Residence Palace Brussels 11 July 2005

SESSION IV: The Transatlantic Campaign Against Terrorism Event 11/07/2005 NATO: New Tasks and Responsibilities Dr. STEFANIE BABST: Can I ask everybody to take seats please? To me it's just amazing how fast, I mean, this day has just flown by. I mean, we started at 8:00, and believe it, this morning, and we are yet ready to head to the last and fourth session. And I'm very pleased, I mean, to be able to introduce Marshall Billingslea, who is NATO's Assistant Secretary-General for Defence Investment, who has kindly agreed to moderate this final panel that we called The Transatlantic Campaign Against Terrorism. We spoke about the fight, the threats, or the war on terrorism numerous times this morning and also this afternoon, but I thought it would make good sense, I mean, to hear from two distinguished speakers what they see which is most challenging, I mean, to the international community's responses to international terrorism. And as I said before, I'm particularly happy that Marshall has agreed to be with us today, knowing that he normally has a very busy schedule. Marshall Billingslea has a very distinguished career in the Pentagon, where he was responsible for in particular counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation issues, before he joined NATO in his current capacity as Assistant Secretary-General for Defence Investment. And if you'd ask him, I mean, what's his main dossier concerning defence investment is, I'd say, if I can ask… answer that question on behalf of him, it… it is very much a core… a core position that drives not only NATO's various responses in that respect, but also which drives NATO's military modernization forces, which is absolutely key in order to actually, I mean, meet that challenge. So without further ado, let me once again welcome our panelists, and I give the floor to Marshall in order to introduce both the panelists and the subjects. Thank you. MARSHALL BILLINGSLEA (Assistant Secretary-General for Defence Investment, NATO): Thank you very much. It's good to be here with everybody today. You've had a long day with a lot of topics to be discussed, as I understand. But I think that this particular subject probably could… you could not have asked, unfortunately, for better timing, with the attacks that have just so recently occurred in London at the end of last week. So we are here today to discuss about… to talk about one of the issues, if not the issue, with which all of our governments are concerned, with which NATO and the EU are concerned, and with which we as ordinary human beings, civilians and parents are very much concerned. I will not spend any time discussing what NATO is doing in this matter. We can get into that to the extent that people want to, but what I do want to do is introduce to you -- because in fact probably I… I should not be carrying this. I… I'm not a woman in international security. But my top counter-terrorism official inside NATO is, and Françoise Perret, could you stand up so everybody can see you? She leads our counter-terrorism technology team, which is a team of… of people inside my division that is pursuing working with the nations to better develop capabilities to help our governments, to help our militaries and our law enforcement and our intelligence services counter the terrorist threat. And so she's available to answer any… any… any of the specific questions that people might have. And if you want to ask specific questions, I'll just ask her to come up here to join the… the panelists. We have a really fantastic group of panelists with us today, and I think what I'd like to do is introduce both of them, but then turn to each in turn, and then we'll just open it up to the floor if that's OK. We have Dr. Martha Crenshaw, who holds the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professorship in Global Issues and Democratic Thought at Wesleyan University, which is a very well respected US university in Middletown, Connecticut. And I believe you've taught international politics in general since about 1974. She is an expert on terrorism, and she serves on the executive board of the Women in International Security program, as… and as a councillor on the… in the International Society of Political Psychology, as well as on the council of the American Political Science Association. So Martha is here and will talk to us about a number of topics. And we also have with us Ms. Julianne Smith, who is a fellow and a Deputy Director of the International Security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, an institute… a very well respected institute with which many of you are familiar. There she focuses on European security, defence and transatlantic relations. Previously Ms. Smith was the Program Officer for the Foreign Policy program at the German Marshall Fund, so again, many of you may know her from that tour, where she co-authored a number of documents and worked on a… a fairly important poll that discussed US and European foreign policy attitudes. So I think what I ought to do first is turn to Martha and then to Julianne for their topics, and then we'll open the floor for a discussion. So Dr. Crenshaw, you have the floor. DR. MARTHA CRENSHAW (Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought, Wesleyan University, Connecticut): Thank you. Thank you for the introduction, and thank you to NATO and to WIIS for organizing the conference and for inviting me. I'm an academic by background, as you can see. And also, I am not a NATO expert. My field of specialization really is terrorism. And so I'm delighted that we have some NATO people who know the details of the NATO response better than I do. So I want to frame some questions that are probably more… from a more general perspective, and that I hope perhaps will sum up some of the many things that have already been said about terrorism today. Because I think you can measure the importance of the issue by the fact that I don't think there was a single presentation today that didn't bring up the issue in some way, because it colours, I think, all of our perceptions of security, and it certainly has a strong effect on NATO's perception of security. Let me point out in passing, and I'll come back to this momentarily, that NATO did not take up the issue of terrorism post-9/11. There were many earlier efforts of NATO to deal with terrorism. So it… there is a certain history here that we don't want to forget in just looking at the post-9/11 world. But what are we dealing with when we're talking about NATO and trying to deal with the threat of terrorism? We're dealing with an alliance of states that are trying to deal with a transnational actor, or maybe not even a transnational actor but a transnational threat that's composed of actors, philosophies, ideas, ideologies, institutions -- in other words, an extremely amorphous type of threat and a very uncertain, rapidly changing threat environment. And let me say I… I sort of hate to add to the pessimistic note with which we appear to be concluding the conference, but when you're talking about responding to terrorism it's sometimes hard to be very optimistic, at least in the short run. It's proved very difficult for the single nation state to figure out how to deal with the threat of terrorism. And whereas we've always said that the answer to the problem of terrorism had to be international cooperation, because the threat is truly a global threat, still, as we all know, bringing a lot of states together to cooperate on an issue is going to compound the difficulty of dealing with it many ways. The end result may be a better response to the threat, but getting there is going to involve a good bit of effort and a good bit of time. So we have an alliance of states dealing with this particular type of threat that I'll talk about a little bit more later. And one of the issues that's been raised again and again today is why is this particular alliance, this particular international organization, better equipped than other international organizations to deal with the problem of terrorism. And that's a question that I don't think that I can answer, but I think you've heard several different answers in the course of the discussions today. Would the EU be better? Would the UN be better? With which national actors and with which international organizations should NATO cooperate more intimately? The