The US will push ahead with more targeted drone strikes and special operations raids and fewer costly land battles like Iraq and Afghanistan in the continuing war against al-Qaeda, according to a new national counterterrorism strategy unveiled on Wednesday.
The doctrine, two years in the making, comes in the wake of the successful special operations raid that killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in May, and a week after US President Barack Obama’s announcement that US troops will begin leaving Afghanistan this summer.
The document is a purposeful departure from the Bush administration’s global “war on terror.”
White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said the reworked doctrine acknowledges the growing threat of terrorism at home, including al-Qaeda attempts to recruit and attack inside the US.
Brennan told a Washington audience on Wednesday that more resources would be spent on the fight at home to spot would-be militants and their recruiters, and the US would resist al-Qaeda’s attempts to bleed it economically by drawing it into costly invasions overseas.
“Our best offense won’t always be deploying large armies abroad, but delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us,” Brennan said at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Brennan said the strategy relies on “surgical” action against specific groups to decapitate their leadership and deny them safe havens and rejects costly wars like Iraq and Afghanistan that feed al-Qaeda’s narrative that the US is out to occupy the Muslim world. He said the US would work whenever possible to help host countries fight al-Qaeda so it didn’t have to, just as it was trying to hand over responsibility to the Afghans.
The operations Brennan describes are almost solely the province of the intelligence and military special operations agencies, especially the CIA and elite forces of the Joint Special Operations Command that worked together to carry out the bin Laden raid, but also including the special operations trainers that work with host nations’ militaries.
Brennan, who is a former CIA officer, did not make specific mention of the covert armed drone program that targets militants in Pakistan and, on rare occasions, in countries like Yemen, but he did refer to the administration’s work to rush what he called “unique capabilities” to the field, an oblique reference to classified programs like the stepped-up construction of a CIA drone-launching base in the Persian Gulf region.
Bush White House veteran Juan Zarate questioned the wisdom of singling out al-Qaeda as the main US enemy, “inadvertently aggrandizing them when they are in decline, by making them the focus of the strategy.”
Retired Brigadier General Russ Howard, who was credited with helping inspire the Bush administration’s pre-emptive strike doctrine, said the message the strategy sends to allies is that the US does not want to be involved if the going gets too expensive, as in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“Nations will question whether the US will be a reliable ally because we’ve just said we won’t get involved with anything new, and we won’t stay” where we already are, said Howard, founding director of the Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy.
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