RE: Meanwhile 31 Americans killed...
The only thing you can do with these terror organizations is what Colin Powell said we were going to in Iraq in 1991--cut off the head and kill the snake. Only we didn't.
These organizations tend to have three levels. One, the leader and his inner circle. Two, a group of bright guys--many of them western mercenaries--who plan the missions, move the money, do the technical stuff, make things possible. Three, the fanatics who actually carry things out.
Our strategy of winning hearts and minds is designed to cut off the flow of people to join group three. No can do. First, in any society where upward mobility is as hard as in the Middle East, there will always be people angry enough to listen to some idiotic line and go join a cause. Second, what we are doing actually drives the process to some extent. We go in and build a school and start teaching western ways and including girls as well as boys, and we think we're doing great because 90% of the people love us--but the other 10% call their friendly al-Qaeda recruiter.
There were two good reasons to go to Afghanistan--kill bin Laden and kill Mullah Omar. Ten years later, and who knows how many dollars and lives later, we're 1 for 2 and planning to leave. We supposedly had shots off drones (predators or their predecessors) at both during the first week of the war. Take both shots, kill them both, and come home. Which approach sends the stronger message to the next would-be Osama?
We're not there to occupy territory, build schools and bridges, and win the hearts of the people. We're there to kill the bad guys, let the people in charge know that if they don't behave we will come back to kill them, and leave. If your military objective includes getting the people to rise up against a dictator, you primary targets need to be 1) his palaces and any other symbols of his power and opulence, and 2) the secret police headquarters. We didn't do that in Iraq, and that's one of many reasons why why it turned into a quagmire.
There's one other advantage of focusing on the head of the snake. If the inner circle and group two decide that they don't want to be collateral damage, they bail on the guy. When that happens, the organization's capabilities are substantially reduced, and your chances of getting the big guy go up tremendously. I read an interesting article in the Sydney paper in the fall of 2003 (never saw anything about it in the US press). The author stated that after 9/11 many of the mercenary types (group two) figured that we were finally angry enough to really mean it, got spooked, and pulled out. But after they had realized that we were nothing but the same old paper tiger, they were starting to get back into the fray.
That's not the American way to fight. That's why we always lose these. We're not going to make the rest of the world like us. There will always be too much envy of us and our economy and the lifestyle it affords us--at least, I certainly hope so. But we can make them afraid to mess with us. And that's good enough.
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