Joe,

"More than anything, is the need to attack the secondary and terciary leadership forcefully: take away the best successors before decapitation."

An interesting idea, take out the successors before taking out the head. Problems: 1) Intel. It is hard enough identifying the heads, locating them, and taking them out while minimizing civilian casualties. Identifying and locating the secondaries and tertiaries is even harder, particularly in informal organizations. 2) Loss of initiative. When his secondaries and tertiaries start to die, it alerts the primary that he is being targeted, which will give up the element of surprise and allow the primary to take defensive measures (go underground, change his security arrangements, etc.)

Also the larger problem with targeted assassinations as a main strategy is, it risks creating martyrs, without addressing the conditions or beliefs that permit the Islamists to portray themselves as martyrs, rather than failures.

For example, rather than just targeting the heads of cells, we should create conditions that require the cells to claim and hold territory. This is possible because the Islamist ideology, particularly the Taliban and al-Qaeda varieties, call for the creation of a new Caliphate as soon as possible. Even better, the existence and success (or not) of the new Caliphate is taken as direct evidence that they are fulfilling God's will. This type of evidence, in turn, is what permits them to convince themselves that their dead are martyrs instead of failures.

We could attack the various Caliphates that pop up from time to time with traditional military force, but that risks validating the Islamist position that, since the Great Satan is attacking the Caliphate, it must be the real thing.

Far better is to help local Muslims defeat these Caliphates. This is possible because, unlike the real Caliphate during the golden age of Islam, today's Islamist Caliphates are miserable places (even without our attempts to disrupt them). Many Muslims who experience these new Caliphates, realize they have very little to do with Islam as Muslims understand it, and quickly grow to hate these pretender regimes.

The compulsion to declare Caliphates in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the failure of these attempts, [i]at the hands of local Muslims[/i], has produced far more disruption to the Islamist movement than simply targeting the leadership of Islamist cells.

OK we're way off-topic now...

Polls like this one are the reason why I insist "we are all Atlanticists" regardless of what we think about NATO, G8, Afghanistan, etc. And I do not simply mean "we are all Atlanticists" due to some disaster that brought us together, but whose sense of unity will inevitably fade. I mean it in a more enduring sense.

We are all Atlanticists because of shared values and shared heritage. Particularly: openness; freedom and individual autonomy (we don't always agree on the limits to these, but we believe in the concepts nevertheless); accountability; empiricism (meaning science, not Empires!); skepticism; loyal opposition; love of technology; the list goes on.

Can anyone name two regions, roughly comparable in size to the US and Europe, anyplace on the globe, that have so much in common? I don't think anyone can.

But of course it shouldn't be limited to geography.