threat itself, as I've said, is a very mixed threat, one that doesn't even involve a single actor. It is very different from the kinds of threats that NATO was created to deal with. Furthermore, what it involves is really a… a post-Cold War and even post-9/11 redefinition of what security is. Because we used to think of security -- the nation-state did, and certainly alliances of states did -- as security from an external threat, wherever it came from. And now that we see that this threat, the threat of terrorism now, is both an internal and an external threat. And I say that quite deliberately, because it does not simply come from failed states; doesn't simply come from poverty in the developing world; does not come exclusively from a lack of democracy in the developing world. All of these things may be partially contributing factors, but they are not the cause. What you have is a mix of these things, mixed in often with domestic grievances within states that are otherwise stable and democratic. I think we have to recognize that fact that was brought up in the first panel today, that we can't ignore that part of it as well. We used to talk about third world states as omnibalancing, was the term that was used. And we said because they are weak states they face threats from internal unrest as much as external unrest. We didn't really quite get the point that very well established liberal democracies could also face the internal and the external threat combined, although looking at this from a historical point of view, I recall, and I think one of the earlier speakers did as well, that in the early days of the Cold War, the threat of subversion in the west was indeed one of the reasons for the Marshall Plan, for the initial European institutions and for NATO. And we've somehow also forgotten that in our emergence from the end of the Cold War. So the threat really is an internal and external threat combined, and sometimes it does result from the domestic consequences of foreign policy actions that states undertake. And here I want to make an observation that is sort of an aside on this, which is that one of the problems when you look at the history of how terrorism emerges is that major states -- the United States and other states -- do not foresee the consequences of their actions. Because if you look at the very complicated emergence of al-Qaeda, its offshoots, affiliates, franchises, venture capital operations, whatever we want to call that… I don't even want to use a term as strong as network… that loose number of groups or small numbers of individuals who might be inspired by ideas, who might be led by someone else, you have to look back at the US actions in supporting the Mujahideen resistance to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and trace it back up from there. There are a number of other actions that… that particularly the United States undertook over the years that simply… the consequences were not foreseen. Is it possible to foresee them? I'm not entirely sure. But certainly if we look back with the benefit of hindsight, we can say these were consequences of actions that were taken for other reasons. We didn't see the effect they were going to have on many other issues. I'll say that, in terms of US policy toward terrorism, one reason for this… and… and not to say that it's not inherently difficult to do it, but one reason was that before September the eleventh terrorism was treated as an issue that really was not part of the whole foreign policy process. It was really not integrated into the spectrum of widely conceived US interests, but treated as something different from and often not as important as other issues. We didn't quite see how all these issues were integrated with each other. So here we have a problem of an alliance trying to deal with a non-state actor and a totally new conception of security. And here's another ironic aspect of this, thinking again back at the history of NATO. We talked a lot today what is the purpose of NATO now. You look back at what the purpose of NATO was, and you remember that one reason for NATO was that European countries thought that they would get greater security, more security, by allying themselves with the United States, and that this was the path to security. And for some states it still is, as we've discussed today. But when you deal with the area of terrorism, even very powerful states find themselves becoming more vulnerable because they're allied to the United States. And this is one of the sources of division within the Atlantic alliance. This division is of course reinforced by the war in Afghanistan because it's thought by many people that it is Afghanistan that is now fuelling the movement toward terrorism and that terrorism itself has changed quite a lot since 9/11. We can't imagine that it's static; it is a dynamic phenomenon. And many people think that the war in Iraq of course is providing inspiration, training, a magnet for groups, and that in effect Iraq has replaced Afghanistan under the Taliban, unfortunately, as a place that encourages terrorism. We talked about what… what's going to be the end result in Iraq and what's going to happen if there's failure, what's going to happen if there's success. Of course if there's failure it's hard to imagine that it will not encourage what we call the jihadist phenomenon, just as the apparent victory of the Mujahadin in Afghanistan encouraged them as well. You can drive out a major power. They drove out one super power. If you could drive out the other super power, think what an inspiration that would be to these movements, and again, from a… a top level of coordinated action down to the level of individuals who may be acting simply by imitating what they have seen and what they have heard and… and following directions that they've received over the… over the Internet. So this is one… one factor of division between the United States and its European allies within NATO. You see also that there's… there are other disagreements that make cooperation in dealing with terrorism harder when it comes to the political level. And that is that we'd like to think that there's a full agreement on principles out there, but I'm not sure that there entirely is as much agreement on principles as we might like to think. We heard earlier today that, whereas the US wishes to put the promotion of democracy, as we conceive of democracy, at the top of the list, whereas many European states think that stabilization is a more realistic goal. There's another difference that I'd like to point to in terms of the conception of the threat of terrorism that I think is one of these underlying differences, philosophical differences if you will, between the US and Europe, and that is on essentially what terrorism is. In the United States the idea has become extremely popular that there is a new terrorism out there, exemplified by al-Qaeda or the jihadist phenomenon, and that it is fundamentally different than anything else that went before, and certainly fundamentally different than any threat that any other state ever faced out there. I think the European view tends to be more the fact that terrorism has long roots, that it is a phenomenon with which many European countries have had fairly extensive experience, and that they see more of an evolutionary phenomenon than a dramatic shift in the nature of the threat. If you look just at London, for example, or you look at the notion of urban bombings -- and I just came from London myself -- if you read the headlines in the British papers, and if you knew the history of terrorism, they said well, let's see. There was a IRA bombing here, and the one there, and the one the other, and this has killed more people but we are familiar with this. We… it's a... blow, but we can cope with it because we have coped before. If you look at the list of European states that had confronted terrorism in the past -- Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Turkey -- in other words, very widespread experience, even with urban bombings. So if you leave out the kind of ideological component of it and you say well, what was the physical threat, it was urban bombings, city bombings. Certainly we've dealt with this before, and there are ways of dealing with it in terms of consequence management. This relates to the nature of how do you respond to terrorism. And here again you find