"Killing Individual Al Qaeda Operatives Won't Kill the Network."
It will if you keep it up. In 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked his military commanders, "Are we capturing, killing, or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?" As terrorism grew in Iraq and elsewhere, the answer seemed a resounding no -- U.S. forces killed or captured so many al Qaeda No. 3s that it became a running joke. Indeed, the conventional wisdom in some circles has become that killing terrorist leaders is eventually fruitless if the underlying political grievances that gave rise to violence are not solved.
If terrorists are killed or arrested on a large scale, however, the effect can be devastating. There will always be plenty of people who hate the United States and want to take up arms. But without bombmakers, passport forgers, and competent leaders, those angry young men will be little more than semi-dangerous bumblers, easy to disrupt and often more of a threat to themselves than to their enemies -- just ask Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the erstwhile "underwear bomber."
It's been done before, and not just to al Qaeda. Israel used an aggressive arrest and killing campaign in the Second Intifada to devastate Palestinian terrorist groups. At first, killing terrorist leaders seemed only to inflame hatred, and revenge attacks were common. But the terrorist groups lost their most skilled personnel, and the younger and less-seasoned replacements made foolish mistakes that set the groups back even more. Five years into the intifada, groups like Hamas sought a ceasefire. Their hatred of Israel remained as strong as ever, but they had lost too many leaders to function effectively.
The U.S. drone campaign against al Qaeda, begun under Bush and put on steroids under President Barack Obama, has achieved similar results, taking out dozens of al Qaeda figures, most of them in Pakistan. All were far less prominent than bin Laden, but their skills were in short supply. Al Qaeda found it hard to find seasoned and skilled new leaders -- and even when it could, it took time to integrate them into the organization. A subtler but even more important result of the drone war was the change it affected on al Qaeda's communications. Lieutenants have been forced to limit their communications to prevent U.S. eavesdropping that could lead to airstrikes; reduce their circle of associates to avoid spies; and avoid public exposure, all of which make them far less effective leaders. This, in turn, makes it harder -- though not impossible -- for them to pull off sophisticated attacks that require long-term planning.
All of this suggests that bin Laden's death may make the terrorist organization less dangerous and less relevant. Much will depend, however, on seizing the momentum of the moment. For now, the United States looks strong, and it can use this credibility to back the democratic uprisings of the Arab Spring, a popular alternative to al Qaeda's bleak, bloody vision of the future of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, drone strikes and aggressive intelligence efforts are necessary to keep al Qaeda's base from recovering -- because if history is any guide, it will undoubtedly try.
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