http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/world/europe/belgium-security.html?_r=1
The country of just 11.2 million people faces widening derision as being the world’s wealthiest failed state — a worrying mix of deeply rooted terrorist networks; a government weakened by divisions among French, Dutch and German speakers; and an overwhelmed intelligence service in seemingly chronic disarray.
It is also home to what Bernard Squarcini, a former head of France’s internal intelligence, described as “a favorable ecosystem: an Islamist milieu, and a family milieu,” which played an important role in sheltering Mr. Abdeslam and also perhaps in Tuesday’s attacks.
But the risks are fatally compounded, some said, by European-wide failures in intelligence sharing and the weakness of a Belgian intelligence service that Mr. Squarcini said lacked the capacity to pick up the “weak signals” of emerging plots.
That's how the French say it.
U.S. counterterrorism officials are frustrated and angry at Belgium’s inability to tackle ISIS terror cells that are successfully plotting murderous attacks on the West from inside the country’s tiny capital city.
The twin terror attacks in Brussels that left at least 30 dead and 230 injured on Tuesday, despite repeated warnings from Washington, left U.S. officials fuming.
A senior U.S. intelligence officer likened the Belgian security forces to “children.”
“It’s really shitty tradecraft,” the agent told The Daily Beast.
I would posit it is cultural, but it's not just the Belgians
The entire European continent is filled with inadequate security apparatuses; everything from Belgian police and intelligence authorities, to the German military.
Whether it's just law enforcement that should be able to monitor and intervene in terrorist plots, or NATO members who should be capable of going to war for their allies (or maybe, maybe using their militaries to prevent the humanitarian conflicts abroad their governments are so willing to absorb at home...), the nations of Europe don't have a federal security apparatus.
http://www.euronews.com/2015/11/30/belgium-s-pm-michel-calls-for-a-european-cia/
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e90a080e-107b-11e6-91da-096d89bd2173.html
A EUropean CIA, a EUropean Army.
The EU is already hilariously dysfunctional.
What's required is competency and realism among each EU/European nation to understand that the terrorists will never stop.
There is nothing like you can find in the histories of ETA or Red Faction or the IRA to compare to Islamic terrorism as goes incentive to stop. Islamist terror has been conducted by the sword on mounted camel, and by hijacked jet, coordinated by messages conveyed by illiterate couriers, and by burner cell phones.
Europeans have to be willing, on a national basis, to spend the cash and develop the institutional competency it takes to pre-empt and intervene against, terrorism and national emergencies, because America can't just run in and do it, and a Federal EU is a complete fantasy.