a difference in emphasis between the US and Europe. As we've pointed out several times today, first of all, intelligence sharing is an important aspect of cooperation; second, is key to dealing with terrorism. But most intelligence sharing in dealing with terrorism does occur at the law enforcement and intelligence agency level, and it often deals with levels below the top levels of decision makers but at mid-levels of bureaucracy. And there is a question of whether institutions can be fitted together when… within an international alliance so that they mesh appropriately. But I think there's also a difference of conception, in that on the European side of the alliance there is more of a tendency to see terrorism as a law enforcement problem, and of course in the United States, with the war on terrorism, there's been an increasing tendency to see it as a military problem. Let me point out, however, that there has been extensive debate in the United States and that this continues. Is terrorism war? Is it crime? So it's not as though the US unanimously or… or completely, you know, was devoted to the idea of it being a military problem. This really is something that came to the fore after September the eleventh. And I think the debate within the United States is probably more nuanced than it may appear to be on this side of the Atlantic. But the notion of whether or not military force is an effective response to terrorism, I think there is a… is obviously a… a real dividing point. That brings us back to the question of NATO, and if it is primarily a military alliance, what can military alliances do. And there are a number of things that they can do, particularly in… in technical areas, and some of the initiatives that have been discussed today have undoubtedly been very important. But can NATO really develop a response to terrorism, NATO in… in the sense of the fullness of its… of its membership, without moving more in a global direction and more in a political direction than a military direction? And… and I don't know. As far as I could see, opinion today was quite divided as to whether NATO should move in that direction, whether it would want to move in that direction. But I would say if NATO wants to be a player in dealing with the response to terrorism, it would have to take on this wider conception. But let me say I'm not entirely certain of what added value there is for NATO to try to become a major player in dealing with terrorism, or whether it wants to be more of a coordinating mechanism and to take more of a modest role in dealing with terrorism. Again, I'd simply pose that as a question. And so let me just conclude on the note of a… of question that we can discuss later. BILLINGSLEA: Thank you, Martha. Julianne, your thoughts? JULIANNE SMITH (Deputy Director, International Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC): Well, first… first I'd like to join the other speakers in thanking NATO and WIIS and hosting this event, in my eyes another major milestone for both organizations and their cooperation together. I have a nomination for their next joint project. I was looking at this fantastic for-and-against debate series, but noticing that there wasn't a single female who was asked to contribute to this. So maybe we could do an all-female edition in the future. My comments will probably echo some of what Martha covered. But I want to look at the transatlantic campaign against terrorism, and look at it essentially through three different layers. First of all, I want to look at it from the military perspective, in terms of our ability as partners to arrest or eliminate terrorist operatives. Second of all, I want to look at our ability, either through NATO or as partners in other institutions or bilaterally, to penetrate terrorist organizations to try and identify targets and planned operations in the future. And then lastly, I want to just say a few words about looking at the roots of radicalization and what drives people towards the path of radicalization. I understand fully that NATO is working hard to excel in the first two areas I mentioned, but certainly hasn't really identified itself as being a player in that last category. But I personally feel like we're never going to successfully combat terrorism unless we really look at that third category as well, and so it certainly deserves mention. And since the title is Transatlantic Campaign Against Terrorism, I'll reserve the right to mention a few other things we're doing as partners, not necessarily under the NATO umbrella. So first in the heavy lifting category, when it comes to military operations and arresting or seizing or eliminating terrorist operatives, I want to outline some of the things that have been done, talk about some of the challenges we face and some of the ideas I have for moving forward, or other ideas that have been mentioned by others here in the room. NATO hasn't been terribly active in terms of robust military operations in combating terrorism. Of course it did send AWACS to the United States after 9/11 for modest airspace surveillance… very important. It also fielded a response in Kabul that we heard about, it was talked and mentioned several times earlier today. It's supporting Karzai. And NATO of course has sent reconstruction teams around Afghanistan, which are important but probably fall into a separate category that I'll cover in a minute. Most importantly, I think NATO's trying very hard, and has tried over the last couple of years, or in fact decades, to develop new sorts of capabilities to address twenty-first century challenges. And… and we've seen some significant progress in some areas, like sealift and airlift. And we've seen virtually no progress in other areas, like air-to-air refuelling or C4ISR. The NATO Response Force of course would be heralded as one of the major developments. It's reached an initial capacity and is close to achieving its full operational capacity. This could potentially be used in the future in some sort of terrorist… counter-terrorism, anti-terrorist operation. Of course there are questions of political will and differences of threat perception. But assuming that we could sort that part of the equation out, of course the NATO Response Force could be an interesting and important tool in the future. Also in terms of capabilities, NATO has developed the CBRN Unit or Battalion under Czech leadership, which I think is a very important development, and has already been leaned on and relied on pretty heavily for various things, even like the Olympics taking place down in Athens. And lastly of course, the training of Iraqis -- not a robust military operation, but at least NATO's playing a role there, slowly but surely, in helping the Iraqis develop their own robust military capabilities in terms of troops who can protect Iraqi citizens. But the challenges are many in this area, and it's no secret to many of us in this room. Of course we know that there are a number of European militaries throughout Europe who are still not configured to operate well outside of NATO's traditional sphere of influence, and this is a challenge. It essentially means that many NATO member states lack expeditionary forces. We heard a stat earlier the… this morning, I think in the first panel with our French colleague: NATO members collectively, or European countries collectively, have… the estimates range from 1.7 to 1.9 million troops, and a very small percentage of those are actually able to be deployed. Five to ten percent are… are the estimates. There are interoperability issues still that remain, although the… this issue has been improved upon significantly in… in recent years. But by and large, I would say that the gap between ambitions and capabilities, at least from a military… military perspective, is still fairly significant. And of course fundamentally we have big differences of opinion on how those military capabilities will be used. So how do we move forward in developing better capabilities for these kinds of operations in the future? First of all, I think those European countries that are struggling to develop these capabilities have to continue to find ways to spend the resources they allocate towards defence more wisely. And there are a lot of formulas for doing this. Many innovative things are being tried throughout Europe. I think pooling is a very interesting option that's been looked at by