Review May Shift Terror Policies

Review May Shift Terror Policies: "Until recently, the Bush administration resisted any broadening of its mission against al Qaeda, insisting on what Townsend once called a 'decapitation' strategy. The policy review marks what many experts regard as a belated shift. 'The administration has appropriately taken the broad view,' said an intelligence official who had urged the review. 'It's not going to be a matter of just trying to roll up more al Qaeda guys. What we still know as the al Qaeda organization -- they've taken a terrible beating.'
But even that notion remains controversial when assessing the continuing threat from al Qaeda will shape the policy against it. 'I just don't accept the idea that the whole organization is completely gone and morphed into an amorphous global jihad movement,' said Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism analyst at the Congressional Research Service. 'They could still try to reconstitute the centralized structure of before 9/11.'
A new campaign targeting 'violent extremism' could also prove controversial, given disputes in the Middle East about how to categorize groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the West Bank that act as political parties while also supporting what the United States calls terrorist activities. 'You can't start drawing very precise lines -- security/counterterrorism versus the broader efforts to deal with the roots of terrorism,' the intelligence official said."