Targeting al Quaeda leaders

The United States appears consistently to target al Qaeda leaders, most recently killing Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the presumptive number three in the al Qaeda hierarchy. (“Al Qaeda Number Three killed,” Times Online, June 1, 2010) If killing al Qaeda leaders is in fact a U.S. strategy intended to decapitate al Qaeda, that strategy seems destined to almost certain failure.

First, al Qaeda is a decentralized, network style organization. Cells operate with considerable independence. Even killing Osama bin Laden is unlikely to degrade al Qaeda’s operational capabilities for very long. Al Qaeda’s ability to mount successful operations in diverse geographic locations in spite of persistent U.S. efforts to neutralize both Osama bin Laden and his leadership team support this pessimistic assessment.

Second, assassinating leaders rarely defeats an enemy. High profile assassinations in the U.S. such as those of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., did not produce game changing results. Similarly, Israel killing the leaders of Palestinian terrorist groups has not defeated any of those groups.

Audrey Kurth Cronin in How Terrorism Ends identified six ways in which terrorism movements end. Killing the leadership, which she terms “decapitation,” was only one of six ways, an approach that based on her review of more than four hundred terror groups is seldom effective. According to Cronin, killing a key leader can temporarily disrupt a terror organization’s plans but is rarely a long-term game changer.

The good news from Cronin’s study is that all terror movements eventually end. If killing key leaders represents a tactic that is part of a larger strategy, then lets celebrate progress. But the hype that surrounds each kill suggests that the U.S. lacks a more comprehensive strategy. In a war of attrition, whether fought in the jungles of Vietnam, eighteenth century American colonies, or the mountains of Afghanistan over the last two millennia, invaders consistently lack the political will and resources to prevail. I do not like that conclusion, but find it unavoidable. (For a somewhat more optimistic assessment, cf. J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr., “The Issue of Attrition,” Parameters, Spring 2010, 5-19.)