Do "Targeted" US Killings Of Militant Leaders Work? Not So Much
By Tyler Durden
When Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed recently in a US drone strike, we noted that experts cautioned that it would make local insurgents even less likely to participate in long-stalled peace efforts, and it would likely lead to an escalation of Taliban retaliation efforts.
Mullah Akhtar Mansour, Taliban militants’ leader
The key question around the US killings of militant leaders is do they even work? This is something the Wall Street Journal also pondered in a recent piece on just how effective US strikes on leaders of militant groups are in the long run.
On one hand, it does appear as though the killing of Osama bin Laden has hurt Al Qaeda; on the other, the killing of Mansour may not have much of an impact at all on the Taliban.
From the WSJ
Both the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and the targeting of Mullah Mansour on a Pakistani road were major successes for U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon.
Al Qaeda’s central command, a relatively tight international terror network now led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been in decline since bin Laden’s death. It has been unable to fully recover from the blow or to mount major attacks against the West.
But the experience is less encouraging for wide-scale insurgencies such as the Afghan Taliban. While such decapitations can provide a short-term gain, they rarely change the course of the conflict—and frequently backfire if not accompanied by a much broader, resource-intensive involvement of a kind the White House has been loath to pursue.
Unlike al Qaeda, the Taliban enjoy support from a significant swath of the Afghan population. The group’s military advances in 2013-15 weren’t impeded by the fact that its leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was secretly dead at the time, or by the assassinations of scores of commanders.
In announcing Mullah Mansour’s death, President Barack Obama said his killing “gives the people of Afghanistan and the region a chance at a different, better future.”
That optimistic assessment isn’t shared by many, in the region or in the U.S., who closely follow the Taliban.
“I don’t think it will weaken the Taliban, and it may strengthen them,” said Barnett Rubin, a former U.S. State Department official who worked on peace negotiations with the Taliban and who is now associate director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.
As we warned the death – which carried the added “benefit” of further infuriating Pakistan which accused the US of violating its sovereignty with the mission – will make peace talks next to impossible, while pushing the militants to an even more extreme fringe.
It is also far from certain that removing Mullah Mansour would make such peace talks—an avowed U.S. goal—any easier to resume.
The minister of aviation in the pre-2001 Taliban government, Mullah Mansour belonged to the original generation of Taliban leaders, was involved in the political outreach, and could influence field commanders. His successor named on Wednesday, Maulavi Haibatullah, is believed to represent a …read more
Source: Do "Targeted" US Killings Of Militant Leaders Work? Not So Much
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