The Obama White House’s new strategy to cripple al-Qaida vows to fight the terrorist network everywhere it operates. As long as it’s IRL.

To read the strategy (.pdf), unveiled on Wednesday by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, is to view a pledge to send armed drones and special operations forces from Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia to the Sahel. It’s obsessed with physical safe havens for terrorists in places from “northern Mali” to Mauritania. But it has practically nothing to say about one of the most important places al-Qaida inspires new adherents and spreads its propaganda: the internet.

This is the most strenuous treatment of online jihad in the entire 19-page document: “Mass media and the internet in particular have emerged as enablers for terrorist planning, facilitation, and communication, and we will continue to counter terrorists’ ability to exploit them.” Sometimes the U.S. will spread its “positive vision of engagement with Muslim communities” through “person-to-person engagement,” and other times “through the power of social media,” it promises.

Yet the internet is the primary mechanism through which al-Qaida communicates with its affiliates and tries to inspire new terrorists. Osama bin Laden’s couriers used thumb drives to blast out emails to the network from Pakistani internet cafes. Its loyalists hang out and debate on message boards, where they make grandiose boasts of future attacks that U.S. law enforcement takes seriously. al-Qaida’s even trying to recruit new terrorists through Facebook. Any minute now, it’ll probably get a Google+ invite.

But the Internet isn’t just a place for al-Qaida to get its message out. It’s an operational medium, too. Brennan called Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S. citizen now affiliated with al-Qaida’s Yemen branch “very, very dangerous.” How’d he get that way? Through emailing with Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan and would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (well, probably emailing; both men say they communicated with one another). Indeed, Awlaki rose to prominence not by killing anyone, but by posting jihadi videos on YouTube — videos hosted on American servers that British security officials implored Brennan to take down.

Not enough? The strategy calls homegrown terrorism a major threat. But it ignores the fact that al-Qaida affiliates’ online magazines call for American Muslims to mow people down with tricked-out trucks or shoot up restaurants — and to take their jihad from their laptops to the malls, transport systems and streets of America, and not to set foot in a training camp. As the U.S. attacks al-Qaida’s physical safe havens, the terrorist response is to congregate in online spaces, where they can’t be blown up by a Hellfire missile or shot by a SEAL.

Even if the new White House counterterrorism strategy treats the internet like an afterthought, the more operational elements of U.S. counterterrorism are more focused. U.S. Central Command is setting up online stings and infiltrating jihadi message boards. Their allies in British intelligence even hacked the English-language online magazine of al-Qaida in Yemen — after the CIA passed on a similar plan, for fear they’d lose a potent source of information. U.S. Cyber Command, however, reportedly wants to shut down the mag.

It would be one thing if the White House made an argument that al-Qaida’s online activity is unlikely to result in actual terrorism. But Brennan didn’t even do that. In his Wednesday speech, he warned of the danger from English-speaking extremists like Awlaki or Adam Gadahn who “preach violence in slick videos over the Internet.” Yet the strategy doesn’t devote any effort to confronting those online messages.

There are smart and stupid ways to confront online jihadism. (The stupid ones include increased government monitoring of people’s Internet usage, since non-jihadis like, um, journalists try to check out terrorist messages online.) But to ignore it might be the biggest unforced error of all.