[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 18]
[House]
[Page 24695]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          THREAT OF TERRORISM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Quigley) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. QUIGLEY. Eight years ago, the U.S. entered Afghanistan. Now 8 
years later, 791 American deaths and billions of dollars later, we must 
ask, what have we gained? Has our 8 years in Afghanistan made us safer? 
And will 8 more years make us safer still?
  As we speak, the administration is reviewing the best strategy to 
achieve one primary objective: To protect Americans from another 
terrorist attack. We agree on the objective. We differ on the strategy.
  As we move to define our strategy, the question we must continue to 
ask ourselves is: how do we keep Americans safe from a terrorist 
attack? Recent events suggest that we need to broaden our focus and 
think bigger than Afghanistan. After all, we are battling not simply 
against terrorists in Afghanistan but against terrorism, which we are 
learning has many fronts, extending from Afghanistan to Pakistan to 
Somalia, Yemen, Uzbekistan and even our own backyard.
  Over the past 2 weeks, five men have been arrested for plotting 
terror attacks in our country. One man lived in New York for more than 
a decade and was planning to detonate a bomb there on the anniversary 
of September 11.
  Thomas Friedman argued in his recent New York Times column that the 
most active front in this war against terrorism is ``not Afghanistan, 
but the `virtual Afghanistan,' the loose network of thousands of 
jihadist Web sites, mosques and prayer groups that recruit, inspire and 
train young Muslims to kill.''
  The young Jordanian who was recently arrested for attempting to blow 
up a building in Dallas was caught after declaring war on the U.S. on 
jihadist Web sites.
  We must broaden our focus. Jihadist networks are also gaining ground 
in unstable states such as Somalia and Yemen. Recently, a source at a 
U.S. defense agency stated, We know that south Asia is no longer al 
Qaeda's primary base. They are looking for a hideout in other parts of 
the world and continue to expand their organization.
  We must broaden our focus. Two weeks ago, a major Uzbek terrorist 
with links to the Taliban and al Qaeda was killed in south Pakistan. 
The man killed was the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a 
group whose goal was to set up an Islamist state there and ultimately 
throughout central Asia.
  We must broaden our focus because the jihad has no borders, and thus 
our security policy must have no borders. James Traub recently likened 
jihadism to Communism without Russia, explaining that ``its success or 
failure is measured in ideological rather than territorial terms.'' 
That is the threat we face, a threat based not on borders but on 
beliefs.
  Which brings us back to our initial question: how can we best keep 
Americans safe from an ideological and borderless threat? We have sunk 
billions of dollars into Afghanistan, but at some point we must 
prioritize our spending. The reality is we have limited resources, 
measured both in lives and tax dollars, and we must expend those 
resources carefully and pragmatically.
  ``The problems of this world are deeper, more involved, and more 
stubborn than many of us realize,'' said George Kennan, scholar and 
diplomat, in a 1949 speech to the Academy of Political Science. ``It is 
imperative,'' he continued ``that we economize with our limited 
resources and that we apply them where we feel that we will do the most 
good.''
  If pouring a large portion of our precious resources into Afghanistan 
will keep Americans safe from another terrorist attack, then it is an 
unquestionable investment we must make. But the reality that we are 
battling a worldwide network of jihadists might require us to step back 
and reassess our priorities.
  If we are ever to achieve our objective of keeping America safe, we 
must, as Mr. Kennan suggests, apply our limited resources where they 
will do the most good. Where that exactly is, we have yet to determine. 
But we must be careful of basing our strategy on borders, when the 
enemy we are fighting is borderless.

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