The Pentagon and White House on Wednesday defended a memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to top defense officials questioning progress in the war on terrorism and warning that the US faced "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sharply diverging from more upbeat public comments, Rumsfeld wrote it was not possible to transform the Defense Department quickly enough to effectively fight the anti-terrorism war.
US President George W. Bush seized on the overall message of the memo -- that the war on terrorism will be long and hard -- to say that he could not agree more.
"I haven't seen the secretary's comments, but somebody told me they thought he said we need to make sure our military's intelligence services are focused on the war on terror. And I couldn't agree more with you. That's exactly what we're doing," Bush told reporters who asked him about the memo in Canberra, Australia.
Posing challenging questions to the military Joint Chiefs of Staff and others in the memo, dated Oct. 16 and released on Wednesday, Rumsfeld said the US had no yardstick for measuring progress in the anti-terrorism war launched after September 2001 attacks.
The Pentagon and the White House said the memo properly raised issues for Pentagon leaders to consider.
Rumsfeld, speaking to reporters after a closed briefing for senators, said the memo was an effort to raise questions.
"Sometimes one needs to say to a big institution: Hey, wait a minute. Let's lift our eyes up and look out across the horizon and say, `Are there questions that we ought to be asking ourselves? Are there things that we ought to think about ways to do differently?'" he said.
He said the memo stemmed from reports he had received from combatant commanders around the world, and was sent to "three or four of my closest associates."
In the report, he wrote it was "pretty clear the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."
"My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?" Rumsfeld wrote, referring to the war on terrorism.
He challenged Pentagon leaders to consider and discuss troubling issues, including whether or not the US was capturing or killing terrorists at a faster rate than they were being created by extremists.
"Are we winning or losing the global war on terrorism? Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists?" he asked.
"The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Rumsfeld cited "mixed results" against the al-Qaeda guerrilla network blamed for the 2001 attacks, "reasonable progress tracking down top Iraqis" and "somewhat slower progress" in apprehending Taliban leaders in Afghanistan.
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