WASHINGTON — President Bush, members of Congress and virtually all counter-terrorism experts have acknowledged that defeating terrorists cannot be accomplished solely by dropping bombs on them. Ultimately, they say, ending terrorism will come only by addressing its underlying causes.
"Our long-term strategy to keep the peace is to help change the conditions that give rise to extremism and terror by spreading the universal principle of human liberty," Bush said in March 2005.
But a close look at the United States' counter-terrorism priorities shows a strategy going in a different direction.
In recent years, the Pentagon has received a larger share of the counter-terrorism budget, whereas "indirect action" programs to win the campaign through diplomacy and other nonmilitary means have struggled for funding and attention, according to a review of budget documents and interviews with dozens of current and former U.S. officials.
Nonmilitary counter-terrorism programs have budgets that are measured in millions instead of billions, and in many cases are seeing their funding remain flat or drop.
Even within the Pentagon, many "soft power" programs, which don't include direct military action, appear to be getting squeezed out as more money goes to support combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and special forces missions elsewhere.
Some top counter-terrorism officials, seeing their noncombat programs languishing, are leaving the government, including a top Pentagon official.
Three at the State Department who ran the highly regarded Regional Strategic Initiative are also leaving.
And increasingly, even civilian anti-terrorism operations are being run by current or former military members.
The shift has troubled many terrorism experts.
The U.S. approach to counter-terrorism is that "enemies simply need to be killed or imprisoned so that global terrorism or the Iraqi insurgency will end," Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy, told a House Armed Services subcommittee last month.
"This is a monumental failing," Hoffman said, "not only because decapitation strategies have rarely worked in countering mass mobilization, terrorist or insurgent campaigns, but also because Al Qaeda's ability to continue this struggle is ... predicated on its capacity to attract new recruits" by publicizing U.S. military actions.
