http://www.strategypage.com//fyeo/qndguide/default.asp?target=urbang.htm
TERRORISM: Al Qaeda Commits Suicide
May 5, 2005; In the last week, Islamic terrorist leaders in Algeria,
Palestine, Iraq and Pakistan were captured. Terrorists need leadership
to be effective. Take away the leadership and the deadly terrorists
become a lot of angry, noisy, but largely harmless, young men. Israel
demonstrated this last year, when they killed dozens of terrorist
leaders, and saw the number of terrorist attacks dwindle as the number
of dead terrorist leaders increased.
The terrorist groups cried foul, accusing Israel of "murder"
because they identified specific terrorist leaders, and then killed
them (or captured them, when that was possible.) The terrorists, of
course, would have preferred that the Israelis kill lots of civilians
while going after terrorist leaders. To them, it was "murder" to just
attack the guy who planned the murder of Israeli civilians, and then
supervised those killings.
The Israelis did it by expanding their informer network in the
Palestinian areas, and they did this because they have a lot of police
and security agents who speak Arabic.
Israel also has a force of police commandos, composed of men whose
ancestors came from Arab countries, and can pass for Arabs. These
commandoes can move, openly and undetected, through Arab
neighborhoods, to collect information, or make arrests. While some of
the informants cooperated because they wanted to stop the violence, in
many cases bribes and blackmail were used to get cooperation, and
information. What was unique here was that Israel was obtaining
information from a hostile population. In Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the informants came forward because
they had become disillusioned with, or hostile towards, the terrorist
groups. In all of those countries, the Islamic terrorists had made
themselves unpopular by killing Moslem civilians.
This is a pattern that has repeated itself time and again over the
last few generations. While terrorist groups can last 10-20 years
before fading away, if they kill enough of the people they depend on
for support, the terrorists will disappear a lot quicker. What usually
happens is that the government protects its own people and facilities
well enough that more and more of the terrorist attacks kill innocent
civilians. The media makes much of this, the terrorists have no
adequate response. Civilians begin to provide information about where
the terrorists are, and it goes downhill from there. This happened in
Egypt in the 1990s, and is happening now in Iraq.
Al Qaeda is particularly vulnerable because it preaches hate not just
against non-Moslems ("infidels"), but also against Moslems who do not
agree with the mainline Sunni brand of Islam. Thus in Afghanistan, the
Taliban, and their al Qaeda allies, persecuted Shia Moslems. In Iraq,
Saddam tolerated, and sometimes encouraged, hard line Sunni leaders
who preached the use of violence against Shias, just because they were
Shias. In Afghanistan, the fanaticism of al Qaeda and Taliban turned
most of the population against them. This was an interesting example
of how terrorists self-destruct even when they achieve their goal and
take over a country.
By definition, a terrorist terrorizes. That isn't hard to do in an age
of mass media, mass media always hungry for scary headlines and
stories of impending doom. But as a long term operation, terrorist
groups are a lost cause. The news of their indiscriminate murder
travels fast too, and dries up that minimal amount of grass roots
support they need to survive, and put together their next attacks.
While it's hard to tell who is winning in a war against terrorists,
when a lot of the terrorist leaders are getting killed or arrested,
the bad guys are not doing very well.
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