Nine years after the September 11 attacks, a key question remains unclear: How, exactly, should the United States fight Al Qaida? Killing its leaders seems to be an obvious answer – though actually getting rid of them is not as easy as it sounds. Osama bin Laden is, of course, still free, and many of the other top leaders have been equally elusive. And once you kill them, it is not clear whether it does much good. Terrorist groups are not like mob families that are wrecked when their leaders are captured or killed, as studies have shown. When a terrorist group loses its leader, the organization dissolves in only one out of five cases.
Al Qaida in Iraq seemed to be one of those cases – at least for a while. As Steven Lee Myers reported in The New York Times in an article entitled, “The ‘Wanted Dead’ Option in the War on Terror,” Al Qaida in Iraq had been losing ground, partly because of the assaults against it and also because of its image problem. “Al Qaida in Iraq is hardly defeated, but recent academic research on decapitation as a strategy suggests that in this case, it may in fact have put the group closer to demise — not so much because the air strikes were accurate as because Iraqis have lost respect for the group,” wrote Myers.
Al Qaida in Iraq was on a downward slide. Unfortunately, though, not anymore, at least according to Ned Parker of The Los Angeles Times. “Al Qaida Iraq is back from the dead,” Parker wrote. In his article, he explained how “the Islamic militant group is carving out new sanctuaries here in the farmlands south of Baghdad, in the deserts to the west and in the mountains to the east. Almost weekly, suicide bombers wage war in the Iraqi capital. Tribal leaders, local officials and some U.S. officers worry that Al Qaeda in Iraq has successfully exploited the country’s six-month political vacuum and anger over arrests of Awakening members in Sunni areas to establish its new foothold.”
If they continue to grow in strength and numbers, it does not mean that killing terrorists is a bad idea – just that fighting Al Qaida requires more than targeted strikes. Counterterrorism experts believe that the war against Al Qaida is most successfully waged on many fronts, ranging from the military to the economic to an effective global public-relations campaign. If Americans believe that the fight against Al Qaida requires only killing its leaders, then they are likely to be disappointed – as the latest developments in Iraq have shown.
