A Bad Week for al Qaeda

Several key AQ personalities met their fates last week. Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior operations officer was destroyed in the FATA. One of the best open sources for counter-terrorism information, The Long War Journal, reports Abu Ali al Harithi, a leader in AQ in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed in Yemen. And Harun Fazul, who has been on FBI’s most wanted list for his role in the 1998 East African embassy bombings, apparently pissed off the wrong folks at a check point in Mogadishu. Life by the gun, die by the gun.

How or who killed these scumbags doesn’t matter. What is important is that constant pressure is maintained on all aspects of the network following the death of UBL. Keeping their operational planners and talking heads in survival mode is the best way to prevent further major attacks on America and our allies.

Despite these positive developments, al Qaeda maintains safe havens in North and East Africa, Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, while pockets of true believers reside untouched in a few other places, and yes, even on US soil. It’s unfortunate that we’ve wasted nearly a decade on a variety of ineffective measures, most of which have done little to weaken al Qaeda. During this time we’ve learned that tap-dancing with corrupt leaders and pumping billions of US taxpayer dollars in foreign aid (much of which makes its way into their offshore bank accounts) while they ignore the very conditions that allow terrorist safe havens to persist in their countries doesn’t work. We now know that our own legal system is mostly too paralyzed by indecision to bring captured terrorists to justice so it’s just easier to kill them on the battlefield, wherever that may be. We understand that there are less costly (in lives, money, and prestige) and better ways to eliminate groups of terrorists than massively expensive wholesale conventional military occupations. Despite numerous efforts, we realize that attempts at public diplomacy, strategic communication, and de-radicalization are futile against an enemy whose core beliefs are not negotiable nor compatible with a free society. And we’ve discovered that inane flying policies and TSA feeling up our children makes for great security theater but only entices the terrorists to become more creative in disrupting our economy and liberty. One hopes that what we have learned is that the best way to defeat al Qaeda and its adherents is to rapidly attrite leadership and key facilitators to the point of collapsing the network to irrelevancy and discouraging those who might want to emulate them. Keep on pressing.

The opinions and views expressed in this post are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense, the US Navy, or any other agency.