The September 11, 2012 attacks at Benghazi, Libya, and in other countries on that day and shortly thereafter, were al Qaeda operations to remind everyone that al Qaeda isn't defeated:
In early November, Ayman al Zawahiri released a message addressed to Al Shabaab, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia. Al Shabaab had suffered setbacks in recent months, but Zawahiri urged the group to keep fighting. According to him, the “Crusaders” had been weakened. While he did not explicitly take credit for the embassy protest in Cairo or the attack in Benghazi, Zawahiri did cite them as “defeats” for the Americans.
“They were defeated in Iraq and they are withdrawing from Afghanistan, and their ambassador in Benghazi was killed and the flags of their embassies were lowered in Cairo and Sanaa, and in their places were raised the flags of tawhid [monotheism] and jihad,” Zawahiri said, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group. “After their consecutive defeats, they are working from behind agents and traitors,” the al Qaeda chieftain continued. “Their awe is lost and their might is gone, and they don’t dare to carry out a new campaign like their past ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Iraq and Afghanistan were but flesh wounds. They argue we've had enough.
It is true that the jihadis are not defeated, as in finally destroyed and unable to regenerate their capabilities from supporters in the Moslem world if left alone to rebuild. But they have suffered defeats that have made them less effective.
We aren't at war with a state that can be fought until they are defeated, admit they are defeated, and agree to end the war. Iraq in the 1980s showed that killing religious fanatics in large numbers can in fact eventually demoralize them and lead them to abandon the fight. By 1988, calls for volunteers went unanswered by Iranians and demands for those in uniform to fight to the death were not heeded. Killing fanatics works where arguments fail.
But without the ability to kill the foot soldiers of their jihad, and without their ability to accept--or admit--defeat after setbacks, we can only go after the smaller leadership class of the jihad.
But these guys are loonies. They are fully capable of believing that simply surviving is a victory. Dead jihadis on the field of battle are but a scratch. The obvious solution is to kill them, which makes arguments moot.
Our drones are becoming a major weapon for this task, assuming we have the intelligence based on people on the ground and cooperation from foreign countries:
Drones enable the U.S. military — which, regarding drones, includes the CIA; an important distinction has been blurred — to wield a technology especially potent against al-Qaeda’s organization and tactics. All its leaders are, effectively, military, not civilian. Killing them serves the military purposes of demoralizing the enemy, preventing planning, sowing confusion and draining the reservoir of experience.
Most U.S. wars have been fought with military mass sustained by economic might. But as Yoo says, today’s war is against a diffuse enemy that has no territory to invade and no massed forces to crush. So the war cannot be won by producing more tanks, army divisions or naval forces. The United States can win only by destroying al-Qaeda’s “ability to function — by selectively killing or capturing its key members.”
Drones would be less than key in a war against a state since a state's armed forces could shoot them down and disrupt our intelligence efforts to provide the information needed for strikes. Despite being non-state actors, jihadis must operate in states.
Those states may be hostile to us or simply unable to police their own territory. Right now we need the cooperation of these states to be really effective. We have to be prepared to wage war on the jihadis even without cooperation of these states:
Where a country's government does not or cannot control all their territory, we should declare areas "free of control" by a national government and therefore deprive the non-state actor from hiding behind the nominal legal government when they are attacked on their de facto territory that the non-state actor rules.
Of course, our military would have a role in keeping a state that hosts jihadis--either enthusiastically or reluctantly--from resisting our drone efforts by using their own military forces.
The jihadi leaders keep yelling that we're yellow and that they'll get us yet. We can't lop off all their limbs. Let's decapitate the body of rage that seeks to kill us. If the desire to kill has no guidance, it's much easier to avoid being attacked.
In the end, final victory will require the Moslem world to delegitimize jihad against us and to control their own people to prevent them from waging jihad. But until that day arrives, we have to at least keep the jihadis from organizing enough to kill us.
This war was always going to be a long one. Just because we aren't fighting it in Iraq and will soon no longer be fighting it in Afghanistan with lots of troops doesn't mean the war is over or that we don't need to fight the jihadis.
Killing the jihadi leaders is at least within our capabilities now. I may worry that the Obama administration is too eager to end the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq prematurely (in whatever form we need to fight them), giving our jihadi enemies hope that we are too tired to fight, but at least the president is ready to use the drones to keep fighting.
