Aside from the obvious unreliability of such reports one wonders what the killing of this or that "terrorist" is supposed to achieves. There will always be another one and the next one and so on and the violence will only get worse ...

Then some U.S. drone strike killed Al-Qaeda old guard member Nasser al-Wuhayshi in Yemen and suddenly main stream media also start to doubt the value of this tactic.

• Christian Science Monitor - US airpower takes out a bunch of Al Qaeda leaders. Effective warfare?
• Washington Post - Why ‘decapitation’ strikes have killed terrorist leaders, but not al-Qaeda
• McClatchy - Al Qaida leader’s death renews debate: Do targeted killings make a difference?
• Guardian - Death of al-Qaida leader masks reality of drone strikes: they don't bring stability
• New York Times - For U.S., Killing Terrorists Is a Means to an Elusive End
• Telegraph - A US drone has killed Al-Qaeda's second-in-command - but like the hydra, cutting off the head only strengthens the body

This is an astonishingly synchronous recognition of the problem. While the U.S. may be "successful" in killing this or that leader of some terrorist gang the overall phenomenon just keeps growing. The Telegraph's sub headline catches it best:

'America has taken on a foe 5,000-strong. It has killed 10,000 of them. There are only 20,000 left'

Except that the original Al-Qaeda was only a few hundred strong and existed only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some fifteen years later, after the U.S. War of Terror killed and several hundred thousands of unrelated persons and thousands of jihadists, Al Qaeda and its derivatives are active in over a dozen countries and have several ten-thousands of followers. As I wrote:

The constant U.S. resort to military means is an expression of the lack of conflict resolution policies.

Still none of the above pieces comes up with a decent list of  policies that could start to address the problem without increasing it.

Here is a first try:

• Stop drone strikes and the like as they obviously only creating more terrorists.
• Stop using extremists, like jihadists and neo-nazis, as a policy tool against this or that inconvenient ruler.
• Restrict the resources such groups need to grow on. This will require to pressure the Saudi and Qatari dictators, including with threats to their regimes existence, to stop financing the proselyting of their radical version of Islam as well as the "private" financing of such groups from their countries.

It is unlikely for now that such steps will be taken. But it took years for the media to recognize the futility of drone strikes. A few years on they may even start to consider the obvious first steps towards a solutions of the problem.

Unfortunately many more will die in the War of Terror before that will happen. 

Via http://www.moonofalabama.org