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:

Imagine, for a moment, if some or all of these attacks had come to pass. Imagine if Islamic terrorists had managed to strike your capitals on the same scale as they struck in New York. Imagine if they had laid their hands on weapons and materials with even greater destructive capability--weapons of the sort all too easily accessible in the world today. We forget at our peril that the ambition of Islamic extremists is limited only by opportunity. (emphasis in original)

Then Gates said something that deserves more attention. He explained:

We should also remember that terrorist cells in Europe are not purely homegrown or unconnected to events far away--or simply a matter of domestic law and order. Some are funded from abroad. Some hate all western democracies, not just the United States. Many who have been arrested have had direct connections to Al Qaeda. Some have met with top leaders or attended training camps abroad. Some are connected to Al Qaeda in Iraq. In the most recent case, the Barcelona cell appears to have ties to a terrorist training network run by Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistan-based extremist commander affiliated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda--who we believe was responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

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.