several countries and is being instigated in things like the Spanish… Spanish-Italian Amphibious Force. We've got the Dutch-Belgian Naval Joint Headquarters. There are an array of… of examples in this regard, whether you're talking about standing capabilities, fighter aircraft, infrastructure, headquarters, etcetera. Of course some countries can pursue niche capabilities. We have had some countries like the Czechs, like the Norwegians, the Danes to a certain extent, consider the possibility of specialization, and this frees up resources obviously, and eliminates a great deal of waste and duplication that still exists across the continent. Multinational procurement arrangements is another option. It's not perfect. It requires additional coordination, I think, but with some focus and some leadership, perhaps by NATO itself on this issue, I think that could be another positive step forward. Of course countries need to deliver on their broad capabilities commitments, again, in areas like air-to-air refuelling or C4ISR in particular. And I think ACT, the Allied Command Transformation over in Norfolk, should be leveraged by NATO to be the European centre of gravity on transformation. You can go to any country throughout Europe, you can go to Canada, the United States, and hear a lot of talk about transformation. But countries aren't necessarily talking to each other about what their plans are and how they're going to actually move forward on the question of transformation, which means we're still going to have gaps further down the road between the actual ambition and the capabilities, or perhaps between what the Alliance actually needs and the capabilities that we're developing. The NATO Common Fund for Operations was an idea that has been mentioned here a couple of times, and I think it's an important one. As many of you know, NATO nations who stepped forward initially during force generation processes actually pay if they play. And I think we have to develop better incentives for countries to come forward and offer military capabilities when the time comes and when we're about to enter some sort of crisis where those capabilities are needed. Of course the NATO-EU relationship needs a lot of love and affection. We've seen some significant strides forward, particularly in the last three years with Berlin Plus and other initiatives to get the two organizations to start talking to each other as much as possible. I think Darfour has been a positive step in the right direction. But there still is a great deal of mistrust between these two organizations, and a lot of work needs to be done, for example, in deconflicting the commitments that are made to the battle groups and to the NATO Response Force. We need some sort of mechanism there to make sure that countries aren't simultaneously committing troops to both forces… multinational forces. Lastly, for all these military capabilities I'm talking about we need a strategic framework. There have been calls for NATO to actually revisit the strategic concept. I understand how politically charged that is. And now NATO's, per its instructions via Istanbul, is trying to outline its comprehensive strategic guidance. I think this will be a perfect next step in bringing NATO up to speed in terms of its response to twenty-first century challenges. And I think the EU should take its European security strategy and also try and see if that strategy could be operationalized and fleshed out in greater detail. We're still hearing a lot of questions about broadly we may know where we want to go and we know kind of what capabilities we might have, but a lot of countries are asking themselves still exactly how will the EU battle groups be used versus the NATO Response Force. A lot of questions out there. So that's all in the military side of things. I do want to jump quickly just to the traditional kind of cops-and-robbers counter-terrorism efforts that are being undertaken by the Alliance. NATO is fairly new to the game here as well, and I'm not certainly as well qualified as you are to talk about some of the initiatives underway. But I will mention that NATO has provided intelligence on maritime threats. They've launched various escort operations to get navy ships through the Strait of Gibraltar. NATO nations have also strengthened their special forces. It's very important counter-terrorism capability. And under the actual umbrella of NATO, we're seeing more and more NATO member states working to develop capabilities that can be used, counter-terrorism capabilities. For example, Spain has recently tried to move forward on developing a laser that can actually detect explosive residue from a safe range, and that will obviously be an important component of NATO's toolbox when it comes to traditional counter-terrorism measures. But of course it's not fair to really talk about this side of counter-terrorism, this more homeland security side, without mentioning the EU, which has really, in my eyes, been on the cutting edge of working very closely with the United States in a number of areas, whether it's border and transport security. We've done tremendous work together on civil protection, terrorist financing, law enforcement. It's been really remarkable. And I think too little of it actually has been covered by the press. The headlines remain in many papers that we hate each other, when in fact we're doing some tremendous work together as transatlantic partners under the umbrella of EU-US counter-terrorism cooperation. But again, like in the military area, there are a lot of challenges. And again, some of them have been mentioned here earlier today. I think the inclination and the urge for a lot of countries is essentially to work bilaterally, especially when it comes to intelligence sharing. NATO does not have its own intelligence apparatus, and so it is very much limited on the intelligence sharing front by political will, by differences in threat perception, a certain level of mistrust that exists out there, depending on who you talk to. And of course, as Martha pointed out, counter-terrorism means different things to different people. There are certainly countries that look at it strictly, more from a criminal, law enforcement perspective; others, like the United States, that look at it also to include a military component. And we have to settle these differences and have as much dialogue and exchange about those differences to move this agenda forward. There are also legislative challenges as we try and move together as partners. Some countries have very weak terrorism laws. Others have very unique and innovative models that might work in one country but certainly not in another. If you look at France… the… the French Chief, Bruguière the Anti-Terrorism Magistrate, very innovative, different model of having someone serve both as a judge and a prosecutor, something that certainly couldn't be created in the United States. But that makes it difficult for us to pair up the people when we're trying to work together as partners on the counter-terrorism challenge. So like the military, even on counter-terrorism we do have a gap between I think our ambition and our capabilities that will require much more coordination in the future. And so some of the ideas… I think NATO should try and focus on helping countries, member states, develop capabilities in this area, might want to think about additional work in the area of border guard training. I think NATO can work very closely with the EU as well when it comes to capitalizing on the paramilitary forces that exist inside a number of European countries. As the European union develops its European Gendarmerie force, perhaps Helga's right that this could be a component of a Berlin Plus in reverse. I… I like that idea, and like to see more work on that. Of course when it comes to counter-terrorism we also need more specialists, both nationally and inside NATO and other international institutions that have a cultural understanding of the Muslim community. We need folks with language skills and networks of people that they can connect to. We do not have the expertise that we need, I feel, right now in looking at the Middle East. And this is kind of a gaping hole, particularly I think in the United States in some ways. Lastly, I don't want to take too much more time, but again, I just want to tip my hat towards the root causes side of things. Of course when