A long-overdue reassessment. “U.S. Is Expected to Look Beyond Al Qaeda,” from the Washington Post, .
The Bush administration has launched a high-level internal review of its efforts to battle international terrorism, aimed at moving away from a policy that has stressed efforts to capture and kill al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001, and toward what a senior official called a broader “strategy against violent extremism.”
The shift is meant to recognize the transformation of al Qaeda over the past three years into a far more amorphous, diffuse and difficult-to-target organization than the group that struck the United States in 2001. But critics say the policy review comes only after months of delay and lost opportunities while the administration left key counterterrorism jobs unfilled and argued internally over how best to confront the rapid spread of the pro-al Qaeda global Islamic jihad.…
The review marks the first ambitious effort since the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks to take stock of what the administration has called the “global war on terrorism” — or GWOT — but is now considering changing to recognize the evolution of its fight. “What we really want now is a strategic approach to defeat violent extremism,” said a senior administration official who described the review on the condition of anonymity because it is not finished. “GWOT is catchy, but there may be a better way to describe it, and those are things that ought to be incumbent on us to look at.”
In many ways, this is the culmination of a heated debate that has been taking place inside and outside the government about how to target not only the remnants of al Qaeda but also broader support in the Muslim world for radical Islam. Administration officials refused to describe in detail what new policies are under consideration, and several sources familiar with the discussions said some issues remain sticking points, such as how central the ongoing war in Iraq is to the anti-terrorist effort, and how to accommodate State Department desires to normalize a foreign policy that has stressed terrorism to the exclusion of other priorities in recent years.
“There’s been a perception, a sense of drift in overall terrorism policy. People have not figured out what we do next, so we just continue to pick ’em off one at a time,” said Roger W. Cressey, who served as a counterterrorism official at the National Security Council under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We haven’t gone to a new level to figure out how things have changed since 9/11.”
“No question this is the next stage, the phase two,” another senior counterterrorism official said. “We are coming to the point of decisions.”…