslim population becoming an internal threat could be minimised if the European governments ensured that in the name of "freedom of expression" European media didn't infuriate the returning Jihadists to a point where they became a threat to Europe's security.
Instead, during a visit to the US after the Charlie Hebdo affair, the British Prime Minister is on record having said that in free societies people have the "right to cause offence about someone's religion", and in Paris the French President reaffirmed French commitment to freedom of expression by asking people not to change their beliefs because that would imply yielding to terrorism.
In a globalised world there's no insulation; what happens there ends up happening elsewhere too. By turning the Middle East into a battle ground, the US and Europe created circumstances wherein the ordinary people of Iraq, Libya and Syria, were left with no option but to migrate at any cost to the nearest safe heavens - the European states across the Mediterranean sea.
The November 15 editorial of the Christian Science Monitor is right in saying that "It is easy to agree on the darkness of the militant ideology that drives IS, and to try to protect against its reach, to kill its leaders, or to retake territory by force. But it also requires hard work to agree on the light that should replace that darkness to end the IS threat for good with something sustainably good.
But blaming the terrorists alone is unrealistic; they turn into monsters after suffering injustice and being misled into believing that compensation lies in becoming twice as unjust. The G20 heads of state meeting in Turkey showed no signs of replacing this darkness; instead they agreed to prioritise counter-terrorism rather than introspect to commence a process of undoing the havoc their power-intoxication has caused.
Despite the assurances G20 leadership has given about focusing only on the terrorist elements in Europe's Muslim populations, these minorities, especially the asylum-seekers who have recently entered Europe, are now worried about their future because, except for concentrated bombing of IS in Syria, Iraq and Turkey, nothing is on the cards about restoring stability in the Middle East.