How the best and the brightest plan to fight terrorism

Slicker packaging will not make American policies more palatable to Middle Eastern audiences or improve Washington's image in the region. The debacle of Al-Hurra, the State Department-funded Arabic-language news network is one example. But such shallow reasoning echoes at the very highest levels of the Bush administration.

In a speech in November, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed embarrassment that "Al Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America." What seems to elude US policymakers is the truth that Al Qaeda's anti-Western, anti-interventionist message resonates with Arab and Muslim audiences sick of what they view as neocolonial meddling in their region.

These views are fed by daily television coverage of US-led occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, American support for unpopular governing elites, and the stymieing of popular political movements such as Hezbollah and Hamas when they win elections.

Back in Bergen's auditorium, a lone European student ventured that only a substantive shift in Washington's policy toward the region could bear true fruit and boost the US quest to succeed in the war against terrorism. Ceasing uncritical support for Israel, the student proposed, might overcome the impression in the Arab world that the US is not an "honest broker." Silence greeted his comments.

Will a new generation of Kennedy School graduates become effective bureaucratic and military foot soldiers in the "long war"? Can they provide America with the cultural awareness it needs if it is to vanquish its foes in the Middle East's battlegrounds?

The rush to study Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages has abated, with university departments reporting reduced applications compared with the initial post-Sept. 11 spike. Torrents of celebrity news, cost-cutting in the media industry, and a gripping presidential campaign have crippled the burst in foreign coverage that accompanied the 2001 and 2003 military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Aspiring Kennedy School graduates looking for professional involvement in the "long war" will probably have their newfound expertise channeled into the same molds carved out already by diplomacy, intelligence analysis, and war. Sitting in on Bergen's class revealed that the shift in thinking implicit in the generational hand over will not be spectacular.

American elites still nurture a certainty that they are on the side of perfect right against perfect wrong in their struggle with Muslim militancy. But fighting a global guerrilla conflict against highly motivated irregular forces and without defined targets has condemned the US to a war with no expiration date.

The rumblings of doubt over how America's strength-sapping campaigns will conclude have still not gone mainstream. But frank classroom discussions about the true nature of jihadis, downward estimates that only 10 to 20 percent of them might be irreconcilable, and brazen proposals to adopt more consultative and multilateral approaches in tackling them reveal that members of the Western establishment will approach the conflict armed with newfound sensitivities and subtler understandings.

• Iason Athanasiadis just completed a 2008 Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. A journalist who covers the Middle East, he is writing a book on the third generation of the Iranian Revolution titled, "Children of the Revolution: Khomeini's Unintended Legacy."

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