The Usefulness of Killing Leaders in Terrorist Networks

According to news reports, two Al Qaeda members were killed on New Year's Day by CIA directed unmanned airborne vehicles, commonly called "drones," on New Year's Day, in northwest Pakistan. Kenyan nationals Usama Al-Kini and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan had long rap sheets that included substantial roles in planning bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Swedan is also said to have been responsible for the 2002 bombing of the Kikambala hotel in Kenya, which killed 12 Israeli tourists. Targeting programs led by Special Operations forces have reportedly accelerated the number of Al Qaeda leaders in northwest Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is suspected of hiding.

The decision to target a group's leaders is based on the strategic calculation that it will weaken or even destroy the ability of a group to continue to execute attacks. This isn't necessarily true, though. Rather, it depends on how the organization is structured, and the relative role that a leader has in ensuring that an attack is executed.

In recent years, counterterrorism specialists have followed the broader intellectual trend of viewing organizations as horizontal networks rather than vertical hierarchies, whether these are workers in a firm, or members of a criminal or terrorist group. In a social network, the leader may not necessarily be the most important actor among those planning an attack. Networks are flat organizations, in which people are connected to others through different kinds of links (such as through kinship, or through membership in the same organization) with different degrees of strength and in different number.

In such an organization, authority can be spread out among different people, so that removing any one of them does not disrupt the activities of the larger system. Alternatively, isolated cells of a network may operate quasi-autonomously and be only loosely linked to other cells in the larger organization. Al Qaeda, a collection of organizations that may be connected in name only, has been notable for its decentralized quality.

So, whether targeting of leaders is an effective strategy remains to be seen. Joby Warrick, reporting on the January 1 strike in Pakistan for the Washington Post, notes that "Terrorism experts have cautioned that al-Qaeda has shown surprising resilience, quickly replacing leaders who are killed or captured." Stratfor, a private intelligence firm, makes the case that the "core" group associated with bin Laden has been "marginalized" and predicts that in 2009, "the bulk of physical attacks will continue to be conducted by regional jihadist franchise groups, and to a lesser extent by grassroots jihadists." In the view of Stratfor's analysts, groups will continue to organize attacks as long as the "ideology of jihadism" survives.

In my own view, it is questionable whether the organizing principle of "jihadi ideology" is useful to understand and counter various groups in different parts of the world, from Yemen to East Africa, to North Africa, to the Middle East and Central Asia. These different conflicts may assert jihadist intentions, but they are rooted in very different historical and political soil. Continuing to view them in meaningful relationship to bin Laden's Al Qaeda is a quiet way of perpetuating the idea that there is a central organization with a unified head, and tends to foreclose looking at the local circumstances of different small wars.

_{Image courtesy of Transportation Security Authority}