Originally published in the Australian on 13 August If a modern-day Australian Rip Van Winkle were to awake from a two-decade slumber and turn on his television set or iPad, he would be stunned by the extent to which terrorism has come to dominate our lives. Barely a day passes without a new government initiative, statement, exhortation or meeting aimed at future-proofing Australia against the kinds of terrorist attacks that have become a regular occurrence in once tranquil Europe. This week in Bali, it was the turn of Attorney-General George Brandis, who emphasised the importance of disrupting the flow of money to terrorist groups and countering the worrying trend of self-funded terrorism.
European soul searching in the wake of the recent spate of terrorist outrages reveals deep public confusion and a polarisation of elite opinion about the nature of the threat, its causes and how best to devise effective responses. As Islamic State slowly cedes territory in Iraq and Syria to an unlikely coalition of Western, Russian and Islamic opponents, do the latest terrorist attacks in Europe presage a co-ordinated, Islamic State-directed campaign designed to bring the war to the West?
Are we in the West responsible, as Islamic State and critics on the Left would have us believe? And why is it taking so long to come to grips with a problem that initially seemed manageable but is now an existential threat to France and Belgium, and a major security challenge for many other countries, including Australia. To take the last question first, there are two main reasons for the drawn-out, patchy and often confused counter-terrorist response.
The first is the disconcerting rapidity with which terrorism continues to mutate, making it difficult for intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to develop a fit for purpose counter-terrorist strategy. Here was an organisation that acted more like a state than a terrorist group. Florence Gaub, a senior analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies, argues that cults are more flexible, cohesive, agile and ultimately more challenging than other organisations.
The way Islamic State recruits and indoctrinates its members is almost identical to cults elsewhere. Like all cults, Islamic State uses difficult to detect, and combat, psychological recruitment techniques to target receptive individuals, eroding, then severing, their family bonds and positioning the organisation to replace them as the only relevant social network.
