Assassinating Terrorist Leadership

Reach Out and Touch Someone...

StrategyPage.com has put up this article describing the military's strategy of political assassination to defeat Al-Qaeda. The idea is that if the military or the CIA manages to take out Bin Ladin or Zawahiri, then Al-Qaeda will fall apart.

This strategy does not seem to make much sense to me for two reasons. First of all, the decapitation strategy has not been very successful for the Israelis in regards to Hamas, which is a much more structured organization than Al-Qaeda.

But perhaps a better reason to keep Bin Ladin & Co breathing is that they have thus far not proved to be very effective leaders. There is Increasing Evidence that Al Qaeda is losing the ideological war within the Islamic world. Whose to say that Al Qaeda would not just splinter into multiple radical groups if central leadership was removed? Bin Ladin was always more of a financier than a manager, and since 9/11 his assets have been largely frozen. Perhaps he would be more dangerous as a martyr than he is as a fugitive.

Look, I don't want to seem like I wouldn't be happy to see Bin Ladin's head sitting on a pike on the White House lawn. It would totally make my day. But people seem stuck with this idea that our campaign against Al Qaeda is all about revenge, rather than victory. We don't win in Afghanistan by killing Al Qaeda, we win by leaving a stable government to prevent the next Al Qaeda. I am just not sure if the military, or the American people in general, have really thought through what that involves.