| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq |
| US chipping away at al-Qaeda, but attacks continue |
| 2005-10-04 |
| The killing of terrorist Abdullah Abu Azzam last week was the latest blow against al-Qaeda's top leadership in Iraq reported by the U.S. military. But like other attacks on the group's leadership, it didn't seem to reduce insurgent violence. Abu Azzam was the last of an original eight-member leadership committee for al-Qaeda in Iraq to have been captured or killed in the past year, says military spokesman Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch. Abu Azzam, group leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's No. 2, was behind the recent wave of bombings in Baghdad, Lynch says. Yet insurgent attacks have climbed steadily over the past six months to more than 500 a week, according to a chart released by Lynch. In the week after Abu Azzam's death, bombs and ambushes killed more than 200 Iraqis and 14 U.S. servicemembers. Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. officer in Iraq, told Congress on Thursday that insurgencies last an average of nine years, and "there is no reason to believe this one will take any less time." He and other U.S. military leaders say killing or capturing the insurgent leaders is important, though its impact may not be immediate. Even in a loosely structured organization, leaders are important, says Col. Kevin Benson, director of the Army's School of Advance Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. "Leaders provide direction, have the contacts with money sources and usually provide the charisma needed to motivate others," Benson says. "We are going to have to kill these people. There is no dealing with them." He notes that al-Qaeda in Iraq is only one part of an insurgency that includes criminals, extreme nationalists and former members of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party. Those groups — which are larger than al-Qaeda in Iraq — appear to have even less organizational structure than the global al-Qaeda network, where leaders such as Osama bin Laden are known to provide inspiration but not necessarily issue orders or make plans. Though former Baath Party members are among the leaders of the insurgent groups, Saddam's capture in December 2003 had little impact on the violence. Peter Bergen of the Washington-based New America Foundation, a public-policy institute, says targeting the leadership isn't a winning strategy. "It's the deck-of-cards fallacy," he says, referring to the playing cards featuring Saddam and 54 of his lieutenants. Eleven remain at large. "The more people we arrested in the deck of cards, the more violence actually went up," says Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc., a book about al-Qaeda. "If it was a Mafia crime family, arrest or kill all the bosses and lieutenants and it is out of business," he says. In Iraq, "there seems to be a potentially ever-larger pool of people willing to replace" those who die. Douglas Farah, a consultant on terrorism, says he suspects al-Qaeda in Iraq is "much less hierarchical" than the U.S. military assumes. There's "a wide range of people with a wide range of skills operating in concert, but not necessarily waiting for orders to come down from above," Farah says. Historically, some rebellions centered on a key figure, such as the Shining Path in Peru, which "virtually disintegrated when its leader was arrested and shown on TV," Farah says. Even if Zarqawi — who has a $25 million bounty on his head as Iraq's most-wanted terrorist — is captured or killed, it may not be a major blow to the insurgency. "Zarqawi and others, while being the most visible factors, do not have to interpret the Quran for the jihadists to know what to do," Farah says. Nathaniel Fick, a Marine officer in Iraq and Afghanistan who has written a book on his experiences, says eliminating leaders and killing insurgents should be only a part of a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. Progress comes from winning over the population, he says. Aggressive military tactics can be counterproductive. "The deck-of-cards mentality is of limited use," he says. "Taking these (terrorist) guys down is ... a necessary but not all that sufficient step toward making progress." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #4 Who cares how long it takes? What's the alternative? Come home and let them metastasize? |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-10-04 21:19 |
| #3 It's you. He's correct. The other part is the variability, which is fairly broad. I know counter intel people who were still dealing with hidden Nazis in the early 50s. |
| Posted by: Omerens Omaigum2983 2005-10-04 20:55 |
| #2 Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. officer in Iraq, told Congress on Thursday that insurgencies last an average of nine years ...Is it just me or does that sound...MacNamarish? Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2005-10-04 20:33 |
| #1 What all of these commentators are leaving out is one simple fact - the Baath party leadership was broad and deep with a claimed membership of over 1 m. And resilient. It kept the 80% of Iraq that wasn't Sunni Arab under its thumb. There are a limited number of leaders. But that pool is broad and deep, which is why rooting all of them out will take much longer than 2 years. The Malayan emergency that everyone loves quoting involved British Army troops fighting a scratch force of ethnic Chinese communists that never numbered more than a few thousand at any one time. This scratch force continued ambushing and killing military personnel for almost 2 decades after the British military left. Total time before complete collapse - 30 years. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-10-04 01:31 |