I spoke today with a former chief of France's counterterror service, and he said, in the simplest terms, and I'm quoting here, "There are too many of them, too few of us," too many suspected jihadis, too few in the police and the intelligence services to track them.
And he gave me a sense, Jake, of the numbers here. He says, for any one suspect, It takes three to as many as 20 agents to track them. You're talking 24/7, and in France alone, there are some 5,000 names on the list of suspected jihadis. You do the math there, you're talking about tens of thousands of security personnel necessary to track those people and that's just an impossible mathematics to make practical here.
He also told me that a particular problem is when these suspects go silent, when they're off the grid for a couple years. You can't keep up that surveillance and he says that's what happened with Cherif Kouachi and, of course, that allowed perhaps an opportunity for him to carry out the carnage they carried out yesterday just down the street from me here.