WASHINGTON — Gen. John Allen, the retired Marine who is coordinating the campaign against the Islamic State, gave an upbeat briefing to Congress last week. He said that because of airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition, the group has “lost half of its Iraq-based leadership and thousands of hardened fighters.”
“Decapitation” is the graphic term for this strategy of killing leaders of terrorist groups. The U.S. adopted this approach against al-Qaeda, most dramatically in the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, and many American analysts have assumed that it worked. President Obama made that argument a centerpiece of his 2012 re-election campaign.
But a skeptical caution about the efficacy of targeting top leaders comes from Jenna Jordan, an assistant professor at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She first distilled her critique in a 2009 article in Security Studies titled, “When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation.”
“Decapitation is not an effective counterterrorism strategy,” Jordan wrote bluntly. She said “decapitation is more likely to have counterproductive effects in larger, older, religious and separatist organizations.”
Al-Qaeda’s deadly persistence, in morphed affiliates and offshoots like the Islamic State, is a warning that eradicating a terrorist group is as hard as killing cancer. The Islamic State arose from the embers of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group that had seemed to be all but destroyed by the U.S. troop surge in 2007 and 2008. Its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed, but his reincarnation in the Islamic State’s “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appears even more toxic.