you talk about the roots of radicalization, you can look at it through two prisms. You can look at getting at the roots of radicalization far away, places like Southeast Asia, or looking at Pakistan. But we can also look at the roots of radicalization inside our own societies. And I think both of those will continue to be very important in the years ahead. NATO hasn't per se done anything, quote-unquote, in the root causes area, although in a roundabout way it does contribute. Its stabilization and reconstruction efforts of course try to move societies away from becoming a failed state, which then become a breeding ground oftentimes for terrorist activity. And in its dialogue, NATO's dialogue with Mediterranean partners, country… Magreb countries, I think that's an important component, as long as we can get some of that dialogue to move beyond just the nuts and bolts of military cooperation or training or those types of things that continue to bring these people, folks from outside the NATO area, into the fold. And in terms of what we're doing outside of NATO, there is some good work being done, both by European countries, either individually or in tandem with the United States and other countries, on the ground in these countries. We are using development assistance more and more as a national security instrument. We're looking at demographics in the Middle East together. We're working on the ground in programs like media training, women's empowerment, literacy. We're talking about democratization. All of these things are very important. But the reality is that far too little is actually being done in terms of getting at the roots of radicalization, especially when we're looking at radicalization inside our own societies. We need here many long-term initiatives. We obviously have to do what we can to try and halt recruitment in places like London or Paris or Madrid or elsewhere. Whether that's training Imams, building national mosques, I'm not sure. There doesn't seem to be a magic bullet. And each individual country faces its own challenges. But whatever we can do in the years, weeks, months ahead to also integrate our Muslim minorities into our societies will remain, in my eyes, a major component of any strategy to combat terrorism. So just to close, President Bush, as I understand it, has asked for a report card in terms of how are we doing in the war on terrorism. And I feel like it's much too early. In my mind, I feel like it's the first week of school, and we can't possibly be ready for report cards. We're still very much understanding this threat. We're trying to identify the tools that we'll… we will need in the years ahead to combat this threat, and exactly… identify exactly how we will use them. But if I had to pass out grades, I guess on the military side, if I have to give NATO a grade, making some progress there in developing new capabilities that could be used for terrorist operations or anti-terrorist operations or other operations -- stabilization, reconstruction. Maybe a B, B minus. If I have to give NATO a grade on the traditional counter-terrorism area, they're a little bit higher, B plus, A minus, again making some significant strides. If I had to give all of us as partners how we're doing on the root causes side, the last category, I'd give us F for failing. I think we've got a lot of work to do, and I would encourage all of us, whether we're academics or policy makers, to take this into consideration in crafting any future counter-terrorism strategy. Thank you. BILLINGSLEA: Thank you, Julianne. You've heard quite a few thoughts here. It is very valuable to us, from a NATO standpoint, to have this discussion with you. After moments such as the London attacks, there always of course is a time for commiseration and mourning, and also a time for introspection, where policy makers start asking themselves the question, 'What more can we do? What more could have been done? What more must be done in the future?' Obviously it is clear that London is just one in a string of attacks that have been ongoing for some sustained period of time now. And while the advent of terrorism is not a new thing, as Martha has pointed out, the nature of the threat, the structure of the network that al-Qaeda created, the capacity of the organization to plan and conduct such a sophisticated attack, the damage done not only on September eleventh but the subsequent scale of damage inflicted by the terrorists, is something that is both quantitatively and qualitatively new. And what is emerging, and one of the things of course that concerns us all, is that this is all, as of today, still, with a few exceptions such as the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack in '95, being done with conventional explosives. And clearly the terrorists have come close to mastering the art of that. What we worry about is the mastery of the chemical or the biological, the radiological attack, or -- perish the thought -- the nuclear attack. So these are things that very much concern us. Now, we can talk about what NATO's doing in the operational field. It sounds to me like you all have heard some about that in terms of the… the… the specific Article 5 counter-terrorist… the shipping escort operations that are ongoing today in the Mediterranean, where actually there have been several seizures of explosives and… and weapons trans-shipment, as well as the interdiction of people. You've heard about the… the growing role in Afghanistan, where ISAF is now responsible for the Karzai government in helping with close to half the country, and is expanding with additional provincial reconstruction teams into the less stable parts of that country, stable being a fairly loose term, as well as the military advisor mission in Iraq, where that… that training program for the Iraqis is ongoing. And I suppose I would add to that the mission in Darfour. Insofar as we worry about failed states becoming havens for terrorists, what is happening in the Sudan ought to concern us all from that standpoint. I think you've also talked a little bit about what NATO is doing on the internal side of the house, in terms of assisting on the capability development of various countries. Quite a lot of intelligence sharing happening, but not political intelligence. This is sort of a more hands-on military type of intelligence that is being shared. I think the thing to do now, because we do have some time, is to open the floor up to questions, if that makes sense, from the audience, so that our panelists or whomever can talk at greater length about anything that you in the audience would like to focus on. So who's got a question about what particular aspect of this… of this very difficult and challenging topic? Yes, please. UNIDENTIFIED: Yes, I'd just like to ask your opinion on the situation that we're current… that's currently developing in Afghanistan, where it's quite clear that Pakistan can turn the tap on and off at will, and that effectively nothing is being done about the scores or hundreds of madressas that are along the Pakistan-Afghan border and which are providing numerous recruits -- young, apparently well resourced, in terms of wearing new hiking boots and the quality of the weapons they're carrying, which can cross a very porous border. And also that source of connections to the Gulf, where obviously funding of these sorts of madressas which are peddling a fairly… a very worrying philosophy, and taking very poor, ill-educated young people who've got no future, and the whole breakdown indeed of the educational system in… in Pakistan is one case in point, and the poverty. There's a lot of interrelated factors here, so that sort of dealing with the situation in Afghanistan isn't as much help when you've got that sort of situation going on at one border, and there may be other examples that one could point to. BILLINGSLEA: Well, it… it is a good question. It… it… it goes well beyond my… either my remit or my competency to answer that question. I don't even know… I don't even… if I were so inclined, I don't know if I could come up with a complete answer to that. If you were to not focus on geopolitical boundaries, and instead to use a variety of other kinds of maps with which to look at the world -- demographic maps, maps that chart out for you relative degrees of poverty, maps that chart out for you the ethnic and the religious balances in communities -- it would seem to me that you might begin to get a better way of looking at the world in terms of… of considering places where you would want to focus your counter-terrorism efforts. You are absolutely right the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is… is not a… is in fact a complicating factor for what… what needs to be done. The role of NATO in working with Pakistan, and working in particular with… on the madressa problem, is very limited. And this gets back to some of the comments you've heard here about the need to address the root causes of terrorism, the need for public diplomacy strategies. There may be a role for NATO in this. In fact, NATO may be uniquely positioned to do certain things that individual countries could not themselves do. But I must say that… that, within the NATO context, our ability to… to deal with the educational foment that is happening in a number of these places is… is quite limited. And… and I think that that is again the province of individual countries working in a bilateral way. But it may in fact be an area where closer cooperation between governments and non-governmental organizations is crucial, and where maybe concerted public diplomacy campaigns might have some… some effect. You mentioned the upgrading in weapons. You mentioned the… the surge in recruitment. I would add to that -- and I heard all of you talking about it before I got in here -- the fact that the drug trade is in fact fuelling, from a financial standpoint, quite a lot of this. So I think we also need to consider the… the heroin revenues coming out of Afghanistan. But we have two panelists that touched on different parts of the exact problem. Certainly on the deeper philosophical questions, Martha, you were speaking on that. CRENSHAW: Well, I think… I don't think it's too philosophical; I think it's the old problem of Pakistan wanting to dominate what's going on in Afghanistan. It's been true for a long time. The US, I think, failed to see before al-Qaeda, before 9/11, what a problem this was going to cause in the long run. And so I think we're back in the same dilemma. What… what sort of influence does anybody have over Pakistan, especially now, because again, like before, their assistance is thought of as vital to what's going on in the region. And I think this poses a problem for NATO, because I think that Marshall has actually, in a very diplomatic way, put his finger on it, which is that NATO is in a situation where it doesn't have control over the surrounding actors in the region, and not much influence either, because control is very difficult to achieve. The US has some influence in Pakistan, but will the US try to use it cut off the support? We didn't before, when support came from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for these types of… of activists. And we ought to be more sensitized to it now. But how do you find the means to deal with it? Because it really is a regional problem. You know, one thing, as long as we're in that region, we haven't even talked about Kashmir, and that whole dilemma, and the fact that Pakistan and India are nuclear armed states. And if terrorist groups or individuals affiliated with them are going to get hold of nuclear weapons, which is probably the most… the rare of the types of the weapons that could get in the CRBN category, that would be a very likely spot. So it's an enormously dangerous region in which NATO has undertaken a commitment. And at least the organization needs to be aware of the… of the risks in… in that environment. SMITH: I would just quickly add that, as part of a project that we run at CSIS called the Transatlantic Dialogue on Terrorism, we recently convened a group of European and American experts to look at the question of madressas: what's been tried? How threatening is the problem? And there was quite a bit of consensus in the room, and actually there have been a couple of pieces on this lately. I… I know The New York Times had a piece on this not so long ago, that the large majority of them of course are fairly benign. But of course you want to get at the heart of those that are not. But the challenges are many. I mean, we heard from Europeans and Americans what's been tried to counter the influence of the madressas, but also things like radical Muslim NGOs who operate in places like Pakistan or Southeast Asia. And everyone essentially came to the table empty handed. I mean, we had those who walked in and said well, what we're trying to do is funnel money to… to the government to try and see if they can build an alternative, which hasn't worked because it's just being dumped into a giant black hole. We've tried to set up alternatives, but if they're perceived as being western they get the kiss of death, and then no one wants to come anywhere near them. We've tried to work with local Muslim organizations on the ground to see if they can build some sort of viable alternative, both again to the madressas and radical Muslim NGOs. And it… it was so frustrating to hear just how ineffective many of these efforts, and how much money actually has gone into -- not enough, but a great deal of money has gone into trying to counter this… this trend. And I don't think we've quite found a magic bullet yet, unfortunately, and it's worrying. The only good news, as I said is that I don't think it's as grave as we originally… I know Washington was kind of… it was a very hot topic years ago, I think right after September… what are we going to do with the madressas? You know, lots of conferences around town. Now people… what you… the latest thing is the Internet. You know, how could we possibly ever counter the influence and the role that it plays in radicalization? It's anonymous essentially. You can certainly monitor it. You can't stop its flow by any means. So that seems to be the latest challenge that you're hearing more of in… inside Washington. BILLINGSLEA: Interestingly enough, I was going to suggest that one of the most important things that can be done in these small schoolhouses may well be the provision of the Internet. You need to find a way to break the control, the information flow control, that the extremists maintain in some of these schoolhouses, though you point out that… be careful what you wish for… SMITH: Double-edged sword. BILLINGSLEA: …because that cuts both ways. We had a question in the far back, then we'll come to the front here, then here, and then to Jamie. Far back, please. UNIDENTIFIED: Well, again, a lot of talk about terrorism today. And Martha, I think this is essentially a question for you. There are a lot of trends in terrorism, it's true, and a lot of things that trigger it, and a lot of blame for the United States for creating the… the Taliban, whatever. Well, I would blame us more for having created the environment, because we… we abdicated our responsibility. We said oh, we want to fight the Soviets. We… we allowed the Saudis, we allowed the Pakistanis, to take the money, pick the people, and we just provided whatever was needed. We were their… we were really a convenient, you know, dump. But my question is this: that there have been… there are several things, I think, which have encouraged terrorism, and I don't think the United States ever stopped looking at terrorism. I think the problem is the administrations, different administrations, found it just wasn't an idea they wanted to deal with. And that's a political decision. So you can have the best information or intelligence in the world -- read Richard Clark's book. You may not like Richard Clark, but his… the… what he's talking about is spot on in the sense here we're presenting you with a threat. It may be the only threat I care about, and it's my threat, but it is a threat. And the administration came back and said well, you know… we'll… when we decide it's a threat then we'll deal with it. They just… the administrations plural, Democrat and Republican, have done that all around. The eighties, terrorism was the number one issue. Hostages in Lebanon -- and that gets me to my next… the question I have is what is it that sparks this. Because what I want to ask you is, not in terms of so much of the region, but the… the actions that American and NATO governments have taken, for example, not just what happened in Afghanistan, getting us out of the Middle East, it's the marine barracks bombing in Lebanon and the great example which is