Al-Qaida sows seed of its own decline

[mgc1961]

There is a lot of reporting on how terrorist groups get started and how they develop, but very little about how they end. Obama administration officials have been saying for weeks that its drone attacks over the past year have got al-Qaida on the run, but experts say it isn't just drone attacks that are weakening al-Qaida. The group is defeating itself.

Al-Qaida is still a serious threat, and nothing could deny the fact the group is focused on attacking the U.S. any way it can. But if history is any guide, terrorist groups can eventually burn out.

The Ways A Group Can End

Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor at the National Defense University, lists the way such movements end.

"There are different ways that groups end, and those include decapitation, the capture or the killing of the leader," she said. "Sometimes negotiations can help lead to the end -- success which is, by the way, relatively rare; failure where groups lose popular support; and finally reorientation of the violence of a group."

In other words, the group comes to the conclusion that terrorist attacks aren't getting them any closer to their goal. That's basically what happened with the Irish Republican Army in the late 1990s. A car bombing carried out by an IRA splinter group in Omagh, Northern Ireland, in 1998 killed 29 people, including nine children. Cronin, who wrote a book called How Terrorism Ends, said that bombing sparked such outrage among the people of Northern Ireland that it gave impetus to the Good Friday peace talks.


More at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126228610

[zipplewrath]

1. 3 things

It helps tremendously if they can happen in concert.

1) The terrorists screw up. Bomb the wrong place, the wrong people, the wrong time, or anything along that line and it can "redefine" them as the folks doing the "wrong thing". These kinds of acts really undermined the '60s radicals in this country, and as the story said, undermined the IRA.

2) The money dries up. It actually takes alot of money to be terrorists on a 24/7 basis, and much of that money ends up paying to "protect" them from governments. It can lead to them being involved in relatively "common" criminal activites like gun running or the drug trade and ultimately that undermines their fund raising. Pretty soon they just become a common "gang" that occasionally does something political.

3) The issue dissolves or "morphs". Hard to work up alot of anger over violent Native America rights when they own the biggest casino in the state. Issues can pass the terrorists by. Often, attempts by the terrorists to "go mainstream" in some sense, or to go "legit", can take down the more violent aspects of their cause.

The biggest screw up that Bush made was given them the war they wanted. Ending both of them will do more than anything else to take away their purpose for being (item 3) and restrict their available funds (#2). They are already doing #1, and if we would stop doing it (bombing innocents) it will spell the beginning of the end.

[whattheidonot]

2. change

Al qaida stated goals of a strict conservative Islamic world will do them in. they do little good in the long run. once people have to live under them their problems would really start. Arabs have to defeat Al qaida , with our help, not the other way around. If AL Qaida is defeated in Iraq without us that is their end. We now provide a huge impetus for them. We cannot be seen to be actively fighting these wars. We cannot directly beat them.