When at war, each side recruits to expand their force in order to generate enough power to win. The jihadis were fighting us in Iraq (remember, they took their eye of the Afghanistan ball and decided that Iraq would be their main fight after we overthew Saddam) and the fact of fighting us led them to escalate their efforts trying to win on that battlefield.
But the fight in Iraq is dramatically reduced with far fewer jihadis flocking to Iraq to kill. And this decline has persisted despite the fact that we are still in Iraq in large numbers. So why aren't jihadis flocking to Iraq if our presence in Iraq provides a boon to jihadi recruiting?
Strategypage has some information:
Iraqi intelligence has noted some interesting trends in Islamic terror attacks over the last two years (since the collapse of the major Islamic terror groups in the country.) Back in 2008, suicide attacks dropped over 80 percent, and have continued to decline since then. Despite the smaller number of attacks the surviving terrorist groups carry out, the terrorists are still having problems. For example, it's been increasingly difficult to get competent suicide bombers. From 2003-2007, there had been a large supply of foreign suicide bomber volunteers (from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Algeria and Morocco). But better security on the Syrian border, and fewer areas where the terrorists could establish safe houses, made it difficult to get the volunteers in and train them. But there were also fewer volunteers. Al Qaeda, and Sunni terrorism took a big image hit in 2005-2008, as it became clear throughout the Moslem would that even Iraqi Sunnis were hostile to the Islamic terrorists. It was also pretty clear that the volunteers were mainly killing civilians. All those videos of dead women and children had an effect. This was often in an indirect way. Many volunteers still wanted to come, but one reason they killed themselves was to win some respect back home. When it became more common, throughout the Arab world, to despise, not honor, the suicide bombers in Iraq, many potential volunteers thought better of dying for the cause (and being held in contempt back home, and bringing shame on his family.)Read it all. It has more on Iraq and some on how this all applies to Afghanistan. But this isn't complete, and I don't know why Strategypage didn't mention one important reason for the decline in jihadi recruits flocking to Iraq.
The missing reason--perhaps assumed and so basic for people used to thinking accurately about the war that they didn't see a reason to mention it--is that we won in Iraq.
It is one thing for a young Moslem man hopped up on jihadi snuff videos to commit to martyrdom when you think you might have your name inscribed on a monument to the new caliphate. But when you are just a DNA sample in a United States database gleaned from your smeared body parts that detonated outside the blast walls, killing nobody but your self? Well, perhaps you'll catch the next jihad, after all.
Winning does that. Yes, fighting an enemy--any enemy, including Islamists--does create more of the enemy. Enemy attacks on 9/11 inspired us to mobilize troops, and continued fighting in Iraq inspired us to enlarge our ground forces even more. Why didn't anyone notice that the jihadis fighting us just created more enemies for them? Nobody says that because saying that fighting just provokes the enemy misses the point.
The point of fighting isn't that we prevent the enemy from fighting us. The point is that we try to win to achieve an objective. While fighting may lead the enemy to recruit more and replace losses or even expand, continuing to fight in order to win eventually starts killing off the enemy and depressing their morale and recruiting ability. The enemy's losses aren't replaced. And existing fighters call it quits seeing their cause in decline. All of a sudden, martyrdom doesn't seem quite the good deal it did back when victory looked like a pretty likely outcome.
Before you know it, Allah isn't someone to die for.
