What Chicago gangs and Al-Qaeda have in common

The big bold text is hard to read, but there are some interesting ideas here: Chicago gangs have flattened due to good police work. When they saw the police taking down their leaders, they evolved, getting rid of their leaders and becoming loosely organized horizontal factions.

The implication is that things were better when the gangs had more structure because then the police could get some leverage, they knew who to go after.

Unfortunately, the author misses the most interesting thing about comparing Chicago street gangs to Al-Queda. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan turned around in large part because the U.S. switched tactics. Instead of hunting down the bad guys, we started showing up with big bags of money and paying them to join our team. If, in fact Chicago gangs have parallels to terrorist cells, then it's quite possible the same approach would work with them.

Of course, while it's ok to use taxpayer money to pay off gangs of murderers and drug smugglers abroad, it would never fly domestically...