Experts weigh in on Brussels attacks

Why are there no control points at the entrance to the Zaventem international airport?

Extending security and surveillance around sensitive targets is sometimes a good idea, but has real tradeoffs in terms of cost, convenience, and manageability for security staff. Often it merely moves the perimeter outward, broadening the area that needs to be monitored and moving the unprotected gathering spaces away from the critical mass of security staff. Traditional airport security has moved this insecure perimeter into the entryways of today’s airports—a part of airports we’ve seen targeted by attackers from Los Angeles in 2002 and 2013, to Glasgow in 2007, and now Brussels in 2016.

Are the control points a necessity?

Control points may be necessary, though they are typically more valuable for crowd control and traditional public safety than for counter terrorism. That said, in high risk areas or at high risk targets, they can be very valuable. We saw during the Paris attacks that checkpoints at the soccer stadium resulted in less deadly suicide bombings than would have occurred if the attacker had gotten inside.

Should Europe’s migration policy be changed?

I think there is little doubt that this attack will—as Paris did—change the rhetoric around the Syrian refugee issue in Europe. This, despite the fact that while many of the attackers in both cases had been foreign fighters in Syria, they have overwhelmingly been first and second generation European citizens and not part of any migrant flow like what is happening today. However, despite the limited ties between these attackers and such refugee populations, that is not likely to stop those who have strong pre-existing positions against immigration and those who are merely afraid of further terrorist attacks from conflating the two issues. There may well be some risk of increased terrorist mobility from large refugee flows, but that issue seems relatively minor compared to the humanitarian need and importance of the EU and world community helping the people fleeing the barbarity of the Assad regime and ISIS. There are real security concerns, but as everywhere else in public policy those concerns need to be balanced against a host of other issues, costs, values and needs.

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Richard Lachmann, a political sociologist at the University at Albany, New York: “Statistically, Brussels is safe.”

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