Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State (12 page)

Such a conflict need not in fact involve large (division- or corps-sized) Western combat units, or an open-ended commitment to occupation and reconstruction. On the contrary, I think we should explicitly rule out any occupation and commit only a moderately larger number of ground troops than at present – but under very different rules of engagement, and with a radically increased weight of air power to back them. We should also limit the war’s objectives to removing those characteristics that currently make ISIS a state-like entity: its control over territory, its ability to dominate a captive population, its government (including its military and administrative structures and strategic economic resources) and its ability to engage with other states. This would put the conflict on about the same scale as the operations in Kosovo in 1999, in Afghanistan during the 2001 invasion (but not the subsequent occupation and counterinsurgency) and in Libya in 2011.

Why so hawkish a response? Because this is an escalating threat that’s growing and worsening. The longer it takes to deal with ISIS, the further its influence spreads, the more recruits it attracts, the harder it is to dislodge from the cities it has captured, the more deeply it’s able to harm the communities it controls, the more civilians will ultimately be killed, and the greater the military response ultimately required to defeat it. This is a case when the job will become much harder, require much more lethal force and do more harm as time goes on: we have to go hard, now, or we’ll end up having to go in much harder, and potentially on a much larger scale, later – or accept defeat. The risk is not that ISIS will somehow restart its blitzkrieg and conquer Iraq and Syria. Rather, the threat is that of a regional conflagration if there’s no effective international (which, like it or not, means Western-led) response.

What would such a response look like? Since August 2014 a combination of limited air power, special forces and enablers (intelligence, logistics, weapons, training and advisory support) has blunted the ISIS advance, contained the group to a network of linked cities across northern and western Iraq and northern Syria, forced it to halt (or at least pause) its expansionist “war of movement” and begun to roll back its control of certain cities (most recently, Tikrit). That’s an important achievement, given the group’s seemingly unstoppable momentum only a few months ago. But there are four key problems so far.

First, the air campaign has been far too limited. Containing ISIS is one thing; destroying its ability to function as a state is quite another. For comparison, during the 78-day intervention in Kosovo in 1999, NATO flew 19,484 airstrike sorties, an average of 250 per day. During the 2011 air campaign in Libya there were 9700 strike sorties over 215 days, or 45 per day. US aircraft flew 6500 strike sorties into Afghanistan in just the period from 7 October to 17 December 2001, roughly 83 strike sorties per day. By contrast, in the nine months of the air campaign until 31 March 2015, US Central Command reported only 2796 strike sorties, slightly more than 10 per day, across both Iraq and Syria. Strike rates are not the only (or even the most important) metric here – what’s more important are the types of targets being struck, which are often low-level, tactical military assets like artillery pieces or fighting positions. We haven’t seen the sort of strategic air offensive that would be needed to take apart ISIS as a state-like entity (as distinct from merely damaging its military capabilities). The risk is that we might be putting enough pressure on ISIS to make it adapt – its forces move by night now, in smaller groups, in civilian clothes, hide in cities, and its command-and-control systems are more decentralised – but not enough to destroy it. One of the key reasons for the limited number of airstrikes is the lack of trained forward observers and controllers on the ground – which is related to the next problem.

This is that ground troops – from the United States, Australia, Canada, the UK and Germany, as well as several regional powers – are constrained by far too restrictive rules of engagement. Most (though not all) of these troops are confined to training bases, where their role is to advise and assist Iraqi and Kurdish forces, offer equipment and intelligence, and engage ISIS only in immediate self-defence. This won’t suffice when battles for major cities like Mosul take place: advisers will have to be able to accompany their supported units into battle, not just wave goodbye as they leave the base. Specialists like Joint Terminal Attack Controllers will be needed to move with the forward troops to coordinate airstrikes and artillery, and if necessary – and it’s a near-certainty that it will be necessary – Western troops will need the authority to fight offensively, not just in self-defence. They’ll also need to reach out to tribal and irregular units – old allies from the Awakening – who’ve been off-limits to date.

