Ackerman, You Seem to Be Diminishing the Significance of the Mehsud Killing

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A long, dispassionate attempt to analyze the importance of AMZ’s in the unraveling of AQI would be pretty fruitless. Clearly he was one of the network nodes whose elimination furthered the cause. I would argue that if he hadn’t been killed, AQI’s unravelling would have been impossible. His killing was of extreme symbolic significance to those who were sitting on the fence. In addition to that, he was clearly very good at organizing and enforcing discipline. So his death weakened the network in practical ways.

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What I think is a more eloquent way of phrasing my earlier point is that killing the head of the snake is an important element in the elimination of the network. One single hellfire will never solve the problem in and of itself. But the Hellfire that got Mehsud (allegedly) was, I believe, the single most important Hellfire that’s been fired since 9/11.

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On the other hand, the Pakistani Taliban is a very different beast than AQI, al Shabab, etc. We will never “eliminate the network”–it’s the clan-based network that is the way of life there. BM turned that network into a very effective killing machine that–I believe–was a legitimate threat to the government of Pakistan. He has many willing lieutenants who will try to take his place, but he was VERY good at leadership. There’s a good chance that, if handled correctly by the Pakistani government, his death really will be turned into a peace pact with the Mehsud tribe and a veritable end to the Pakistani Taliban as a legitimate threat to Pakistani democracy.

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Ironically, if this happens, it makes the U.S. job harder in Afghanistan. If the insurgency ends in Pakistan, the motivation for the Pakistani government to continue to police the border areas will decline dramatically. That ends the hope that the Pakistani army will somehow fix Afghanistan’s problem. And the Mehsudi clan will stop fighting against itself and the Pakistani government and put all of their focus on fighting over the border.

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Nevertheless, the big prize is Pakistan, not Afghanistan. And a world without BM makes Pakistan as a sovereign democracy significantly safer.

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In regards to Abdullah’s comments: I agree with you that BM was in a bad way at the time of his alleged death. His support was down and he was getting hurt badly by the drone strikes and the Pakistani air force strikes. But if he had survived and played his cards right, he could have quickly regained his power and then some. His power base on Wednesday was significantly diminished. But he still represented a tremendous threat while still alive.