SINCE the emergence of Osama bin Laden as the terrorist leader-in-chief of the 9/11 attacks, a significant chunk of the US military effort in the subsequent war on terror has been devoted to his capture. Over the past decade, every leader in the US, from presidents to army chiefs to heads of intelligence have vowed to capture him.

The fixation on Bin Laden’s capture has in fact become the cornerstone of US counter-terrorism strategy. Whether it is Predator drone attacks or targeted killings, the underlying assumption is that eliminating the leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban is the recipe to ridding the region of terrorist activity and achieving a victory for the United States.

Echoing this theme, both Defence Secretary Robert Gates and CIA chief Leon Panetta have, in public statements, lauded the use of drone warfare for their ability to eliminate the Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership without infantry incursions into Pakistani territory. The number of eliminated leaders as proof of the value of the drone programme has been repeatedly cited.

On April 14, 2010, the Los Angeles Times further said that senior officials at the Pentagon had reported that the number of elite special operations forces in Afghanistan had been nearly doubled in recent weeks in targeted operations to eliminate the mid-level Taliban leadership. According to the article, officials contended that stepped-up targeted operations had already eroded much of the Taliban leadership.

To add to the saga of dwindling terrorist masterminds, the capture of a host of Al Qaeda and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan leaders by Pakistani security forces has been lauded by the US as signs of crucial progress in the effort to defeat, disrupt and dismantle Al Qaeda.

Another example of the unwavering belief in the utility of targeted assassinations as a means to eliminate and cripple terrorist organisations is the Obama administration’s recent authorisation of the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US citizen and civilian. Officials issuing the announcement described Awlaki as “a proven threat” who “was being targeted” even though he is in Yemen.

Representative Jane Harman, chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, further stated that Awlaki was a “No. 1 terrorist threat” while admitting that going after him “would be complicated” since he was a US citizen. Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal advisor, hastily provided a defence of the extension of the targeted killing strategy to US citizens by referring to Awlaki as a “belligerent who was a lawful target under international law”, drawing analogies with the targeting of the bomber of Pearl Harbour during the Second World War.

The objections of defence analysts in Pakistan and elsewhere who have tried to draw attention to the possibility that simply killing the seemingly endless stream of supposed leaders may not be an effective extermination strategy has largely fallen on deaf ears among those intent on quantifying success by counting the heads of dead Al Qaeda and Taliban members.

A recent study cited in a New York Times article by Robert Wright posed this very question, and found that “leadership decapitation” is a dubious strategy at best. According to the study, published by the journal Security Studies, elimination of leaders in “religious-based” organisations such as Al Qaeda was only 17 per cent effective in actually causing the collapse of the organisation. Particularly notable is the fact that if nothing was done, the chances of the group just fading away increase to about 33 per cent.

The study, which looked at nearly 248 cases of leadership elimination from 1945-2004, concludes that targeting leaders may possibly strengthen rather than weaken religious-based organisations. The conclusion of the study states that killing leaders may actually increase the chances of survival of that particular group from 67 per cent to 83 per cent, boost its popularity and provide other strategic advantages.

These revelations are unlikely to change the direction of US strategy in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. Indeed, commentators in Pakistan have repeatedly been drawing attention to how the elimination of those at the top, be they of the TTP or Al Qaeda, does little to eliminate the ideological appeal of these organisations or harm their operational capacity.

On the issue of drones, much attention has been drawn to the fact that the high number of civilians killed makes the actual elimination of leaders worthless in terms of increasing public sympathy for those killed. Finally, as stated by Gary Hart, a member of a US Senate committee to investigate US intelligence services, a study of nearly five official US plots to kill foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende reveals that each plot worked terribly for the United States as a policy and strategic issue, and caused incalculable damage to the nation’s prestige and ideals.

Despite the ominous warnings of history and scholarship, US military and civilian officials remain convinced that eliminating leaders is the key to defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Media reports of captured leaders paraded before a war-weary American public provide definitive evidence of victory in an expensive war and promote the popular belief that eliminating individual terrorists is delivering actual safety to the American citizen.

Similarly, such a strategy allows Pakistani security officials a strategic means to extract bounties from the United States so long as an uninterrupted stream of dead leaders is being delivered. Such a dynamic, with Pakistanis delivering terrorists to US leaders who must satisfy the American public’s boundless desire for imagined safety, creates a lurid supply-and-demand mechanism for terrorist leaders that has little to do with the actually elimination of terrorism or the dismantling of organisations that promote it.

Thus facilitated by the Osama myth, Pakistan and America’s stagnant military organisations continue to believe that the hunt, kill or capture method will eliminate the enemy. In the meantime, the organisations continue to replenish their ranks with new recruits, creating scores of new leaders to replace old ones as new Osamas and Baitullahs continue to evolve.

The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional history and political philosophy.