Third, these limits have strengthened the role of Iran in the conflict. Iranian aircraft have flown sorties against ISIS, and Qasem Soleimani (who, remember, is head of the Quds Force, which sponsored Shi’a death squads in Iraq in 2005–11) now operates openly on the front-lines of the campaign, with hundreds of Iranian advisers, subject to few of the restrictions on Western troops. Many of those former death squads are now operating as militia in Sunni-majority areas. Iran offers weaponry, ammunition and funding, and (with Lebanese Hezbollah) sponsors approximately 100,000 Shi’a paramilitaries, known as Popular Mobilisation Forces. This confirms to Sunnis that the forces opposed to ISIS are controlled by Iran. More broadly, Iran is cementing control over a huge tract of territory that stretches all the way from the western frontier of Afghanistan to the Golan Heights on the Israeli border, which – along with its nuclear program, sponsorship of Palestinian terrorist groups and support for Yemen’s Houthis – is a key provocation driving Israel, Turkey and the Sunni Arab states towards a region-wide, and potentially nuclear, hot war with Tehran.

Greater Western involvement would mitigate all these problems, since regional countries (Iraq included) much prefer US assistance against ISIS, and are accepting Iranian help mainly for lack of other options. It would also make efforts to curb mounting Sunni–Shi’a conflict far more credible if Western countries offered Sunni states a better alternative than war with Iran or simply accepting Shi’a Persian regional dominance. This would also require international action against the Assad regime – or, at the very least, much greater engagement in forcing a negotiated settlement of the conflict in Syria.

At present in Iraq, the United States is in a de facto alliance with Iran against ISIS. Both countries deny they’re cooperating, claiming they simply act in parallel, but since both coordinate with the Iraqi government there’s actually a close alignment. This was clearest in March and April 2015 near Tikrit, where Iraqi troops (including Popular Mobilisation Forces) stalled in heavy urban fighting, taking the city only after airstrikes from the US coalition. The fact that Iranian-sponsored militias boycotted the final phase of the Tikrit offensive in protest against US involvement underlines the difficulty of this partnership.

On the other side of the frontier, US passivity and reluctance to target Assad (though his regime kills more people than ISIS) makes many Syrians wary of joining the “moderate” rebels. Many loathe ISIS, but they have no reason to go against it if that will only help the regime – as it’s currently doing. As coalition airstrikes target ISIS, Assad’s forces have repeatedly stepped into the gap and expanded the area under his control.

In this sense, Syria 2015 is like Pakistan 2002 – it’s the complex, intractable problem Western leaders don’t want to address. In 2002, after the invasion of Afghanistan failed to eliminate Osama bin Laden, President Bush switched his attention to Saddam Hussein. But Saddam was a distraction from the real problem: figuring out how to deal with AQ and the Taliban once they were established in Pakistan. Likewise, in 2015, President Obama and other Western leaders have focused on Iraq – a difficult problem to solve, though relatively easy to get our heads around. But unless we resolve the conflict in Syria, nothing we do in Iraq will work. Just as AQ and the Taliban destabilised Afghanistan from their cross-border safe haven in Pakistan after 2002, the Islamic State can always use its sanctuary in Syria to recover from defeat in Iraq. And this sanctuary will remain open to it until Syria’s civil war comes to an end.

Hence, a critical counterpart to the “war strategy” to neutralise ISIS in Iraq is a “peace strategy” in Syria – to end the slaughter by convincing all players that they can’t achieve their goals through continued conflict, that their best alternative is a negotiated peace. As in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya, there may be a role here for the military (specifically, air power): creating humanitarian corridors and no-fly zones, or inflicting sufficient damage on armed actors to force a ceasefire. But ultimately this is a political problem – and it will demand at least as much strategic effort and attention as the military problem in Iraq.

