There are huge gaps in the capabilities of the continent's security agencies
by Pauline Neville-Jones / December 2, 2015 / Leave a comment
Two Belgian police officers guard the Grand Place in Brussels. © AP Photo/Michael Probst
Developments in Syria and recent IS atrocities have spotlighted the issue of intelligence failures. British intelligence agencies, apparently, did not foresee the Russian decision to move equipment to Syria to prepare for bombing what it claims are terrorist targets. After the Paris attacks, the French said that other EU countries did not inform them that one of the perpetrators, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had reached France from Syria. No doubt there have been failings in both cases, though the causes may well have been different.
All intelligence agencies are told by their governments to focus their efforts on certain targets. Thus, they do not devote resources to matters lying outside these areas, however significant they may be or become. In David Cameron’s foreword to the newly minted National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, one of the more telling passages reads “we cannot choose between conventional defences against state-based threats and the need to counter threats that do not recognise national borders. Today we face both and we must respond to both. So over the course of this Parliament our priorities are to deter state based threats [and] tackle terrorism.”
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