#WTH The problem with killing terrorists

It doesn't kill the idea

There are hard conversations to be had on the killings of Ismail Haniyeh, the late Hamas leader, and Fuad Shukri, a very senior Hezbollahi who also met his end this summer. Not hard because there is some moral question involved; these were murderers, with American as well as Israeli blood on their hands. Difficult because there is no strategy to truly eliminate Hamas or Hezbollah, Israeli protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

The position that the Israelis find themselves in is not unlike the American quandary vis à vis al Qaeda and ISIS. We have killed Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, Anwar al Awlaki, and innumerable others whose names are forgotten to history. Each such targeted killing is a triumph of intelligence, persistence, and military know-how. What it isn’t is a systematic effort to degrade and destroy al Qaeda, ISIS, or any other Salafi group we take on. Killing the boss is very satisfying, and a nudge and a wink to let the bad guys know we see them; but it isn’t eliminating the group.

This is the problem with Hamas and Hezbollah (and more broadly, their puppetmasters in Iran). It’s great to humiliate the Iranians by killing Haniyeh on their territory, and to watch poor old Ayatollah Khamenei’s eyes scan the skies nervously when he’s outdoors. But it doesn’t eliminate the group they lead or seriously harm their prospects of reconstituting themselves when things calm down.

There’s been a lot written about this problem over the years, and more will likely appear soon as we watch ISIS and al Qaeda grow to new strengths throughout Africa, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And there’s very little agreement about how to tackle the problem of Salafism at its root. People like Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Donald Trump like the idea of extrajudicially offing creeps and then sitting back down to watch reruns of The West Wing or The Apprentice. But this whack-a-mole counter-terrorism policy is nothing more than tactical.

For the Israelis, they will knock off Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s new honcho, and perhaps they’ll eventually lure the chicken-hearted Hassan Nasrallah from his Hezbo-hidey-hole. But these groups have tens of thousands of supporters, many of whom are willing to kill and to die. This Hamas is not mark I, or even mark II.

Here’s the issue: You can’t beat something with nothing. The main rival to Hamas is the Palestinian Authority, a bare improvement on people who like to behead infants. The main rival to Hezbollah in Lebanon is no one. The main rival to the Muslim Brotherhood is secular tyranny — Egypt’s Sisi, Syria’s Assad, and others. Salafis must be beaten at their own game, which is ideology. And we, like the Israelis, stink at that.

In the wake of the end of the Cold War and the rise of the 9/11 cohort of terrorists, there were hopes in the Bush administration and elsewhere that Salafism could be neatly substituted for Communism, and we’d be off to the races for the next ideological war. That didn’t happen, in part because America isn’t very good at that kind of war. At least, we aren’t anymore.

There are a slew of problems for Americans, not least of them the growth of the flag-burning pro-Palestine, America-hating generation. These, after all, are the people who made Osama bin Laden’s letter to America go viral. SMH. The other problem is that Communism was a secular, godless ideology in an era when we felt comfortable with American greatness. In addition, we weren’t required to battle Russian Orthodoxy, or quaintly keffiyed imams, or bearded men of God. The politburo was easy in comparison.

Americans don’t like telling self-appointed religious leaders that their vision is garbage, their aims are terroristic, and that they ought to be more like us. To me, this is stupid, but there it is. Are we better? Well, if you like religious freedom, democracy, women’s rights, a free press, and all that jazz, then, um, yes. But generations of Foreign Service officers and their timid political commissars don’t like to suggest that somehow our way is better, even in the face of murderous ideologies that rape, kill, and desecrate.

Absent a genuine battle for the hearts and minds of Hamasniks, Hezbollahis, Houthis, and all the fellow travelers of the Muslim Brotherhood, this war will be endless. There must be alternatives for the Islamic world that rest somewhere between corrupt Sisis and fanatical ayatollahs. The fact that the United States, Europe, and Israel are not even thinking about taking on Salafism, that we have not engaged with our friends in the Arab world who perceive the same threat, and that this battle is 100 percent military suggests a failure of imagination that will have fatal results.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t miss Haniyeh or bin Laden, and I won't miss Sinwar. But we can’t kill everyone. At some point, we need to win.