Europe's leaders don't seem capable of fighting militant Islamism

There is no disguising that the continent faces a number of existential challenges

A chalk-drawn tribute to the victims of the attack on a wall on the Place de la Bourse (Beursplein) in central Brussels (AFP)

After the terror attacks in Paris last November, The Independent concurred with President Hollande’s verdict that these atrocities were an act of war. The suicide bomb attacks in Brussels on Tuesday were another event in the same war: same aggressors, similar innocent victims.

Acceptance that we are in a war makes such murderous events both easier and harder for us to deal with. Easier, because no war ends with a single battle, so unconsciously at least we were braced for further such atrocities, as the speed at which the Brussels metro returned to normal service suggested. But if these warlike events, stretching back to the 9/11 attacks in the US and the 7/7 attacks in London, are understood as battles in an ongoing war – and both the public and the authorities are aware that this is the case – it becomes harder to accept the failure of those responsible to take the necessary steps to bring the war to an end.

As our Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn has argued, we and our allies share a grave responsibility for creating the circumstances in which Islamist terror groups can thrive, and then refusing to learn the lessons of those mistakes.

The invasion of Iraq, where jihadi terror had barely a toehold under Saddam Hussein, created a power vacuum and a seething population of resentful Sunni Muslims, which proved the perfect ground for Isis to emerge and flourish. We went on to make precisely the same errors in Libya, with the same consequences – a grotesque error for which David Cameron has never publicly apologised. Indeed, only the wisdom of the House of Commons balked him from doing precisely the same thing all over again in Syria, eliminating the Assad regime and thereby throwing down the welcome mat to Isis in Damascus. Even today there is no indication that he and his colleagues are aware of how much more dangerous their actions have made the situation in Europe.

But given the fact that terror is today being manufactured and exported from Iraq and Syria in industrial quantities, the other, equally grave problem is that Europe has utterly failed to forge an adequate response to it.

Turkey deported Brahim el-Bakraoui, one of the Brussels bombers, to the Netherlands last year, but despite overt warnings by Ankara that he was a terrorist fighter, he was able to go about his business, which culminated in him blowing himself and others up at Brussels Airport. One might fondly suppose that the erosion of national borders in the EU would facilitate the continent-wide struggle against the terrorists, but the opposite seems to be the case: while Schengen permits the killers to slip in and out of any country they fancy, the EU’s counter-terrorism co-ordinator was dismissed in a recent French parliamentary report as “weak” and “having no operational capacity to offer”. Nigel Farage’s comment about the “free movement of Kalashnikovs” was crassly timed but essentially correct.

Like other vital EU arms such as Frontex, the border control agency, the counter-terrorism co-ordinator is disastrously weak, as weak as the union’s weakest link. And few links are more treacherous than Brussels: heart of the union, and so dysfunctional in its policing that Molenbeek, where much recent terror has been incubated, has been a no-go zone for decades.

As Mr Farage was tartly reminded, the aftermath of an atrocity is no time for political point-scoring. But there is no disguising that Europe faces a number of existential challenges, among which its will and ability to defend its citizens from terrorists is perhaps the most crucial.