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The bold statement quoted above from the then Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Lord Robertson of Port Ellen,1 places the organization at the very centre of the ongoing ‘war on terror’. Given his role as institutional cheerleader and trailblazer for NATO, such sentiments are unsurprising, if not wholly convincing when placed alongside NATO’s actual record in this area. At the end of the day, it was part of his job descrip tion to defend the utility and effectiveness of NATO. Elements of the secondary literature seem to have followed his example. Rather than start with a blank page, certain authors have adopted Lord Robertson’s controversial assertion as their starting point, taking NATO’s usefulness in the field of counter-terrorism as read and therefore devoting their time to proving NATO’s utility; occasionally resorting to tenuous defences and ill thought through propositions to substantiate their case. In fact, much of the existing literature demonstrates clearly what Sloan once presciently referred to as ‘the NATO bias’.2 This tendency can be seen in a number of different areas, which will be developed at greater length later in this article, such as the portrayal of both Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom as evidence of NATO’s centrality to the war on terror and the unnecessary repackaging of pre-existing NATO tasks through a counter-terrorist prism. For the moment, it will suffice to suggest two nascent trends to demonstrate ‘the NATO bias’. First, in a reversal of the Mitranian dictum that ‘form follows function’ in terms of the allocation and augmentation of competencies to international organizations,3 the assumption is made that NATO is the most effective organization available to take on many of the varied elements of a counter-terrorist strategy. Rather than assess, on a case by case basis, the relative strengths and weaknesses of alternative organizations with regard to the allocation of responsibilities, in areas as wide-ranging as intelligence exchange and civil contingency planning, an assumption is made that NATO