Establishment counterterror analyst Max Abrahms, who recently revealed himself to be yet another in a seemingly endless series of arrogant pseudo-academic puffballs (a series that also includes Joseph Lumbard, Mia Bloom, Christine Fair, Omid Safi, and of course, Reza Aslan), reaches a new low in this Wall Street Journal piece featuring a gaggle of establishment “terror experts” seriously wondering if the U.S. should take out “militant leaders.” A former State Department wonk, Barnett Rubin, says of the killing of the Taliban’s Mullah Akhtar Mansour: “I don’t think it will weaken the Taliban, and it may strengthen them.” Then a bit farther along in the piece, the learned Max weighs in with this: “When a leader of a militant group has been taken out, the group tends to become even more extreme.”
Of course. The Taliban were just sitting around puffing cigars and playing bocce until Mullah Mansour was killed. But now we’ve gone and made the poor dears angry. Who knows what they might do now? They might even target a security team protecting government VIPs, murdering at least 28. Or respond with rocket fire to an invitation to negotiate. Or launch a new wave of jihad attacks in Kabul.
Oh, wait, my bad: they did those things in recent months, before Mullah Mansour was killed. What will they do now? More of the same: attacks on American troops, attacks on Afghan government forces. They are at war, and now they will have to prosecute that war without the strategic expertise and inspiration of Mullah Mansour. Anytime a group loses a major leader, it can only weaken the group, unless that leader was completely incompetent. Rubin’s assumption is that Afghans who didn’t support the Taliban will become “radicalized” by the U.S. killing of Mansour, and will join them when they otherwise would not have done so. That line of reasoning, followed out to its logical conclusion, would lead us never to fight back against those who are at war against us, for to do so will only strengthen enemy recruitment. That is what Abrahms is counseling as well: if we don’t want the Taliban to become “even more extreme,” we better not kill their leaders. We should instead leave them alive to…plot the killings of Americans.
Abrahms is counseling surrender and defeat. And he is a mainstream “terrorism theorist.” No wonder we’re in the fix we’re in.
“Do U.S. Killings of Militant Leaders Work?,” by Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2016:
Killing leaders of Islamist militant groups, such as the Saturday strike on Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour, has long been a signature strategy of the Obama administration—an alternative to massive troop deployments overseas.
But how effective are those “decapitations” in the long run? The verdict is far from clear and, to an extent, depends on the size and cohesion of the targeted group….
But the experience is less encouraging for wide-scale insurgencies such as the Afghan Taliban. While such decapitations can provide a short-term gain, they rarely change the course of the conflict—and frequently backfire if not accompanied by a much broader, resource-intensive involvement of a kind the White House has been loath to pursue.
Unlike al Qaeda, the Taliban enjoy support from a significant swath of the Afghan population. The group’s military advances in 2013-15 weren’t impeded by the fact that its leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was secretly dead at the time, or by the assassinations of scores of commanders.
In announcing Mullah Mansour’s death, President Barack Obama said his killing “gives the people of Afghanistan and the region a chance at a different, better future.”
That optimistic assessment isn’t shared by many, in the region or in the U.S., who closely follow the Taliban.
“I don’t think it will weaken the Taliban, and it may strengthen them,” said Barnett Rubin, a former U.S. State Department official who worked on peace negotiations with the Taliban and who is now associate director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University….
Social scientists who examined the effect of such decapitations on militant groups have found little empirical evidence that the killings advance U.S. goals. One of these researchers is Max Abrahms, a scholar of terrorism at Northeastern University.
“When a leader of a militant group has been taken out, the group tends to become even more extreme,” he said. “When militant groups are placed under duress, there is also greater chance that they will decentralize, sometimes by splitting.”…

concerned canadian says
I love how buddy is standing there arms folded.
Like he is bad ass and smart.
He must “know” the secret !
jihad3tracker says
Hello CC —- Robert usually finds superb pictures of those he writes about, photos that show the essence of such morons. By the way, Max Abrahms should fall to his knees in fervent prayer every night, begging God to keep him kilometers away from Muslims with functioning erectile appendages.
If a cute goat is not close at hand, this eminent terrorism theorist would be a perfect substitute — and for a hilarious vivid reference, find the movie “Deliverance” and its “Squeal like a pig!” scene, in which actor Ned Beatty unfortunately bumps into a country boy with outdoor romance on his mind.
Carmel says
If you want a basic body language lesson , I can tell this .
Peoples crosse their arms one way or the other and they stick to it all their life once it is choosen, unconsciuously.
