With an eye on world opinion, President Barack Obama ushered in a kinder, gentler version of the "war on terror" this week with orders banning torture and shutting down Guantanamo within a year. But the harsher realities of the struggle against al Qaeda have quickly reasserted themselves, with raids and missile strikes in Pakistan showing that the war is by no means over.
"The terminology 'war on terrorism' may go away but the war on al Qaeda is not going to go away," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and an Obama adviser during the transition and his presidential campaign.
"It is a mistake to conclude that the Obama administration is not going to go after al Qaeda with a seriousness of purpose that may be even more serious than George Bush," he said. On Friday, unmanned Predator aircraft launched missiles in two separate attacks on suspected extremist hideouts along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.
Pakistani security officials said 15 people, including three children, were killed. Jihadist websites, meanwhile, showed video introducing a former Guantanamo detainee, Said Ali al-Shahri, as the new deputy commander of al Qaeda in Yemen. Al-Shahri is among 61 former prisoners at Guantanamo who the Pentagon believes has returned to terrorist activities since their release.
"More of them will be rolling around," said a US military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Still, the new administration and others say the harm done to US standing by Guantanamo and controversies over interrogation methods like waterboarding required a change in direction.
"I think you have to weigh the costs of the more severe interrogation measures with, as the president talked about in his inaugural address, our values and the impact on our values," US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday.
Retired admiral Dennis Blair, Obama's nominee to run the US intelligence community, told Congress this week that the "immediate tactical benefit" of those methods was "not the only answer."
The new administration clearly hopes that the change in policies will make it easier to get help from other governments, and also ease the anti-American sentiment that fuels militancy in the Muslim world, analysts said. Renouncing torture and closing Guantanamo "has the effect of increasing the likelihood of other countries co-operating with us on counter-terrorism efforts, where some of them felt they had to take distance," said Robert Hunter, a diplomat and senior adviser to the RAND Corporation.
"I would say it is, if anything, intensifying the fight but drawing on instruments that are more likely to have long-term effect." he said.
Nevertheless, applying the new policies is confronting the new administration with difficult practical questions that will soon need to be resolved. Will the United States now extradite captured al Qaeda leaders to the United States for trial? Can the CIA hold and interrogate al Qaeda suspects overseas on its own, or must it work through host governments?
It is already facing such a test in Pakistan where a joint CIA-Pakistani team captured a senior Saudi al Qaeda suspect just hours after Obama's inauguration.
Pakistani security officials identified the man as Zabi ul Taifi, who is wanted for the 2005 bombings in London that killed 52 people. "This capture is worth noting," said Riedel. "It's been a long time since an important level al Qaeda official has been captured, rather than killed. Hopefully it will be a source of new information."
"We've said we're not going to send people to Guantanamo, we're not going to torture them, but we now have a new prisoner, potentially in the mix. And he may be the first to be handled by the Obama administration," he said.
"That, of course, will depend whether the Pakistanis will turn him over to us, or turn him over to Saudi Arabia. But it's an interesting early case."
In his confirmation testimony this week, Blair acknowedlged that the United States has not yet found "the correct way to treat this new type of campaign that we are engaged in."
"On the one hand, we have to fight it like a war and detain people and get information from them and protect our citizens. "On the other hand, we have to maintain our stature as the country that is governed by our values and governed by ideals. We've gone back and forth in many different ways," he said.