Topics: Terrorism, Drones, Osama Bin Laden, Politics News
Hillary Clinton holds a small U.S.-made drone that the Ugandan military uses in Somalia to fight al-Qaeda linked militants. (Credit: Reuters)Earlier this month, a CIA drone missile fired into a compound in a Pakistani village killed al-Qaida’s deputy leader, Abu Yahya al-Libi. The strike killed only Libi, but America’s targeted killings of terrorists and suspected militants have proven deeply controversial, both at home and abroad. So why does the Obama administration continue to rely on drones and targeted killings? Well, because they work.
That, at least, is the conclusion reached by two new studies in the journal International Security. Killing terrorist leaders is effective in destroying terrorist groups, suggest the papers, published by MIT Press. These findings contradict previous research and accepted wisdom that taking out terrorist leaders is either useless or, worse, an invitation to retaliation.
In the first article, the effects of leadership “decapitation” on 207 terrorist groups from 1970 to 2008 are cataloged. Of the 131 groups whose leaders were killed or captured, 70 percent are no longer in existence. Conversely, only 57 percent of the 76 organizations whose leaders weren’t successfully eliminated expired. “When the leadership of a terrorist group were decapitated, they ended sooner by a significant margin,” says the study’s author, Bryan C. Price, the incoming director of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. “If they were killed or captured during the first year, they were more than eight times more likely to” die out.
According to Price, the effectiveness of targeting terrorist leadership can be seen in the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden in May 2011. “I noticed al-Qaida, this media savvy group, took a month and a half to even respond to his death,” he says. “They were unprepared, and under [bin Laden’s successor] Ayman al-Zawahiri, they are far more disorganized.” A charismatic, transformational terrorist leader such as bin Laden is extremely difficult to replace, Price says. The trove of documents found in bin Laden’s compound show that he remained far more involved in the day-to-day activities of al-Qaida than most people had assumed.
The second International Security article examines 118 attempts to kill terrorist leaders in 90 counterinsurgency campaigns. Forty-six of those efforts successfully took out their intended targets. The numbers show that when leaders were removed, there was a 25- to 30 percent increase in the probability that the group would terminate, and a 30 percent boost in the chances of a government victory over the insurgency. “Contrary to the accepted wisdom within the academic-research realm, we see that when leaders are targeted, the terrorist campaigns end more quickly, and the frequency and lethality of their attacks go down,” says the study’s author, Patrick Johnston, a political scientist at the RAND Corp. “Simply put, leaders matter.”
Johnston believes his research has direct implications for the Obama administration. “You could certainly make the argument that there is evidence that the Obama administration’s approach has historically been effective,” he says. Killing and capturing terrorist leaders leads to organizations’ demise because it disrupts their operations, deprives them of particularly wealthy, skilled or charismatic individuals, and/or eliminates someone who successfully staked out a safe haven. “The bin Laden raid could easily have failed — many similar attempts by governments have failed — but because it succeeded, it hurts the organization in the long term.”
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