Lecture Seven - Decapitating Terrorist Leaders
Lecture Seven - Decapitating Terrorist Leaders
Hi class, and welcome to our lecture on a controversial approach to dealing with an equally controversial global political issue - conducting "decapitation" operations to kill or capture the leaders of terrorist organizations. In this lecture, we are specifically going to focus on the question of whether these operations work by examining the tangible effects they have on terrorist organizations.
Introduction
Introduction
Today's lecture is going to be based on an article by Patrick Johnston called "Does Decapitation Work?", which used a variety of statistical analyses to determine the effects of killing or capturing the senior leader or leaders of a terrorist organization.
Although governments have been conducting these kinds of operations for well over a century, they have recently become quite popular, especially with the Governments of the United States, Israel, and Russia. The killing of al-Qaida's leader, Osama bin Laden, in May twenty eleven, is definitely the most famous of these operations. However, it was just one of several hundred conducted by the Government of the United States since two thousand one, most of which have involved the use of remotely piloted aerial vehicles, or drones.
Indeed, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maintains one of the major, publicly available databases of drone strikes, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations carried out at least fifteen thousand twenty-six drone strikes against suspected members of terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia between two thousand two and twenty twenty, which killed between eight thousand seven hundred seventeen and sixteen thousand seven hundred twenty-eight people.
From these stats, it's hopefully clear to you that attempting to kill suspected terrorists has been a very popular strategy within the US Government during the early twenty-first century.
And, with this in mind, trying to figure out whether these operations are successful is an important endeavor because, if they aren't successful, then they would constitute a waste of resources. Moreover, if they aren't successful, then this means that, in the cases where they result in the death of a terrorist, let alone civilians, they have inflicted needless losses of life. On the other hand, if they are successful, then it's important for us to know why.