This man is probably a right -handed man . First , it is useful to know that 85 % of the people are right -handed and 15 % are left -handed and that it seems it has always been like that when archeologists can see in old cemetary .
When you are looking to a right -handed person , if that person has the right arm over the left arm , this person has an offensive personality. If this person , right -handed again, this person is rather a defensive person.
Knights (right -handed) used to have the sword in the right hand and the shield in the left one.
Left-handed peoples, man or woman , if they cross right on left are defensive and if they cross left on right , they are offensive peoples.
As one might notice, Barry Soetero , is a left-handed man . He crosse his arm left on right , which means he is an offensive person rather than a defensive. Normally , most of the leaders are rather offensive peoples than defensive.
In western societies, 65 % of the people are defensives peoples and 35 % are offensive. Offensive peoples habe more tendency to lead than to follow. So we find them more often at the head of groups – school directors, chairman or at the head of new companies.
Coming back to our photo , the man there is lifting his tchin. A lifted tchin is the tchin of someone who is challenging someone else. So , this man seems to say , on this photo , I am the one who know better here and don’t even dare try to say I’m wrong because you will know who I am . But , in his inner self , he is a great coward and you will see him use the first door to leave you alone in the fight he has started . Never follow such a guy , you will be the one who will have to do the job at his place and if you win , he will be the first on the stage to congratule himself how he was right . Never in the fight , always there for the flowers.
Custos Custodum says
The Center’s name couldn’t be clearer about its mission – we pay you for a sinecure job, you spout the party line upon demand: war is not the answer, make love not war, etc.
Abrahms the underling will no more advocate a military solution than a whore will advocate chastity. Of course, it not done and would be downright gauche to challenge consummate insiders (has-been at State) on such blatant conflicts of interest.
A writer (one cannot really say “journalist”) committing such faux pas might even find himself excluded from chic Georgetown dinner parties. Oh the humanity!
marc says
he must be working for the other-side. there are so many reasons to kill their leadership, a major one rarely discussed is it will always cause infighting with the power struggle it causes, splintering them.
sog says
He’s right that we need a long term strategy. It should be clear to even the most casual observer, that Muslims become radicalized to extremist if it pays well. If being angry feeds the family, then they will get mad.
We haven’t seen a long term strategy since Eisenhower. The workable long term strategy envisioned by Eisenhower, but not implemented, was to suck the money out of the middle east by replacing Oil with the newly Engineered STRONG force. Eisenhower warned the Saudis not to interfere in the 1956 war in the Levant or he’d replace much of the Oil markets with Nuclear Power. It worked.
If Islam had to depend on an edified population to generate wealth rather than mineral resources, that would go a long way to stabilizing the middle east, and the whole rest of the world too.
There is nothing more stabilizing than human actualization IMHO.
senor doeboy says
Let me see, killing Nazis leadership would only make them madder, become more reckless because they are more extreme and more likely to have a break up with lower central command and easier to divide and conqueror or infiltrate and cause even greater division, distrust and infighting.
Oh, what did I describe what was done in WWII to the fascist? And some how a new group of Mohammedan fascist will some how get stronger when the same principles are applied to them?
Rule one: Know your enemy
Rule Two: Know yourself
This guy is a wackademic mole, the traitor that is with in. The one that history has warned us against as the greater enemy than the one at the gates.
common sense says
This guy is Jewish? An American schmuck for sure who never had to face down a Jihadist.
Angemon says
That, and it fails to explain how they became “radicalized” enough to wage war against us to begin with.
underbed cat says
Ah , how about not making planes for the middle east, or sending weapons, or trying to train muslim soldiers or exposing the doctrine,or sharing technology, or educating the newbie mb,or taking them off talk shows, or diversifying our towns and cities with mosques, or electing them into office, or allowing the drugs or not being duped by the refugees….or any of the multitude of mistakes and strengthen our culture and borders.
killerjools says
This is a whole new level of stupid.
Ralph says
He really does have a point. Killing Yammamoto in WW2 had no effect on fanatical Japanese resistance throughout the Pacific campaign. However, for what he did, he deserved to die. Killing him was its own reward. Perhaps it’s the same with these Muslim monsters. The war must be pursued on many other fronts, including in this country where border control and mass deportations of sharia supporting Muslims should be carried out immediately.
Mark says
Establishment FAKE counterterror analyst Max Abrahms…tries to put more people in danger with his ignorance…
firefox says
That’s the current problem with this mamby-pamby approach.
