How does this end?

"How does this end?" I asked a friend, an Egyptian immigrant, over the weekend.

"Its been going on for hundreds of years," was his less-than-encouraging reply, "And it will continue to go on."

While the terrorist attacks have been largely seen as retaliation for France's military action in Syria, perhaps the larger long-term problem is that France has long kept the lid on a simmering pot of jobless, frustrated, angry young men from the former French North African colonial possessions Morocco and Algeria, men who live largely on the outskirts of France's cities and on the outskirts of French society. They used to feel powerless to express their anger. But now there is an organization with the motivation and means to give them the power, in the form of bullets and explosives. So, I come back to my original question. "How does this end?" Let's hope it doesn't take hundreds of years.

However long it takes, the solution will have to come both from military might and social reform. The French do have their hands full.