U.S. Ties Europe’s Safety to Afghanistan

By THOM SHANKER and NICHOLAS KULISH

MUNICH — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued a stark warning on Sunday to Europeans, saying that their safety from terrorist attack by Islamic extremists was directly linked to NATO’s success in stabilizing Afghanistan.

After weeks of calling on NATO governments to send more combat troops and trainers to Afghanistan, Mr. Gates made his case directly to Europe’s inhabitants in a keynote address to an international security conference here. Mr. Gates summoned the memory of Sept. 11, 2001, to say that Europe was at risk of becoming victim to attacks of the same enormity.

“I am concerned that many people on this continent may not comprehend the magnitude of the direct threat to European security,” Mr. Gates said. “For the United States, Sept. 11 was a galvanizing event, one that opened the American public’s eyes to dangers from distant lands.”

In a hall filled with government officials, lawmakers and policy analysts from around the world, Mr. Gates added: “So now I would like to add my voice to those of many allied leaders on the Continent and speak directly to the people of Europe. The threat posed by violent Islamic extremism is real, and it is not going to go away.”

Mr. Gates listed terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Paris and Glasgow and said other terrorist plots, some complex, had been disrupted before they could be carried out in Belgium, Germany and Denmark and in airliners over the Atlantic.

“Just in the last few weeks, Spanish authorities arrested 14 Islamic extremists in Barcelona suspected of planning suicide attacks against public transport systems in Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Britain,” he said.

“I am not indulging in scare tactics,” Mr. Gates stated. “Nor am I exaggerating either the threat or inflating the consequences of a victory for the extremists. Nor am I saying that the extremists are 10 feet tall.”

He said the task facing Europe, the United States and allies around the world “is to fracture and destroy this movement in its infancy — to permanently reduce its ability to strike globally and catastrophically, while deflating its ideology.”

The “best opportunity as an alliance to do this,” he said, “is in Afghanistan.”

August Hanning, the state secretary at the German Interior Ministry and an outspoken voice in the German government on the threat of terrorism, welcomed Mr. Gates’s address because it “made clear the connection between domestic security in Germany and the deployment in Afghanistan.” He said that Al Qaeda and associated groups in the Afghan-Pakistani border region continued to “strengthen their operational capabilities in order to carry forward attacks.”

In his speech, Mr. Gates said that while many NATO governments “appreciate the importance of the Afghan mission, European public support for it is weak.

Many Europeans question the relevance of our actions and doubt whether the mission is worth the lives of their sons and daughters.”

But they “forget at our peril that the ambition of Islamic extremists is limited only by opportunity,” he added.

Mr. Gates said some terrorist cells in Europe are financed and receive inspiration from abroad. “Many who have been arrested have had direct connections to Al Qaeda,” he said. “Some have met with top leaders or attended training camps abroad. Some are connected to Al Qaeda in Iraq.” He was referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the largely local insurgent group that American intelligence officials say is foreign-led.

He said the suspected Barcelona terrorist cell appears to have links with a terrorist network commanded by extremists in Pakistan thought to be affiliated with the Taliban, the former rulers of Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda. Those extremists are also accused by the authorities of being behind the assassination in December of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister.

Mr. Gates said that in Afghanistan “the really hard question the alliance faces is whether the whole of our effort is adding up to less than the sum of its parts.”

Concerning specific policy initiatives, Mr. Gates called for a common set of training standards for every soldier and civilian deploying into Afghanistan, and for the appointment of a high-level European official to serve as civilian administrator to coordinate international assistance.

Echoing the difficulties the United States faced in trying to suppress insurgents and terrorists in Iraq after the swift invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Mr. Gates said NATO must coordinate military operations and civilian reconstruction better and “put aside any theology that attempts clearly to divide civilian and military operations,” adding, “It is unrealistic.”

The Munich Conference on Security Policy was meeting here with the theme, “The World in Disarray — Shifting Powers, Lack of Strategies.”

In contrast to the contentious tone struck last year by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the Russian representative to the conference this year, First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei B. Ivanov, made his nation’s recent record of economic success the focus of his largely positive address, pointing out that Russia’s economy had grown by 80 percent in the last nine years.

He highlighted cooperation between the United States and Russia, including in fighting nuclear terrorism. But, he added, “some states strive to exploit antiterrorist activities as a pretext to achieving their own geopolitical and economic goals,” and had what he called “a double-standard attitude toward Russia.”

During a lively question-and-answer period after the speech by Mr. Gates, Alexey Ostrovskiy, a member of the Russian Parliament, challenged the United States record in arming anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan — many of whom became Islamic extremists and members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Mr. Gates responded that “If we bear a particular responsibility for the role of the mujahedeen and Al Qaeda growing up in Afghanistan, it has more to do with our abandonment of the country in 1989 than our assistance of it in 1979.”