still talked about. And it's governments, quite frankly, like the French, who for years paid terrorist groups off. Now, a lot of this is done for financial reasons, for blackmail. How do you get at that? BILLINGSLEA: Let's collect a couple and then just try to handle them all. And I'm sorry, if you could also announce your name and… and who you're with. Most of… behind you first. Most of the folks know each other, but I'm new to this so I don't know all the faces yet. Please (inaudible). CHANTAL DE JONGE OUDRAAT (Vice-President, Women in International Security): I'm Chantal de Jonge Oudraat. I'm Vice-President of WIIS. And you started off this panel by saying you should actually not be here because you're not part of the WIIS family. Consider you part of the WIIS family now. We have many male members. BILLINGSLEA: There we go. DE JONGE OUDRAAT: And… BILLINGSLEA: I've been inducted. DE JOINGE OUDRAAT: …welcome lots of male members. My question is to Julianne about… she talks a lot about military capabilities, and you talked about the NRF. But could you give me an example where we would use the NRF now in a counter-terrorism operation? I don't see that. And I think this ties in with the question that follows on that, and that is, you know, what is the development of a terrorist threat. And I don't think it is staged or Taliban-like structures, but on the contrary, it's more decentralized and nodes within our own societies. And then I see the military option as really not being any option at all. UNIDENTIFIED: (Inaudible) CLAIRE SHORT (ph) (British Member of Parliament): My name is Claire Short. I'm a Member of Parliament from the UK. Because of the bombs on the street of London, in my mind, I make all the comparisons with Northern Ireland, which now seems a tame and little problem, but it didn't at the time. And I would say the UK's response, and compared with this problem, you know, a part of the UK itself and a highly developed country and a small piece of territory, it seems a very small problem. But was repressive legislation, emergency powers, arresting people without… It's gone off. Arresting people without trial, a lot of harassment of young people of Irish origin travelling to and from… from the UK to Northern Ireland or to Ireland itself, interestingly lots of complaints about money coming in from the US to help -- I mean, just it's interesting historically -- to help those who would engage in the use of force. And I think the (inaudible). And this went on in its recent phase for 30-odd years, and we're almost at the end of it now. That that repressive phase acted as a recruiting side to… for membership of the IRA, particularly emergency powers and arrest without trial. And then we moved on to of course having to retain a security component, but very much going for justice, outlawing discrimination in Northern Ireland in jobs, in allocation of housing, in recognition of the community of Irish origin and its language and so on and so forth. And I think that prepared the ground for the political settlement. So I… my view of the radical causes is that you have to look for justice and respect. And if you look at young Muslims -- I've got a very substantial Muslim population in my constituency -- they're very, very angry, as are many British people, about a sense of deep, deep injustice in the Middle East, the Palestinians, what's happened in Iraq. And I don't think there's a security response -- obviously there has to be one, and there will be an attempt at containment. But I don't think there's a response only on the security side without a political component that's looking for a more just political settlement in the Middle East. And I… I feel that's not coming in the short term, and therefore we're in the negative phase like we were in relation to Northern Ireland, of trying repression and oppressive laws. And we'll get failure, and then we'll look more intelligently politically. And it kind of breaks my heart because I think it's going to take time, when a commitment to justice in the Middle East would peel off all but the most extreme elements, and then we'd have some hope of really moving forward. Dr. JAMIE SHEA (DASG, Public Diplomacy Division): Is it… this… this is working? BILLINGSLEY: Are you a member of Women in International Security too? Is that…? Dr. JAMIE SHEA: Well, having appeared before you today, I… I jolly well hope so. BILLINGSLEA: All right. UNIDENTIFIED: No, two… two questions, one practical, one more philosophical. The practical question is that the… the attacks in London last week, like the attacks in Madrid, occurred against a public transport system. The United States since September the eleventh has invested massively in airport security and against hijackings. But after Madrid and London, is there likely to be, with Homeland Security, a refocusing on the US public transport system as being particularly vulnerable? The philosophical question is Tom Friedman is always pointing out, and I think rightly, that this battle will only be won when Muslims… moderate Muslims condemn terrorist tactics of radical Muslims, although I'm not pretending that there's any link between religion and terrorism, or that terrorism is only Muslim. Of course not. But we're nonetheless in this paradigm. So from a US perspective, it's all very well obviously for the… the President and US public diplomacy clearly to condemn terrorism, to condemn violence. But… but Martha, from… from your perspective in the US, is… is the administration having some success at getting Muslims, both in the US, worldwide, America's allies in the region, not just to obviously lament attacks when they occur and do nothing thereafter, but to run a systematic campaign of… of… of trying to obviously fight this type of extremism on behalf of the more moderate… moderate message of Islam? CRENSHAW: Well, I'll try to be just very brief and maybe link some of these questions together, because a couple of them do refer to the… the US role. And I think Judith Yaphe's question had to do with why… part why terrorism before 9/11 was not at the top of any president's agenda, or if it was, why nothing happened. And that relates of course to Jamie's question: Will something be done now about rail transport and things other than airport security? And a lot of experts are not convinced that the rather elaborate and cumbersome measures that we have for air security are actually effective in producing security for the public, that they may be more of a… a panacea. And I think there's a certain question as to whether that kind of panacea type response is… does more harm than good in leading people to think that they're safer. Along those lines, there were many police on the streets in London after the bombings, which reassures the public; it doesn't stop another bombing, unfortunately. But it's reassuring. So whether that's a good thing or a bad thing… US presidents didn't like to touch terrorism before 9/11 because it was a no-win issue. There's no easy answer. We all… we know that now. We know it full well. These measures that we're talking about are very hard to pull off. And most American presidents didn't want to commit their prestige to counter-terrorism policy. Plus, counter-terrorism policy was always very messy. It involves intelligence types of issues; it involves all kinds of things that for example the US Congress found objectionable. They didn't… they… they just didn't want to deal with it. And then bureaucracies were slow and sluggish and poorly coordinated. This relates to both the public diplomacy initiative that the US says it's going to undertake as well as providing better transport security. Attacks on public transportation are the hallmark of terrorism. They always have been. Many… as I've said, many attacks in London, in Paris, remember in the eighties and in the nineties. This is just a favourite target, and has been since terrorism became an issue in Europe, which would be the late nineteenth century. The precursors of the IRA were bombing trains and subways back in the 1860s and 1870s. So… and why haven't we done anything earlier? It's costly economically, and it's disruptive to the public. And transportation industries, when they're private, don't want to undertake the costs, by and large. That was another obstacle to fewer security measures before 9/11. It costs a lot of money. Whether you're talking about military, police, private