Well, we are using our special forces. And we're having great success:
The "fusion cells" are being described as a major factor behind the declining violence in Iraq in recent months. Defense officials say they have been particularly effective against AQI, which has lost 10 senior commanders since June in Baghdad alone, including Uthman.
Aiding the U.S. effort, the officials say, is the increasing antipathy toward AQI among many ordinary Iraqis, who quickly report new terrorist safe houses as soon as they're established. Fresh tips are channeled to fast-reaction teams that move aggressively against reported terrorist targets -- often multiple times in a single night.
"Wherever they go, they cannot hide," said a senior U.S. defense official familiar with counterterrorism operations in Iraq. "They don't have safe houses anymore."
The rapid strikes are coordinated by the Joint Task Force, a military-led team that includes intelligence and forensic professionals, political analysts, mapping experts, computer specialists piloting unmanned aircraft, and Special Operations troops. After decades of agency rivalries that have undermined coordination on counterterrorism, the task force is enjoying new success in Iraq with its blending of diverse military and intelligence assets to speed up counterterrorism missions.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said in a recent interview that the cells produce intelligence that nets 10 to 20 captures a night in Iraq.
The key is the inability of the enemy to find safe havens. And the enemy now has more difficulty replacing losses. This is the result of our conventional forces that atomized the enemy and kept them mostly out of the neighborhoods.
Our Left was always spouting idiocy by claiming that we could have abandoned the streets to al Qaeda and the Baathists and Mahdi Army thugs, and still fought al Qaeda with special forces raids. Remember that when we got Zarqawi, while it was a blow against the enemy, the enemy continued fighting since we had not yet knocked them down enough overall to put them on a death spiral.
Or look at Pakistan's frontier areas where we are limited right now to special forces and missile strikes:
A pickup truck packed with explosives blew up a police security checkpoint in northwestern Pakistan Saturday, killing at least 30 people and injuring dozens more, the day after a foiled militant kidnap attempt led to another 24 deaths in the volatile region.
The enemy's ability to generate new forces swamps what we can do with special forces and UAV strikes on their compounds. The area remains volatile and immune to the precision of special forces.
Ideally, counter-terror operations are police actions. Or less ideal, special forces operations. When we faced large numbers of insurgents, gangsters, and terrorists backed by large amounts of money and arms as we did in Iraq, we needed an army plus the other two elements.
Quality alone cannot trump quantity in a counter-insurgency/counter-terror fight. Consider this reality as we debate how to deal with Afghansitan and the Pakistan tribal areas.
