Israel Shows How to Defeat Terrorism the Smart Way

The best approach to winning the struggle against terrorism isn’t by killing them, rather by getting them to kill each other

Can you defeat terrorism by killing terrorists? This simple-sounding question, which sounds so obvious as to be silly, is nevertheless vexingly difficult to answer with precision. Killing off the occasional terror mastermind – for instance Imad Mughniyeh in 2008 or Qasem Soleimani in 2020, as we discussed in the last newsletter – obviously diminishes terrorist proficiency. But they get replaced. The cemeteries, after all, are filled with indispensable people.

The United States thinks killing terrorists helps defeat terrorism. Since 9/11, the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense together have assassinated thousands of jihadists from multiple terror organizations, all over the world. We’re still doing it today, although at a much slower pace than during Barack Obama’s presidency. Drones firing missiles are the American weapon of choice for such assassinations. They look clean, from a distance, they don’t put American lives at risk, moreover they terrify the enemy. Jihadists call it “the hand of Allah” when that drone flying thousands of feet above you that you can’t see or hear, fires a missile and the earth all around you explodes in a flash of fire and metal, without warning.

Despite good intelligence and lawyerly rules of engagement that are designed to minimize civilian casualties, it’s inevitable that innocents get killed by what the Pentagon politely terms “collateral damage.” To say nothing of the screw-ups that inevitably accompany humans with weapons. Real-time multidisciplinary targeting intelligence cannot lift the fog of war entirely. That’s how we got the vaporization of the Ahmadi family, which lost ten members, seven of them children, when they were hit by a U.S. drone’s missile during our shambolic bugout from Kabul in August 2021. It was simply a mistake, the wrong target. Nevertheless, Washington still uses armed drones to fight terrorism, and Uncle Sam presumably will keep doing this – at least until others get in on the act and a Chinese drone incinerates Richard Gere as he drives through Beverly Hills for his support for Tibetan separatism, which is deemed terrorism by Beijing.