Thom Shanker reports in yesterday's NYT that air strikes have been cut back in Afghanistan to avoid civilian casualties. This is a step in the right direction, as these attacks haven't done much to curtail the Taliban's operations but have earned the enmity of the civilian population. Of course, the Taliban propaganda machine's distortion and exaggeration of American attacks accounts for a good deal of the population's anger. But all the same, this is a good sign that the strategic big-picture is finally being valued over the short term tactical benefit of decapitation operations against cell leaders and commanders.
Even these operations, perhaps modeled after the Israeli practice, don't really work well. David Tucker of the Naval Postgraduate School has an interesting article in the June edition of Homeland Security Affairs arguing against decapitation of high-value targets and a greater focus on counterprofileration. While his criticism of Networks and Netwars is a little off-base, Tucker does show that Al Qaeda is not really a network of networks in the popular conception.
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