According to Major General Douglas Lute, who as director of operations for Centcom is responsible for near-term planning, the long war amounts to an offensive from the Horn of Africa to the borders of Afghanistan to ensure that al-Qaeda and its affiliated terror organisations do not find a safe haven once they are forced out of their current bases.
On the most basic level, Maj Gen Lute said, that offensive was likely to include tracking Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant who has emerged as a leader of the Iraqi insurgency, once the war in Iraq is over. To Centcom, Mr Zarqawi is not in Iraq to die for the cause, but rather to build on his network and take the fight to the entire region.
For Centcom planners, those safe havens are both physical and virtual. On the physical side, the main concerns lie in the Horn of Africa, where vast ungovernable spaces would provide ideal homes for Mr Zarqawi and his associates.
From Yemen across the Arabian Sea into Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan, local forces have already seen stepped-up US efforts to train and strengthen elite counter-terrorist units to combat any al-Qaeda affiliate that might emerge. Their efforts also include work with border control and immigration agencies to modernise their approaches to tracking those moving across their borders.
But perhaps more interestingly, Maj Gen Lute noted that Centcom was increasingly looking to fight its campaign on the internet, where Islamic radicals have found ways to recruit, train, and raise funds for their cause. He said terror networks had become so sophisticated that they had begun to use otherwise prosaic commercial applications such as PayPal, the internet payment system, to collect donations to their cause.
FT.com
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