Fareed Zakaria: What Does ISIS Want?

The barbarism of the attacks in Paris mark a new low in terror. The attacks were not directed against national symbols or government targets, but designed simply to kill innocent men, women and children. The murderers did not even bother to issue demands. 

French President Francois Hollande has called Friday's attacks an act of war. They were worse. War has a goal. It's fought by soldiers against soldiers. This is nihilism -- violence as an end in it of itself. 

That doesn't, however, answer the question what to do. In the wake of the attacks, people rightly ask, what could France have done better? What could the United States have done better? And people are offering up various solutions regarding borders, visas, police procedures and the battle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. 

Would this really have prevented this kind of attacks?

As The New York Times has noted, France already has in place very tough anti-terrorism policies at home. The United States has been expanding its war against the terror group for a year. It has spent about $5 billion and launched over 8,000 airstrikes against ISIS with its coalition partners. Would more strikes have resulted in fewer terrorist responses by ISIS? Would the various policies that people have advocated -- no fly zones, safe havens, special operations forces -- have stopped the Paris attacks? 

We don't know the details yet, but the attacks appeared to have been carried out by seven or eight people, some locals, some outsiders, armed with weapons that are easily obtainable anywhere in the world, coordinated in the sense that they all attacked at about the same time. They chose soft targets that are difficult to defend -- cafes and concert halls. This didn't require vast sums of money, complex logistics or great cunning. It just required barbarity and a willingness to die. 

Now it is easy to imagine the likely responses from the West. The war against ISIS will intensify with the United States and France, possibly even sending troops in there. At home it will mean more domestic laws and tougher police efforts to monitor and arrest people. Given the news about terrorists posing as refugees it could mean that borders will be closed. The government will spy on communications more intrusively. It will fuel the rise of nationalist politicians everywhere, and mistrust between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities will grow. 

It's worth asking, what does ISIS want? By most accounts it wants all of this, a world divided between Muslims and non-Muslims. Its propaganda stresses that the West is intractably anti-Muslim. And as Graeme Wood notes, it has always openly tried to draw Western forces into Iraq and Syria hoping to make itself the great army of believers, fighting the crusaders. 

Imagine if the West could respond to these terror attacks with increased and more effective efforts both at home and abroad, but also with the determination to demonstrate that it would act but not overreact. That it would reaffirm its basic values and it would strive to restore normalcy in the face of brutality. To do this would be to understand that terrorism is unique in that it depends for its effectiveness on the response of the onlooker.

If we are not terrorized then it doesn't really work.