Experts: 'Decapitation' May Not End Terror - Yahoo! News: "The Israeli assassins caught Abu Jihad in his study. They left the chief strategist of the Palestinian uprising with 170 bullets in his body. Over the next two decades, however, the movement only grew stronger, and Israel bled even more. It's called 'decapitation,' and a missile strike in Pakistan has raised the question anew: Would eliminating Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahri deal a mortal blow to the al-Qaida terror network?
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'Decapitation just fuels the movement itself,' says Jenna Jordan, a University of Chicago scholar who has closely studied the historical record of such antiterrorist tactics.
'I think that is the lesson of the Israeli efforts over the years,' says Brian Jenkins, veteran terrorism analyst with the RAND Corp. research firm.

The Pakistan case, where you have all those people killed, that's the kind of `bad press' that keeps a movement going," said Jordan, whose 2004 study reviewed 72 international cases, stretching back almost a century, in which militant movements' leaders were targeted and killed.
In most cases, she found, the movements carried on — particularly if they were religion-based, like al-Qaida. Only one in five violent religious groups collapsed when their leaders were eliminated, she determined.
"Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," said Richard A. Clarke, who was White House counterterrorism coordinator in 1998, when U.S. missiles were fired at suspected al-Qaida training camps in
Afghanistan' name=its leaders.
"There's no iron law," Clarke told The Associated Press. "But the law enforcement side, the intelligence side, will always want to eliminate the leadership."
One of the most spectacular "eliminations" occurred in 1988, when Israeli commandos slipped into Tunisia and stormed the exile home of the
Palestine Liberation Organization' name Palestine Liberation Organization's Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, the PLO's No. 2 and architect of the uprising that had exploded five months earlier in Israeli-occupied territories.
Abu Jihad was killed, but the "intefadeh" went on, and by the 1990s still more Palestinian groups had joined in, followed by still more decapitations. With the latest tracking technologies, the Israelis have successfully targeted top leaders of the Hamas group in particular
But, he quickly adds, 'that doesn't mean you don't do it.'
The Jan. 13 missile strike on a remote Pakistani border village showed again that the U.S. government is still trying to do it.
The early-morning attack, reportedly aimed at al-Zawahri, killed 13 villagers and possibly a few second-rank al-Qaida operatives � but not the bin Laden lieutenant. Its immediate impact could be seen in the streets of Pakistani cities, where thousands rallied, chanting 'Death to America,' in support of al-Qaida's 'jihad,' or holy war."