US now sees home-grown terrorism as biggest threat

WASHINGTON - Nine years after the Sep 11, 2001 terror attacks, the United States is looking at the terrorism issue differently, with experts saying that the biggest threat to the country comes not from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions, or from the Middle East, but from home-grown terrorists.

The 42-page analysis by the non-partisan National Security Preparedness Group, warns of the growing threat of home grown terrorism and the role played by US citizens and residents within Al Qaeda and allied organizations.

Headed by former Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton and former Repiblican New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, the panel describes an increasingly wide range of “US-based jihadist militants” who do not fit “any particular ethnic, economic, educational, or social profile.”

“A key shift in the past couple of years is the increasingly prominent role in planning and operations that US citizens and residents have played in the leadership of Al Qaeda and aligned groups,” said the report by the two experts, who also headed the 9/11 commission.

“In many ways, trying to catch home grown terrorists is more complicated - the suspect is no longer a poor kid from Pakistan who has come to the US to attack. Now he (or even she) could be an MBA from Connecticut or a college student from Minneapolis,” the panel said

The Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was a young American of Pakistani descent with an MBA, it noted.

The plot to bomb New York City subways last year, which was described as the worst plot levelled against the US since Sept. 11, would have killed dozens had Najibullah Zazi succeeded in mixing the chemicals and getting them on the trains.

Had the bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day succeeded, it might have killed hundreds. Those kinds of operations should be seen as the new normal, the report said.

“This level of threat is likely to persist for years to come,” it said noting, “Al-Qaida is believed to lack the capability to launch an attack sufficiently deadly in scope to reorient completely the country’s foreign policy, as the 9/11 attacks did.”

The report makes the case that part of the reason the group’s reach is diminished is because its core leadership is under siege.

Drone attacks in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan have gutted its midlevel operatives and sent Osama bin Laden, and his No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, underground.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)