WASHINGTON, July 6: The Bush administration is revising its post-Sept 11 counterterrorism strategy, moving beyond a “kill and capture approach” by pushing Washington’s campaign for democracy and economic reform, officials familiar with the project said.

The new draft strategy also uses a broader definition of “the enemy” as Al Qaeda splinters and evolves, shifting the focus to “violent extremism” from the more generic “war on terrorism.”

The document will be the overall US anti-terrorism blueprint which clarifies and streamlines the missions of various agencies in the fight, said officials from various agencies, who declined to give their names because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

The Pentagon has also developed a strategy that widens the military’s role in domestic security.

The plan does not ask for new legal authority to use military forces on US soil, but it raises the likelihood that US combat troops will take action in case civilian and National Guard forces are overwhelmed.

The new strategy, which is being prepared by top government officials, is still a work in progress, with key issues such as Iraq still under discussion, they said.

“The new strategy is supposed to go beyond the kill and capture approach to terrorism and marry it with the administration’s democratization and liberalization policies. The idea is that it’s not just about taking out the terrorists, but dealing with the underlying issues of what breeds terrorism,” said a counterterrorism official briefed on the review.

“So much has changed since 9/11, including the nature of the enemy. Al Qaeda isn’t what it was. The review is looking at philosophical issues such as who the enemy is, as well as issues like priorities, programmes, and roles and missions, i.e. who is responsible for translating the goals into reality,” he said.

The draft strategy also will take into account changes in the government, such as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the National Counterterrorism Center and a new intelligence czar’s office.

Several officials said the new strategy’s interlaced focus on liberalization and fighting terrorism mirrored President George W. Bush’s greater emphasis on the spread of democracy as a pillar of his second term.

“It’s a shift,” said a second official who is familiar with a draft of the review.

“What’s different is the language on ... promoting freedom, democracy and economic prosperity to improve conditions that terrorists would exploit,” this official said. “They go into democracy assistance, development of civil society, women’s empowerment, rule of law assistance, literacy and education, free trade and development of private enterprise.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declined to comment on the new document, but said, “The Bush administration is constantly reviewing its policies and its strategy for combating terrorism in order to make sure we’re doing all we can to protect the American people.”

Officials involved in the project said it was not yet clear if the new strategy would be made public, or whether the administration would just issue it as an internal directive to government departments later this year.

White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend is spearheading the review, which also includes the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, the Treasury, the State Department and others.

Details are still sketchy, the officials said.

“It’s still evolving,” said the second official, adding that the document’s authors defined “the enemy as a transnational movement of extremists, or networks of individuals, and state and non-state supporters.”

The focus on Al Qaeda has broadened to include “affiliated extremists,” the official said, adding there appeared to be a subtle shift away from the term “Islamic extremists” to “violent extremist groups.”

“But they do use the phrase ‘who exploit Islam’ and ‘use terrorism for ideological ends,’” the official said.

INTERNAL SECURITY: In its most controversial aspect, the Pentagon plan for homeland security calls for sharing military intelligence with civilian law enforcement to identify and track suspected terrorists, raising the spectre in some civil rights activists of unwarranted intrusions on privacy.

“The last time the military got heavily involved in domestic surveillance, during the Vietnam war era, military intelligence kept thousands of files on Americans guilty of nothing more than opposing the war,” Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute, a non-profit libertarian policy research group in Washington, was quoted as saying in the Post.

“I don’t think we want to go down that road again,” he said.

The use of federal troops to supervise elections in ex-confederate states after the 19th century US Civil War was criticized, prompting the enactment of legislation in 1878 placing legal barriers to sending soldiers onto US streets, according to the Post.