WASHINGTON — The U.S.-led war on terrorism has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, prompted the largest restructuring of the U.S. government and become a central issue in the presidential campaign.
Potential voters are being buried under a deluge of partisan and often contradictory claims about whether Americans are safer now than before Sept. 11 and even about the nature of the enemy and the war itself.
If Americans are confused, they have good reason to be: Their government appears to be just as much in the dark as they are about whether the terrorism war is succeeding, as President Bush claims, or has actually strengthened the terrorists and further jeopardized the nation, as Sen. John F. Kerry asserts.
That's the case in part because progress in the terrorism war is hard to define and even harder to measure, especially this early in a struggle that could last for decades, according to terrorism experts in and outside the U.S. government.
It's also the case because the Bush administration and Congress haven't corrected fundamental flaws in the way the government measures its progress in the terrorism war, according to extensive interviews with U.S. officials and outside experts.
Lacking such hard information, the presidential candidates can claim almost whatever they want about the war on terrorism without fear of being proved wrong.
But such flaws do more than confuse voters. They undercut the entire war effort, these experts say, by depriving government leaders of a clear understanding of the evolving threat posed by global terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda.
Without such an understanding, they say, the government and its congressional overseers can't engineer a coordinated and effective response to terrorism in the short term, or the kind of strategic campaign needed to defeat such enemies over the long haul.
"The two candidates often appear so far apart on the issues. How can this be?" said Raphael Perl, a senior U.S. terrorism analyst at the government's Congressional Research Service. "It's not that one has his facts right and the other doesn't. It's that we lack clear objective goals and standards by which to measure success. And that it is a very, very serious problem."
A year ago, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld inadvertently brought such concerns out into the open when his internal memo on the subject became public.
