Orin Gordon
Editor-in-Chief
With exquisite bad timing, President Barack Obama declared, in an interview with ABC News early on Friday, that the US and its allies had contained Isis. Then Friday night’s attacks in Paris happened.
Obama may have been talking about Isis’ territorial gains in Syria and Iraq, but he must wish he could take that statement back today. “I don’t think they’re gaining strength,” the US President had said. “What is true, from the start our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them.
They have not gained ground in Iraq and in Syria…you don’t see this systemic march by ISIL across the terrain. “What we have not yet been able to do is to completely decapitate their command and control structures,” he added. “We’ve made some progress in trying to reduce the flow of foreign fighters.”
Friday night in Paris, ISIL’s command and control structures looked very much intact. Even allowing for the view of intelligence professionals that terror attacks are increasingly cellular—planned and executed at source rather than from a Middle Eastern central command—the level of organisation suggested something rather higher than cellular command, or a series of opportunistic attacks.
We’ve come a long way since 9/11, so despite the terrible tragedy, some perspective is needed. 9/11 threw transatlantic travel into chaos for days. From London, where I watched it unfold, we couldn’t place a phone call to any country in the Caribbean with the +1 XXX numerical prefix.
We grumble at taking our shoes off at Piarco, and shake our heads at coming straight off intransit flights and being marched through the machines again, something that Panama, for example, has the good sense not to put its intransit passengers through.
Three years before 9/11 was the World Cup in France, and those of us who went to see Jamaica’s Reggae Boyz take on the world could move around with relative freedom, even with heavy security. Bombs went off on Friday at the Stade de France, where the ’98 final took place. Six and counting were killed. The terrorists had planned to kill far more.
Seventeen years ago, they’d surely have succeeded in doing so.
However unfortunate Obama’s analysis looks today, success in containing Isis/ISIL, either on the battlefield or in our cities (a battlefield of sorts for terrorists anyway), is not down to the US alone, or the US and its allies.
The question of how and why some of our young men and women find succour in the twisted, quasi-religious message of ISIL, so much so that they answer the call to arms, is one we need to answer and address urgently. The number of Trinidad and Tobago citizens who have made their way to the battlefield may be comparatively small, but it is nonetheless a chilling development.
What can we, as residents and citizens of this country offer by way of a message to counteract that appeal? And how can we work with Imams to bring them back, both physically and mentally? Isis, as Obama learned to his chagrin, won’t be defeated by armed might alone.