US: 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 September 11th, 2001, and toward what a senior official called a broader "strategy against violent extremism".
The shift is meant to recognise the transformation of al-Qaeda over the past three years into a far more amorphous, diffuse and difficult-to-target organisation than the group that struck the United States in 2001. Critics however say the policy review comes only after months of delay and lost opportunities while the administration left key counter-terrorism jobs unfilled and argued internally over how best to confront the rapid spread of the pro-al-Qaeda global Islamic jihad.
President Bush's top adviser on terrorism, Frances Fragos Townsend, said in an interview the review was needed to take into account the "ripple effect" from years of operations targeting al- Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, arrested for planning the September 11th attacks, and his recently detained deputy.
"Naturally, the enemy has adapted," she said. "As you capture a Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an Abu Faraj al-Libbi raises up. Nature abhors a vacuum."
The review marks the first ambitious effort since immediately after the 2001 attacks to take stock of what the administration has called the "global war on terrorism" - or GWOT - but is now considering change to recognise 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 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."
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.
Officials refused to describe in detail what new policies were under consideration. Several sources said some sticking points remained, such as how central the war in Iraq is to the anti-terrorist effort and how to accommodate State Department desires to normalise a foreign policy that has stressed terrorism to the exclusion of other priorities.
"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 Cressey, a counter-terrorism 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."
Much of the discussion has focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists. Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed-out" of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe.
A former senior Bush administration official said: "If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?"
Another key aspect is likely to be the addition of public diplomacy efforts aimed at winning over Arab public sentiment. State Department official Paul Simons said at a congressional hearing earlier this month that the "internal deliberative process" was broadly conceived to encompass everything from further crackdowns on terrorist-financing networks to policies aimed at curbing the teaching of holy war against the West and other "tools with respect to the global war on terrorism."
Officials said the review may lead to a new national security presidential directive, superseding Mr Bush's October 2001 document that pledged the "elimination of terrorism as a threat to our way of life."