If you don’t kill off the cancer entirely, what’s left will grow back and maybe stronger.
Obama won’t do it cuz he’s Muslim.
The military-industrial complex likes this tactic.
The west’s leaders are too removed from this as a personal affront – it was someone else’s grandma – and this is what the NWO wants.
Trudeau doesn’t count, but he sure doesn’t care cuz he found a new paid for voting block.
No actual Islamic nation has declared this war, so there’s no use the west fighting it as a war.
The frightening part about this indefinable opponent is that this terror and insanity may go on a long time or until one of them gets a big enough bomb to really attack Europe, the US, or Israel before the world wakes up sufficiently to do what they should be doing right now – and that’s knocking Islam right onto its ass so hard and fast that it will take a long time to even get to its knees again; and building the west and securing its democracy and freedom and economy and military to give us a respite against this eternal enemy of the world that is truly a threat worse than Nazism.
Jack Diamond says
Leaders matter, even as jihadis (ISIS) attempt to decentralize to avoid what happened to them after 9/11. They are not the only thing that matter but killing them is not a negative. Even the new emir of the Taliban, he may be a “religious authority”, but unlike Mansour and Omar he has no military experience. That makes him, probably, a lesser leader of jihad than the previous two. In contrast to the Abrahms/Rubin position (“I don’t think it will weaken the Taliban, and it may strengthen them”; “when a leader of a militant group has been taken out, the group tends to become even more extreme,”) you have one of the premier Al Qaeda-ISIS strategists, Abu Musab Al-Suri indicating something different.
Al-Suri authored the 1,600 page history of the modern jihad movement, “Call to Islamic Resistance”(2004,) and he sure seemed to think taking out jihadi leadership was not only effective but devastating:
“the best of our brothers have been killed and the rest of us have been banished or seized by the treacherous foxes of apostate governments in the service of America…the Americans have eliminated the majority of the armed jihadist movement’s leadership, infrastructure, supporters and friends.
“the majority of the mujahideen living in Afghanistan were killed or captured. This was also the case for the mujahideen who were residing in the Arab and Islamic world as well as in the West. The jihadist movement was uprooted and decimated. The strike on the Arab mujahideen in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan killed off most of the senior members of the jihadist organizations and the first generation of Arab Afghans…the flower of the jihadist movement was killed or captured…the American attack decimated the senior leadership of those jihadist organizations.
“the jihadist movement, which arose in the 1960s and thrived to the 1970s and 1980s, had great potential during the Taliban period in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, following the events of September 2001, the jihadist movement was utterly destroyed, bringing the period to an end. By the will of Allah, a new jihadist movement has arisen to confront the Zionist-Crusader campaigns” {which al-Suri credits to the U.S. invasion of Iraq}.
Of course they all could have been left alone since killing leaders doesn’t matter, but I’ll go with Al-Suri on this one.
Guest says
Is this not the same dumbass that challenged Robert Spencer to a debate, then backed out before it even began?
mortimer says
DO SUPREMACISTS NEED AN EXCUSE?
So why are these jihadists from GOOD, STABLE HOMES, with UNIVERSITY DEGREES and some leaving WELL-PAYING JOBS going to fight IN THE CAUSE OF ALLAH?
(Is the answer is in the question, Max.)
Has Abrahms read all the 164 jihad verses? Did he read the Sira? Has he ever read all the jihad verses in the hadiths? If not, is Abrahms an ‘expert’ on jihad terrorism?
When supposed experts like this talk about jihad with seemingly no understanding of the motive, I wonder how they got their degree and whether they are being bribed by the Saudis.
Abrahms has not apparently understood the reasoning of jihad. He thinks there is a ‘REAL’ explanation besides jihad. There isn’t.
berserker says
I am sure he has done some fancy statistical analysis to back up such claims. That is what political scientists do these days. Take a look at the top journals.
– The problem with people like these is that they have no skin in the game. They are not held accountable for their advice. If an engineer designs a bridge and it collapses, he will be sent to jail. Social scientists face no such cost for wrong policies.
Vito says
You have to love Liberal logic – one genius states if you kill the head of Taliban that only inflames the situation and causes muslims to go jihad. Then you have the other genius in the White House who comes up with yet another soundbite – killing of Mansour “gives the people of Afghanistan and the region a chance at a different, better future.” Can we all hold hands and sing kum-by-ya? The Obama Regime covers both sides of the fence and they’re cowards! But let’s not forget Obama has known islam on 3 continents, so submitting to Allah & Islam is in his DNA!