Counterterrorism Blog

The debate over whether the recently-killed Abu Azzam is really the second in command to Zarqawi in Iraq or an important figure in the insurgency, reminds me of how little we know of the internal structures of the enemy there, and, in a broader sense, of the al Qaeda network. Newsweek, along with my colleague Evan Kohlmann, are correctly pointing out that Azzam may not have been all he was portrayed to be by President Bush and U.S. military commanders.

Having covered conflicts and the war on drugs for two decades now, it is clear how unhelpful it is to repeatedly trumpet the supposed damage to an organization when one person is taken out of action. The closest parallel I find is in the drug wars, when first Pablo Escobar then other leaders of the Medellin cocaine cartel were taken down. Then the the leaders of the Cali cartel were killed or arrested, then the Northern Valley gangs were decapitated. At every step, the DEA and U.S. government would hail the actions as a major triumph, destined to end or greatly diminish drug trafficking. Yet, after each major killing or arrest the amount of cocaine entering the United States remained unchanged. New people would simply step into the breach. While each generation of traffickers was able to individually control less of the market, and each succeeding organization was small and less vertical in its structure, the aggregate amount of drugs they are able to produce and export did not diminish, and ultimately grew.

It seems to me there is a lesson here we have not learned in Iraq and with al Qaeda. In largely non-hierarchical structures, where highly-trained individuals are running small cells with interchangeable responsibilities and tasks, the loss of an individual is likely to matter less. The same is true in U.S. Special Forces and other elite units. What would damage the organization more than taking out a field commander would be to eliminate someone with a specific skill set, such as bomb-making, communications and internet expertise or document forgery, that would be hard and time consuming to replace. Go here to read complete blog.