NATO chief says alliance threats lie outside Europe

BRUSSELS, July 7 -- NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Tuesday that threats facing the alliance lie outside Europe and that there should no longer be a distinction between security at home or abroad.

"The threats to our security today lie mainly outside Europe, notably from extremism in places like Afghanistan and elsewhere," de Hoop Scheffer told a forum dedicated to a debate on NATO's new Strategic Concept, which serves as a guideline for all of the alliance's actions.

"I hope the new Strategic Concept will finally lay to rest the notion that there is any distinction between security at home and security abroad," the NATO chief said. "Globalization has abolished the protection that borders or geographical isolation from crisis areas used to provide."

He said Article 5 of the alliance's founding treaty, which provides for the collective defense of NATO allies, can "apply outside NATO territory as much as inside."

"Today the challenge is not to defend our territory but our populations. And they, unlike our territory, move around," he said.

De Hoop Scheffer said the new Strategic Concept should also reassure NATO's new allies that the alliance takes its Article 5 collective defense commitment seriously.

"NATO cannot function in the long run with two types of membership: those who feel secure and willing to transform and those who feel less secure and are less willing," he said.

Allies that feel secure at home are much more likely to transform their forces for expeditionary operations and send them to Afghanistan or elsewhere, he said.

De Hoop Scheffer said collective defense is the bedrock of the alliance.

"We should not feel bashful in discussing it in the alliance. It is purely defensive," he said.

Article 5, a powerful deterrent in the Cold War era, had not been invoked until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

At a summit in April, NATO heads of state and government tasked the alliance to develop a new Strategic Concept. De Hoop Scheffer on Tuesday launched a one-day forum for public debate on the document.