industry, it's… it's very, very costly financially and in terms often of privacy and civil liberties. So whether or not the US will undertake more stringent measures in terms of ordinary public transportation, I don't know. I… our vulnerabilities are so many and so vast, and it doesn't take very many of them, and it's easy, as we mentioned earlier today. I really don't know how much you could do in the field of protecting. There… there are certain obvious things, but by and large it's… it's really very difficult. As far as better public diplomacy, the US is… is… Karen Hughes apparently is going to go from the White House to the State Department and take this over. Whether she'll be more effective than any of her predecessors I don't know. I think in the US we probably don't have enough specialists in the Muslim world -- we all know that -- to really create the kinds of levels of understanding and trust that really would do a good job. As far as internally within the US, I… I noted that in the London press immediately after the bombings there were groups of Muslim leaders, and Muslim-Christian-Jewish leadership conferences that immediately got together and said we want to prevent any kind of outburst against the Muslim community. They issued joint statements. But often when something happens there's not a prominent role by either Muslims within our society or the governments of the majority of Muslim countries. And I think that would be… that would… I think Friedman is right that it would be important to encourage that. But just remember that, in terms of the kinds of overall conditions that might be the causes for terrorism -- lack of a settlement in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, various other conflicts, sources of… of these perceptions -- there are millions if not billions of people who are upset, even… even angry, who feel the kinds of emotions of… of acute… acute resentment, and a very, very, very small number turn to violence. The number of people who are actively involved in terrorism is infinitesimal compared to the number of people who suffer from the conditions that we think might be the root causes of terrorism. So you really can't… you need to pursue a policy that would, I think, try to do these things, which are good in and of themselves: promoting democracy, greater understanding, moderate Islam. But there's going to be no substitute for actual police work. But it has to be very discriminating police work. To get back to Claire Short's latest point, when the British responded to the re-emergence of the IRA in the early 1970s, when they interned everybody they had on their old lists of IRA members, the… the vast majority of them had nothing to do with it. All they did was create a ground for recruitment, indoctrination and training. It was better than the madressas because people couldn't leave. They were in prison. So it has to be a very discriminating police response in conjunction with measures to… to create the kind of trust and confidence that will improve the… in effect the atmosphere that terrorism thrives on. SMITH: Just quickly, I thank Chantal for asking the $64,000 question. I don't know if I have the perfect answer. When you ask that question around Europe or in the United States, of course you get different answers. There are people who could roll back time and say had the NRF been operational, fully operational, and had we all been on the same page, and the political will was just right, and if threat perception was just right, maybe in Afghanistan we would have seen some sort of NATO operation up front. But that's behind us. And so in terms of what's on the horizon, again, I guess it depends on how you define it. Some people would say well, any future stabilization or reconstruction or peace keeping effort would be a part of a broader counter-terrorism operation. Others… you know, there are certainly those I've heard say well, we don't know what's on the horizon. Is a country going to implode and become another safe haven for terrorists? Are we going to see something in Africa or Pakistan, you know, 15, 20 years out? And so we don't know. I mean, there are lots of scenarios, I know, that are being run behind closed doors, asking that question. But ultimately we can build the capability. We're almost done building the capability. But at the heart of it is I think what you're trying to touch on in part is this question of once we have it, will we ever reach a consensus on how to actually deploy it, assuming it has all the perfect combination of parts that we need. BILLINGSLEA: (Inaudible)… offer just a couple of final… final thoughts, and then I think maybe we could wrap it up. I don't know if you have another panel yet today or if we're the last, but I would… Maybe on the NRF, I would add… I would offer one… one further thought, which is that I, even in the short period of time I've been at NATO, about a year and a half, I have seen a systematic and deepening expansion in what the Alliance is doing to counter terrorism. The technology program that Françoise Perret here leads in fact was launched within a week of the Madrid attacks. So the Alliance very much is reacting in… in many cases to events, and in many cases is… is seeking to prevent further actions from happening by taking the initiative. We've seen an expansion in its operational posture. The number of operations being conducted, the number of troops in the field, and the number of territory for which the Alliance is responsible has done nothing but go up. I would anticipate -- and we've already had this debate over the role of the NRF -- I would anticipate for… for sure seeing the NRF used as a technological experimentation process by which militaries will learn how to cooperate with each other in a multinational context, but with specific motives in mind. For instance, there is a special operations component of the NRF, and there will be an enormous amount of work done for those soft teams to see what works and what doesn't work in a multinational context. Because increasingly those guys are finding themselves thrown into the field together, perhaps in a way that they really never were before. The question of whether the NRF itself, or pieces of the NRF, are deployed in a… in a CT operation is a political question. It hasn't been answered. In fact, it hasn't been answered over whether the NRF will have any operational role. There are those who feel strongly it should, and others who feel strongly that it should not. I, for my own part, could very much imagine situations in which parts of the NRF might in fact play a role. There was a lot of discussion over deploying aspects of… of the NATO Response Force to Afghanistan prior to the presidential elections. For… for our part, obviously pieces of the kinds of forces that are assigned to the NRF were deployed to help with the Olympics. For instance, by this I mean, the… the AWACS fleet. I also mean the CBRN battalion that was referenced, and maybe some other parts of it as well. So I… I think that's quite possible. The last thought maybe to end on is exactly what… what Claire mentioned, which is… is that we don't… unfortunately we don't lack for historical examples from which we ought to be learning. And the… the experience with the IRA is one. I would also say the British experience in Malaysia, by the way which is what the PRTs are modelled on, is another. The French experience in Algeria, and the Israeli-Palestinian experience are all… have all important lessons to be learned. And among the lessons to be learned, and you mentioned several, the final one that I would add is that yes, while it is true that some actions run the risk of radicalizing or making more militant local populations, there are other actions that need to be taken that reduce that. Because the key in all of this is that… is for the local populations and the opinion leaders to step forward not after the fact, not after an attack has occurred, to condemn it, but to condemn the culture of violence that leads to an attack happening in the first place. And so in that respect, I think Tom Friedman is exactly right. And the question is how… what can we do to encourage that, recognizing that the communities in question really have to take the initiative themselves. So unless there's anything else, maybe I'll wrap this panel up. And thank you very much for inviting us to participate.