A few days ago was the attack in Ottawa that woke Canadians up to the idea that terrorist activity at home was a real possibility, preceded by another attack against military a few days earlier. I had been expecting that some sort of attack was possible for some time, and wondered about the timing and how prepared the emergency services would be. To some extent this came sooner than I had expected. However, it turned out not to be a foreign attack and from one perspective was just a lone guy gone mad. Nonetheless, it had the impact of terrorism on the city, and I think will on the future of the country.
Speaking to the possibility of an attack, it has been obvious that the capital city of a country involved in military and economic intervention in other countries must be vulnerable to terrorist attempts. Ottawa lacks the flashiness of New York or Washington, but still is the centre of government and would be an appropriate place to make a point. My own big fear has been that there would be an attempt to induce terror in the population as a whole, via random killings or bombings in public places. I think personally of the possibility of being caught up in that - not too likely statistically that it would be me, but it's gonna be someone. There have been recent direct threats against Canada issued through the media, and while that may be posturing, it is still something I have taken seriously.
In fact the recent attacks have been against military and government personnel. On the one hand those seem likely to be less effective as a civilian terror inducement - though they have been effective enough. But they do drive a concrete point that dissatisfaction with government decisions drives the attacks. Perhaps that makes some sense as these attacks were carried out by domestic terrorists - not people who came to the country for that purpose, nor even immigrants who might have ties with troubles abroad. Usually when a citizen attacks another, it is considered murder, not terrorism; crime, not war.
I think what has caused these to be tied to a terrorist motive is the political motivations and the existing though tenuous ties these people had, or sought to have, with international terrorist organizations. Yet that seems to me a somewhat tenuous connection to make - not a wrong one, but tenuous. One reason I think so is observing how impusive and frankly inept these attacks were. With just a little more advance planning these people could have caused a lot more damage. The Parliament Hill shooter chose to shoot soldiers in front of the War Memorial first, which got the alert started and probably slowed down his ultimate progress in Parliament. And he didn't even check the schedule so he headed to the wrong location to have the worst effect.
Everyone is lucky that it was so badly planned, and yet even so the event had a big impact. The downtown core was effectively shut down for the day or longer, people across the city were in fear, world leaders took note, and many civil rights in Canada are likely to be changed. All for one person who killed one person and wounded a couple others before being killed himself. What impresses me about this is the effectiveness of the act, inept though it was. What scares me is the much greater impact a truly planned and competent attack could have.
Of course that point won't be lost on law-makers and security agencies. The Parliament Hill attack was unpredicted, even though the shooter was known to police well enough to have his passport held (apparently the provocation for his actions unfortunately). More intelligence capabilities will probably increase the number of potential cases that can be intercepted, and more on-the-ground monitoring and personnel will probably decrease the response time when something happens. I expect there to be calls for both. Yet even the experts will acknowledge that it is impossible to achieve 100% security, and there will be incidents in the future. How much loss of privacy and civil liberty will be reasonable, for what level of protection?
I don't have the answer to that, though I generally lean towards minimal monitoring and removal of rights from people who haven't proven dangerous. To some extent that suggests that I would support more targeted and planful monitoring than the dragnet of data gather that is happening, at least in some spheres. But I also think problems of attacks on home soil need to be prevented by other means than intelligence, and stopped by other means than force. These attacks happen within a context - whether the attacker is domestic or foreign.
Specific to the threat of terrorism from abroad is the question of why we would have the attention of would-be attackers. The pretty direct answer is, Canada has its military over there meddling in their affairs. That is a vast oversimplification of course, there are many credible arguments for helping to quell unrest where it happens or help protect people who can't protect themselves. On the other hand, what we may see as a noble cause will be seen by others as picking a side and imposing our values, making retaliation quite justifiable in their view. Then there is the economic interest issue - are our political interventions just that, or are they motivated by economic interests? And whose interests? Canada's? Corporations who have influence in Canada? The First World? Are the long-term economic costs and payoffs worth the short term costs? These are questions that I don't know enough to answer, but they are important to an examination of our role in the world and how we hope the world to react to us.
Domestic issues are also relevant, particularly when attackers are domestic. What is it in our culture that causes some people to be so marginalized they choose to identify with foreign extremist organizations? There are many obvious answers to that question - various inequalities, bias against certain groups, legacy issues from how the country was formed, unhealthy modes of thought woven into the cultural narrative. There are probably subtle answers to that as well, and I think we've been given a clear signal that we need to eplore those. If we can't get a handle on that, no amount of prevention will stop people from radicalizing and turning into terrorists.
One of my big fears is finding myself in a society where, when in a public place, one has a reasonable chance of being attacked. In fact, I marvel at how rare attacks are, and it's one reason I like living in Ottawa where the rate does seem relatively low. Of the hundreds to thousands of people one briefly encounters in a day, almost always none of them decide to kill you. The opportunity is certainly there, I don't kid myself about that. Two big reasons, of course, are that normally the motivation is low and the cost is high. But as any trek in a car will show, the motivation to actively klll may be low, but the motivation to not kill "by accident" is also surprisingly low - so it's not that people are really all that interested in keeping the people around them alive. I fear we risk a change of thresholds where public killings could become much more common. We need to understand what might lead to that so that we can redirect the direction of the culture. That is the response that needs to be taken to these attacks, more than the security changes.
Comments