Let’s talk about the American way in the context of the assassination strategy used against the Taliban, for the last 8 years.
First, a simple fact: this strategy hasn’t worked worth a damn against the Taliban. They’re winning, the US is losing.
The argument for it would be that killing leaders messes up the Taliban. This is marginally true at best. Loss of a leader may cause a slight delay and occasional fights within the Taliban, but it doesn’t stop them from getting stronger and continuing to win.
Americans think that good leaders are hard to come by because modern America produces bad leaders regularly, and rarely produces even marginally competent leaders.
Or, to be more accurate, average leaders are not sufficient to make anything in America work because America is set up to force people to do the wrong thing and people who care about doing the right thing are systematically kept out and forced out if they make it in.
The Taliban doesn’t need brilliant leaders, all it needs is leaders able to execute its strategy, and its’ strategy is simple enough that your average leader can implement it, whereas the US strategy couldn’t be executed by a Napoleon.
Killing leaders at the cost of bombing weddings and funerals and killing civilians does not work in the context of counter-insurgency unless your strategy is scorched earth, which the US’s is not. There is also an opportunity cost to anys treategy.
This is the same strategy the Israelis have used for decades against the Palestinians and Hezbollah
You’ll notice that the problem has not gone away.
Americans think leaders matter far more than they actually do. In the context of an actual ideological movement with substantial popular support, there’s always another one. And, in fact, he’s somewhat more likely to be competent than whoever he replaced.
Take a look at the evolution of Hezbollah’s leadership to see how this works. The leadership keeps getting more competent, not less competent, as does the organization. The Israelis act as a nice Darwinian force, making sure the most able wind up on top and that strategies which don’t work end, because the people executing them die. Likewise the Taliban is more deadly now than it was 2 years ago, 2 years ago it was more deadly than 2 years before that, and so forth.
The war should have ended years ago, and the assassination strategy is not producing results.
But by all means, keep trying a strategy which hasn’t worked for 8 years. It’s the American way, if at first, second, third, fourth, tenth a strategy doesn’t work—do it harder. Doesn’t matter whether it’s taxes, warmaking, healthcare or anything else: the easy stupid way is always the right way, even after it hasn’t worked, over and over again.
Wonderful.
