113 / 150
ASSESSMENT OF THE JIHADI THREAT AND THE RESPONSE STRATEGIES
113
describe the international scene in this way fol-
lowing 9/11, as the grounds for undertaking the
invasion of Afghanistan (October 2001) and
Iraq (March 2003). There is no doubt that we
have to fight the threat, but war –which by def-
inition means handing the military the lead role
in the response– is not the best strategy.
Basically, it is a matter of understanding that
in general terms the armed forces are not
equipped, trained and even motivated to per-
form in these circumstances. Without getting
carried away by the academic arguments and
critical theories regarding the prevailing milita-
ristic approach of the last decade, we have the
cases of Afghanistan and Iraq to remind us that
the Taliban have not been eliminated and nor
has Al-Qaeda in Iraq (now DAESH). On the con-
trary, as a result of the application of a milita-
rized agenda in every dimension (in which there
has barely been room for other necessary social,
political and economic instruments) and after
an accumulation of considerable political and
military errors, both countries still remain very
active theatres for jihadi groups today.
It is not the greatest challenge for
European security
If the experience of the Cold War had not been
enough, at the beginning of the 1990s we came
to realise that security is a concept that goes
way beyond the field of military defence. We
learned then, once the bipolar confrontation
had been overcome, that the threats affecting
our security were not limited to a devastating
nuclear holocaust or the dreaded invasion of
Western Europe by Warsaw Pact troops. We fi-
nally learned that pandemics, climate change,
uncontrolled population flows, organised crime,
the destabilizing potential of illicit trade, failed
states, exclusion and poverty, the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction and, of course,
international terrorism were high on the list of
threats facing us in the globalised world in
which we happen to live.
Similarly, we also learned that they were
transnational threats and risks that no country
could tackle on its own with any real prospect
of success and that they were rooted much
more in social, political and economic issues
than in purely military considerations. As a re-
sult, we concluded that it was necessary to re-
formulate the concept of security to take in
many dimensions that had been neglected be-
fore then –food, energy, economic, political,
health security and so on–; that multilateralism
had ceased to be an option and become an ob-
ligation and that the answers would have to be
essentially non-militarist, ceding centre stage to
social, political, diplomatic and economic instru-
ments, while the military featured only as the
last resort.
Despite the new analysis, which stressed the
importance of human security as the ambitious
paradigm towards which efforts had to be
geared, it was not possible to change the pre-
vailing course that led NATO (an essentially mil-
itary organisation) to include international ter-
rorism in its strategic concept of 1999, assigning
itself the task of responding to the threat that it
posed. The 9/11 attacks prompted a definitive
return to mindsets that had seemingly been su-
perseded, with unilateralism and militarism as
the standards and the US intention (which for-
tunately failed) to make preventive war a third
rule of the game to legitimise the use of force
(along with legitimate defence and an explicit
mandate from the UN Security Council).
As a result of a process in which there has
been no hesitation to resort to spreading fear
among the population, the fine balance between