If there is one thing that is clear from the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday, it is that we do not know how to react. We see the amount of bloodshed and believe something, anything must be done about it, but we have no idea what we can do. It’s a horrible event which needs a response, but no response seems adequate or makes much sense at all, possibly because the attack itself is so incomprehensible.
The immediate response has been a call to arms, as people want to see those responsible punished. That means military action against ISIS, which has already claimed responsibility for the attacks. This seems to make sense, because it is a violent response to a violent act, and we need to do something. If we can punish those responsible then perhaps in some way we have managed to solve the problem, or at least dealt with part of the problem.
The problem is that a military response has proven inadequate for actually dealing with the problem, something we know from the decades spent in the middle east trying to stamp out different terrorist groups with bombing and combat. ISIS was not there a decade ago, but it’s still in the same area and fed by the same group of people that powered other, older terrorist organizations. Some of those have since been destroyed, in name, but what they have been doing has not been stopped.
We have what can be described as a monster that feeds on angry, young people who do not believe they have a future and just want to destroy with what life they have left. We can injure it, but we have no indication of how it can be killed. The only way to stop it would be to turn off its food supply, to prevent those angry young people from joining their ranks and destroying themselves in order to further some inscrutable goal. That goal might just be to keep feeding the beast and continuing to get people to destroy themselves.
The attacks killed people, creating angry people who have lost those they care about. The response will kill people, leading to the same. There will be countries that scale back the number of refugees they are willing to host, which allows for more recruitment from refugee camps. It leads to more racism against those who are Muslim, and that could create more people who are angry at the world and want to destroy it. It does not achieve any goal apart from the escalation of violence. That’s what it aims to do, and it succeeds, but it otherwise has no end game. There is nothing to achieve apart from destruction, the entire goal is to destroy and nothing else. It is not about religion or any just cause, it’s merely a wish to destroy.
There is nothing in the attacks that improves life for members of ISIS, if anything it will make life more difficult for them, as countries will step up their military presence in Syria. But that could be what they want anyway, escalating the combat giving them an opportunity to die for their cause, whatever it happens to be. Increased military against them might even be the goal, more death and destruction in their territory being something which they actually want, in order to use it as a recruitment tool. Our problem is that we have an enemy that we do not understand. In the same situation, we would not want to see more bombing, more conflict or more destruction. But everything about what they’re doing is wrong to us, which makes it difficult to actually achieve anything of meaning in this never ending conflict. Knowing your enemy is the only way to know how to defeat them, and the enemy here is one which is so foreign and remote to our sensibilities that we might be doing what they want.
If we have an enemy that does not fear death, what can military action accomplish? After all, they went into this act with the intention of dying. We cannot do nothing, but it’s a case where we have no clear indication of what we can do that will be effective and meaningful. The threat of death means something to us, so we are reacting with what means most to us, but if the people we are acting against don’t have the same fears how can we understand how to deter them?
Then how do we react? I do not know, nobody does. It’s not as though we have an opponent with demands or some sort of political goal. That may have been the case a long time ago, but right now we have people who are fighting for the sake of fighting, destroying themselves and others for the sake of destruction. We know we must react, and prevent this from happening again, but we have no idea how to react.
