WASHINGTON, May 29: The Bush administration is shifting its focus away from capturing and killing Al Qaeda leaders to a broader strategy against violent extremism, the Washington Post said on Sunday. The new challenge confronting the administration is to reorient US efforts when the immediate threat from Al Qaeda seems to have receded, but the threat of violent extremism appears to have become more widespread.
The report said that many US experts agree with the assessment of President Pervez Musharraf, who told a reporter recently that ‘we have broken the back of Al Qaeda’.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai also expressed similar views in a recent interview to the Post in which he said: “No doubt Al Qaeda as an organization has been destroyed (and) is no longer capable to launch the kind of attacks that they did … a few years ago.” The new US policy, the report said, is the culmination of a heated debate within the US government about how to target not only the remnants of Al Qaeda, but also broader support in the Muslim world for militants.
The report said the new policy would also accommodate the State Department’s desires to normalize a foreign policy that has stressed terrorism to the exclusion of other priorities.
Policy makers are also trying to decide how central the occupation of Iraq is to Washington’s anti-terrorist effort. The shift is meant to recognize the transformation of Al Qaeda over the past three years into an amorphous, diffuse and difficult-to-target organization.
President Bush’s top adviser on terrorism, Frances Fragos Townsend, is leading the policy review, which may lead to a new national security presidential directive, superseding the Oct 2001 document signed by President Bush that pledged the ‘elimination of terrorism as a threat to our way of life’.
The review marks the first ambitious effort since the immediate aftermath of the 2001 attacks to take stock of what the Bush administration has called the ‘global war on terrorism’.
Much of the discussion within the Bush administration has focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple of years.
Another key aspect is likely to be the addition of public diplomacy efforts aimed at winning over Arab sentiment. State Department official Paul Simons said at a recent congressional hearing that the new strategy would aim at curbing the teaching of ‘holy war’ against the West.
As part of the reorganization, a new office of strategic and operational planning is slated to become the focal point for operations aimed at terrorists. A CIA veteran, Hank Crumpton, will move into the State Department as the head of its office for counter-terrorism while Air Force Gen Charles F. Wald will take over the directorship of the new National Counterterrorism Center created nearly a year ago as the main clearing house for terrorism-related intelligence.
Ms Townsend also hired a deputy last week, Treasury official Juan Carlos Zarate, to take on the terrorism portfolio at the National Security Council.
The Post said the Bush administration recognizes that there’s been a vacuum of leadership in its efforts to fight terrorism, particularly in supervising day-to-day operations, and is trying to fill these gaps by appointing new people.
