 [MITPressJournals] Does leadership decapitation lead to the demise of terrorist organizations? Can the United States undermine or destroy terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida by arresting or killing their leaders? What explains organizational resilience to leadership targeting? Leadership decapitation, or the killing or capturing of the leaders of terrorist organizations, has become a core feature of U.S. counterterrorism policy. Many scholars and analysts claim that it weakens terrorist organizations and reduces the threat they pose. Unsurprisingly, they saw the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as a major tactical victory for President Barack Obama and for the broader war on terrorism. Despite the success of this operation and subsequent attacks on al-Qaida leaders, decapitation is unlikely to diminish the ability of al-Qaida to continue its activities in the long run. Rather, it may have counterproductive consequences, emboldening or strengthening the organization.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States has killed or captured many al-Qaida leaders as part of a general campaign to decapitate the organization. It has employed a variety of military operations to achieve this objective, including raids by Special Operations forces. Both bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, were killed as a result of such raids. On October 5, 2012, U.S. forces captured Abu Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaida leader, in a raid in Libya. The United States has also relied heavily on drone strikes to target al-Qaida leaders and other militants in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.
In June 2012, Abu Yahya al-Libi, then al-Qaida’s deputy leader, was killed in Pakistan in a drone strike coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency. Highly experienced, al-Libi served an important operational function within the organization. Scholars and policymakers saw his death as a significant blow to an already weakened al-Qaida.2 Nine months earlier, a Hellfire missile fired from a U.S. drone killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric linked to a number of terrorist plots in the West. On August 22, 2011, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, believed to be the organization’s second-highest leader, was reportedly killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.3 Rahman served an important communicative function between bin Laden and lower-level operatives. Ilyas Kashmiri, reputed to be a senior member of al-Qaida and the operational commander for Harakat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, was killed in a drone attack in South Waziristan on June 3, 2011.4 These examples illustrate the frequency with which the United States has targeted al-Qaida leaders and operatives over the past few years, speciªcally through the use of drone strikes.5
Despite these and other instances of successful targeting, al-Qaida remains a resilient terrorist organization. Applying a theory of organizational resilience, I examine why targeting al-Qaida’s leadership is not an effective counterterrorism strategy and, indeed, is likely counterproductive. A terrorist group’s ability to withstand attacks is a function of two factors: bureaucratization and communal support. Analyzing both when and why certain terrorist groups are able to survive leadership attacks, this article differs from existing work by providing a more nuanced lens through which to evaluate the effectiveness of counterterrorism policy.
The center of gravity of Islamic terrorism is their grievance that we occupy their countries and kill their people. Stop doing this and their grievance disappears. Attacking their leaders or footsoldiers will never, ever win the war.
| The center of gravity of Islamic terrorism is that we have not surrendered and converted to their faith — that’s what their term for the non-Muslim world, Dar al-Harb, the House of War, means. There is only one way, from their perspective, for their grievance to disappear, and that is for us to become members of the Borg. But killing lots of them will discourage the jihadi faction for a while. |
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I do not remember reading about any Sturmabteilung rising from the ashes of Dresden.