These "decapitation" operations have been on the increase over the past few years. The Taliban and al Qaeda have already figured out what is going on, and are increasingly paranoid when it comes to informers, using their own cell or satellite phones, and the sight of any unidentified aircraft in the area. The terrorists keep changing the way they meet and communicate, yet they keep getting killed. While the terrorists can replace leaders and technical specialists, they cannot replace them with people of equal skill and experience. And as they move into the shallow end of the talent pool, more mistakes are made. Al Qaeda operatives who have fled Iraq to Afghanistan, have noticed, and commented on, the lower level of technical expertise among their Afghan brothers. While most Iraqi terrorists were literate, and some even had formal technical training, most Afghans are illiterate, and any technical training they might have was acquired informally. This has led to more bombs that don't go off on cue, or, worse yet, explode while being worked on, or emplaced. This sort of thing will happen more, as the talent pool gets diluted. The terrorists have a nearly inexhaustible supply of gunmen and suicide bombers from the hundreds of pro-terror religious schools in Pakistan.
Just as civilian-based efforts to decouple the people from the insurgents and terrorists is necessary to win rather than relying on a pure military strategy to kill the enemy (mind you, military power is necessary to allow civilian efforts to work), even within the military component, killing the rabble gunmen is not enough to win militarily (mind you, when they attack you or go after the people, you have to kill them)--you have to get the leadership to make it impossible for the vast supplies of rabble recruits to be deployed.
The enemy has problems far worse than we have. They aren't ten feet tall. Stop acting like retreating in the face of these enemies is a wise policy designed to avoid getting our asses kicked.
