[Mb-civic] They Will Strike Again

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-attack12dec12.story

They Will Strike Again ...

Europe is fast becoming the staging ground for terror attacks on the U.S.
 By Peter Bergen
 Peter Bergen, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, is the
author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden" and
an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University School

 December 12, 2004

 Is Al Qaeda capable of carrying out another Sept. 11 attack in the United
States?

 The terrorist organization doesn't appear to have sleeper cells in the
country able to perform such a mission, or even capable of launching a
smaller-scale operation against a "soft" target such as a mall. If Al Qaeda
had this capability, its cells would have attacked either at the beginning
of the Iraq war in spring 2003 or during the recent presidential election.
Almost without exception, the "terrorism" cases in this country since 9/11
have involved wannabes and malcontents accused of "material support" for
terrorism, not planners of terrorist acts. Moreover, to its enormous credit,
the Muslim American community since 9/11 has rejected Osama bin Laden's
ideas. 

 The most pressing threat to Americans from Al Qaeda is not from within, but
from without: its cells and affiliated groups based in Europe.

 The attacks on three Madrid trains on March 11, which killed 191 commuters,
demonstrated that Al Qaeda-inspired jihadist groups on the Continent are a
real threat. And just as it is hard to imagine 9/11 without the "Hamburg
cell," future terrorist attacks damaging to U.S. national security probably
will have a strong European connection. For example, European members of Al
Qaeda could sneak into the United States to launch an attack on the scale of
the one in Madrid or they could detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb in
London's financial district, an event that would have a devastating effect
on the global economy and, by extension, the U.S. economy.

 How Al Qaeda succeeds or fails in Europe is critical to its future in the
West. Although few American Muslims have embraced Al Qaeda's ideology, that
is not the case with Europe's 20 million Muslims.

 Part of the reason is alienation. In general, Muslims in Europe face more
discrimination than their U.S. counterparts. Algerians in France and
Pakistanis in Britain, for example, are often treated as second-class
citizens and are less integrated into their host countries than Muslims in
the U.S. As citizens of the European Union, however, adherents of Al Qaeda's
ideology have considerable latitude to move around Europe and visit other
countries in the West.

 A suicide attack in Israel illustrates the threat. On April 30, 2003, two
middle-class Britons of Pakistani heritage walked into a popular cafe near
the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. One of them had attended meetings of Al
Muhajiroun, a British Islamist group broadly sympathetic to the goals of Al
Qaeda. Once inside the cafe, the younger man detonated a bomb, killing
himself and three bystanders and wounding dozens. The other man fled. It was
the first time that a citizen of Britain had committed an act of suicide
terrorism in Israel.

 If such an attack can happen in Israel, a country with the most rigorous
counter-terrorist defenses in the world, it can happen in the United States.
The so-called shoe bomber, Richard C. Reid, who failed to blow up an
American Airlines flight between Paris and Miami in December 2001, is a
British citizen. And the July 2004 terror alert in the United States was
sparked by word that a British Al Qaeda operative, alias Issa al Britani,
had scoped out U.S. financial institutions in New York and New Jersey before
Sept. 11. 

 Just as light can be defined as both a wave and a particle, Al Qaeda is now
both organization and political movement.

 It lost its base and training camps in the Afghanistan war, which damaged
its formal organization. But the war in Iraq has helped promote its
ideological movement.

 The most significant evidence of Al Qaeda's growing ideological appeal in
Europe beyond the Madrid bombings were last month's assassination of
filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam by a Moroccan who said that Van Gogh
had blasphemed Islam; the 2003 arrests of a group of men in London
experimenting with ricin, a biological toxin used in assassinations; and the
breakup by British police of an Al Qaeda plot to attack Heathrow Airport.

 At a Dec. 2 conference on Al Qaeda in Washington, Steven Simon, former
senior director for transnational threats at the National Security Council,
described Europe as both a "new field of jihad" for Al Qaeda and a
"ripening" threat. Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside Al Qaeda," described
Europe as a "staging ground" for future attacks against the U.S. and said
European governments had been overly tolerant of the terrorist
organization's support networks in their countries. Ursula Mueller, a German
diplomat, said the group posed a "greater risk" in Europe than it did in the
United States. 

 This trend is likely to accelerate. Europe's Muslim population will
increase dramatically in coming decades because the native populations of
most European countries are going into a steep decline, and those countries
will need to import labor from North Africa and the Middle East to sustain
the costs of supporting its rapidly aging populations.

 How European governments address the problem of integrating their growing
Muslim populations will do much to determine how safe Americans will be from
future attacks by Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups.


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