ArgumentsKilling Terrorist Leaders Gets Attention, But It Doesn’t Stop Terrorism

For nearly two decades, American leaders have stressed the need to address the root causes of terrorism. More often, though, they focus on something else: killing terrorists.

Kathy Gilsinan writes in Defense One that

Much like the end of the territorial caliphate, Baghdadi’s death won’t end the group as a whole, or the threat it poses. The so-called kingpin strategy of pursuing terrorist leaders to defeat the groups they lead has had mixed results historically. In some cases, a group simply carries on with a designated successor, like al-Qaeda under Ayman al-Zawahiri following the death of bin Laden; in others, the death of a leader can fracture a terrorist group into violent, competing factions, as has been observed among some Mexican drug cartels. When the kingpin strategy “works” to end a terrorist group, the terrorism scholar Audrey Kurth Cronin has written, it tends to be in groups that are “hierarchically structured, young, characterized by a cult of personality, and lacking a viable successor.”

ISISis young but famously loose in its structure; to the extent Baghdadi did enjoy a cult of personality, it may have faded with the loss of land, because much of the group’s propaganda appeal came from holding territory. By the time he died, Baghdadi was a caliph without a caliphate.

His real operational role is, moreover, unclear. Bin Laden, who died in a similar special-operations raid into Pakistan in 2011, did offer direction and guidance to al-Qaeda from hiding, as documents recovered from his compound after his death show. But Baghdadi, rumored to have been killed or injured numerous times before yesterday’s announcement, spent his last years on the run, reportedly with very little contact outside a small circle of people, avoiding the modern communications technology the group was otherwise famous for exploiting, for fear that cellphones could give away his location.

So why does the United States pour so many resources and risk so many lives in pursuit of such dubiously effective ends?

“The kingpin strategy provides instant gratification, and of course [addressing] root causes is something … that takes years if not decades,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Long-term investments in, say, political reform in the Sahel are not going to yield the kinds of results campaign ads are made of. The words Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead speak to an immediate and tangible achievement, as well as a kind of justice.

There is also a “threat-mitigation” factor in the moment, said Nicholas Rasmussen, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center. Even when striking at a terrorist leader worsens underlying conditions, for instance by incurring civilian casualties, doing so may still be a rational choice in the face of an imminent threat. You could stop the hunt for terrorist leaders in, say, Yemen, and focus on conflict resolution and political reform. “In the meantime,” Rasmussen says, “I hope there’s no underwear bombs.”

Gilsinan adds:

The other problem is that there is no one root cause of terrorism, and some of the ones policy makers pointed to early after the September 11 attacks, such as poverty, have, research shows, turned out not to be strong drivers of terrorism at all. Even when a likely root cause is identified—civil war is strongly correlated with terrorism, for instance—what does “addressing” it mean? The Iraqi insurgency and the Syrian civil war helped drive the rise of ISIS; building peace in such contexts is a much more difficult and long-term proposition than even the most dangerous and complicated special-operations raid against a high-value target.