White House Unveils retooled plan to hunt for al-Qaeda (AP)

WASHINGTON-United States will push ahead with more targeted drone strikes and raids by special operations and less expensive land battles, such as Iraq and Afghanistan in the war against al-Qaeda, according to new national counter-terrorism strategy presented Wednesday.

The doctrine, two years ago, comes on the heels of successful special operations raid that killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in May and a week after President Barack Obama's announcement that troops will start leaving Afghanistan this summer.

The document is a proposal by the Bush Administration's global war on terror. The worldwide hunt for terrorists that began after the attacks of September 11, 2001, first focused on Afghanistan, and a small number of al-Qaida there is still active.

White House counter-terrorism Chief John Brennan said that the revised doctrine recognizes the growing threat of terrorism at home, including al-Qaeda tries to recruit and attack within the United States.

Brennan told an audience in Washington Wednesday that more resources would be spent on the fight at home to identify potential militants and their recruiters.

"Our best offense may not always be the distribution of large armies abroad, but surgical delivery pressure, targeted to groups that threaten us," Brennan said at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Brennan describes operations that are almost exclusively the province of military special operations agents, especially by the CIA and the elite forces of the joint special operations command that worked together to carry out the raid of bin Laden, but also including special operations trainers that work with host Nations ' armed forces and intelligence.

With regard to threats from abroad, Brennan said that the strategy is based on "surgical" struggle against specific groups of decapitating their leadership and deny them safe havens and rejecting expensive wars like Iraq and Afghanistan that bleed in the United States, economically and feed the narrative of al Qaida that America is out to the Muslim world. He said that the United States would work when possible to help the host countries to fight al-Qaeda, so the United States did not have to, as he was trying to hand over responsibility to the Afghans.

Brennan, who is a former CIA agent, did not mention specific secret armed drones program that targets militants in Pakistan and on rare occasions, in countries like Yemen. But he referred to the work of the administration of rushing to what he called "unique skills" to the field, an oblique reference to programs classified as building a CIA drone launch base in the Persian Gulf region to use unmanned aircraft to hunt militants in Yemen intensified.

Bush White House veteran Juan Zarate questioned the wisdom of singling out al-Qaeda as the main enemy, "inadvertently aggrandizing themselves when they are in decline, the focus of the strategy."

He also questioned the decision to "focus very mechanically on the al-Qaeda," with less emphasis on violent Islamic ideology that drives the group. "You could lose a movement that is developing or ... is turning into a global platform" as al-Qaeda, said Zarate, former National Security Advisor Deputy White House for the fight against terrorism.

Zarate also said that while the Obama administration may drop the world "global" war on terror, still seems to be targeting terror cells in almost all continents.

Retired Brig. Gen. Russ Howard, who has been credited with helping to inspire the doctrine of pre-emptive attack Bush Administration's strategy, said the allies send the message that the United States does not want to be involved, if the game becomes too expensive, as in Iraq or Afghanistan.

"The question is whether Nations will be a reliable ally in the US, because we just said we do not get involved with something new, and we don't stay" where we are, Howard, founding Director of the Centre for combating terrorism at the Military Academy of the United States, he said.

In another apparent swipe at the Bush administration, Brennan said his White House was using every "legitimate tool and authority available" in the fight against terrorists, describing the rejection of the Obama White House's interrogation of terror suspects Bush by methods such as waterboarding.

"The United States of America does not torture", Brennan said, "and this is what he (Obama) has banned the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, which didn't work."

Brennan repeated the Administration's mantra that wants to "secure" to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after both prosecuting suspected terrorists in the United States, from military commissions or releasing their home Nations.

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