Obama again says war on Al Qaeda, its allies must also be battle of ideas

WASHINGTON, Feb 1 (KUNA) -- President Barack Obama on Monday once again said that the war on Al Qaeda and its extremist allies continues to be not only a military one but also a battle of ideas.
Al Qaeda "is probably the biggest killer of innocent Muslims of any entity out there, and so that is our target, and that is our focus," he said during a White House interview with Steve Grove, the news and politics editor of YouTube.
The President had been asked about his policies in the war on terror.
Al Qaeda must be found on all fronts, Obama said.
"We have to fight them in very concrete ways in Afghanistan and along the border regions of Pakistan, where they are still holed up," he said. "They have spread to places like Yemen and Somalia, and we are working internationally with partners to try limit their scope of operations and dismantle them in those regions." But the United States also must battle them with ideas, the President said.
"We have to help work with the overwhelming majority of Muslims, who reject senseless violence of this sort, and to work to provide different pathways and different alternatives for people expressing whatever policy differences that they may have," he said.
But US officials have not done as good of a job on that front, he added.
"We have to project economically, working in countries like a Yemen that is extraordinarily poor, to make sure that young people there have opportunity," Obama said. "The same is true in a place like Pakistan. So we want to use all of our national power to deal with the problem of these extremist organizations, but part of that does involve applications of military power." The President said he believed it was "very important to make sure that we had an additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan to help train Afghan forces so that they can start providing more effective security for their own country in dealing with the Taliban, and ultimately allow us to remove our troops, but still have a secure partner there that is not going to be able to use that region as a platform to attack the United States." Asked about US policy in Sudan, Obama said US officials were trying to work with not only the regional powers, but the United Nations and other countries "to see if we can broker a series of agreements that would stabilize the country, and then allow the refugees who are in Darfur to start moving back to their historic lands." "Sadly, because of the genocide that took place earlier, a lot of those villages are now destroyed," he said.
Thinking about how to resettle these populations in places that are viable economically, that have the resources to support populations, is a long-term development challenge that the international community is going to have to support, he added.
"We continue to put pressure on the Sudanese government," Obama said. "If they are not cooperative in these efforts, then it is going to be appropriate for us to conclude that engagement does not work. And we are going to have to apply additional pressure on Sudan in order to achieve our objectives. But my hope is that we can broker agreements with all the parties involved to deal with what has been an enormous human tragedy in that region." On the issue of closing the controversial US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the President said that if the US Congress decides to try to block the opening of a new prison facility in the United States to house some of the Guantanamo detainees, "it potentially constrains what our administration can do." The issue "is something that we have got to work through both in Congress but also with public opinion, so that people understand that ultimately this is the right thing to do," he said.
"By closing Guantanamo, we can regain the moral high ground in the battle against these terrorist organizations," Obama said. "There has been no bigger propaganda weapon for many of these extremists than pointing to Guantanamo and saying that we (Americans) do not live up to our own ideals. And that is something that I strongly believe we have to resist, even if it has some costs to it, and even if it is not always the most politically popular thing to do." (end) rm.bs KUNA 020006 Feb 10NNNN