Secretary of Defense Robert Gates laid out the case for a continued NATO role in Afghanistan during a speech in Germany this past Sunday. Highlighting the gravity of the terrorist threat against Europe, Gates listed a number of terrorist plots that have been foiled in recent years and asked the audience to:
Then Gates said something that deserves more attention. He explained:
Here, Gates is directly refuting what I will call the “homegrown-only myth.” That is, it is widely believed that attacks such as the March 11, 2004, bombings in Madrid and the July 7, 2005, bombings in London were executed by terrorists with no real affiliation to al Qaeda’s global network. Instead of being the work of an organized and professional terrorist network, it is widely believed that such attacks were cooked up by local extremists, with no support from more seasoned terrorist operatives. Some Western counterterrorism officials and analysts believe this to be true despite abundant evidence to the contrary. For example, as I argued in “The Real Madrid Bombers?“, there are numerous threads connecting the terrorists responsible for the 3/11 attack to al Qaeda. The same can be said for the 7/7 attackers–they had clear ties to senior al Qaeda operatives operating out of Pakistan. Hopefully, some in Secretary Gates’ audience paid close attention to what he had to say about the global terror network. If NATO fails in Afghanistan, we can expect even more attacks from the al Qaeda terrorists operating there and in northern Pakistan. Europe and the United States should be on guard against “homegrown-only” plots. There is certainly the potential for such attacks in the future, and some incidents both here and abroad appear to conform to this paradigm (e.g. the Fort Dix Six). But this does not mean we should bury our heads in the sand when it comes to the terror emanating from northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as Iraq. Nor should we ignore the fact that al Qaeda still maintains an active network all across Europe.