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

California Central Coast, Easter 2015

I started this essay in the Middle East, worked on it through the northern hemisphere winter of 2014–15 in various odd places – near the Arabian Gulf, in Washington DC, on a climbing trip in Bavaria, in a mountain house in the eastern United States, on a trip to the north of Canada to help train troops deploying to Iraq, and in the back of several military transport aircraft.

I’m finishing it on an achingly gorgeous spring day, between hiking trips in one of the most wonderful places on earth: the Big Sur region of California’s central coast. As I sit here quietly among the redwoods, it seems hard to imagine that anything, anywhere, could threaten the peace and beauty of this bubble. And yet, just a few hours’ flying time away, one of the most intense conflicts of the century is playing out, and it’s nowhere close to being over.

As I said at the start, this is my attempt to answer the questions of how we got here, whether we can recover, and if so, how. After all this time, the closer I get to the issues, the less clear-cut they seem. I certainly have no easy prescriptions to offer. All I can do, sitting here as the sun sets over the Pacific, is share a list – a very short list – of insights picked up along the way.

The first, and most important, is that we’re living in an era of persistent conflict. This isn’t my insight – you can read it in the latest concept documents of half a dozen Western militaries. But it doesn’t seem to have hit home, for the public or some policy-makers, that the notion that this can all end, that we can get back to some pre-9/11 “normal,” is a fantasy. This – this instability, this regional conflict surrounded by networked global violence, this convergence of war and crime, of domestic and international threats, this rise of a new aggressive totalitarian state from the rubble of the last war – is the new normal, and it’s not going to change for a very, very long time. There are no quick solutions: we need to settle in for the long haul.

Second, that being the case, we have to figure out methods of dealing with persistent conflict that are minimally intrusive and affordable over the very long term. As I’ve said, I see no alternative to a larger, more intense, conventional war against ISIS than the one currently being contemplated (though emphatically not an occupation or a counterinsurgency campaign). But I say this not because I think a larger operation – on the scale of Kosovo or Libya – would somehow put back into the bottle the genie (the horde of genies) released by our missteps in the War on Terror. Rather, removing ISIS as a state-like entity would help slow the growth of the problem and buy time for the long-term approaches – security assistance, persistent engagement, governance reform – that we’ll need for the long haul. International engagement is the best of a bad set of choices – and the only thing that makes it remotely acceptable is the realisation that the alternative to Western-led intervention is not
no
intervention, but rather a regional conflict with potentially global consequences. If we don’t act, others will.

Third, we need a strategy that recognises global terrorism for the threat it is, but doesn’t treat it as if it’s our only security issue; the United States and several of its allies, including the UK and Australia, came dangerously close to breaking the bank doing counterterrorism since 9/11, and none of these countries can afford to do it again. Between the overreaction of 2001–04 and the passivity of 2008 onwards, we need to find a middle ground. As I’ve tried to explain, for a while there many of us thought Disaggregation might be that middle ground. It worked at one level, the global level, but not at the regional and local levels – and it was from the regional groups that today’s primary threats emerged. I’m the first to acknowledge that the strategy failed in the execution. But the underlying theory of victory – neutralise the global actors, work with local partners to contain regional groups, break the connections between them and partner with people to remedy the underlying conditions that create fertile ground for terrorism in the first place – still makes sense at the level of principle. It’s in the designing of new techniques, and in their effective execution, and in the careful resourcing and sequencing of actions, that the next phase of this long conflict will be won or lost.

My final insight, as I write now in the twilight, is the centrality of political will. The one thing that saved us, in that brief period when we seemed to be getting it right, was the close engagement, personal attention and determined will of elected leaders at the highest level. This – political will, not troops, not money, not time, not technology –
this
is the scarcest resource, and without that political will at the level of entire nations, nothing else we do will work. Preserving and strengthening the political will of our societies, the will to continue this struggle without giving in to a horrific adversary, but also without surrendering our civil liberties or betraying our ethics, is not an adjunct to the strategy – it
is
the strategy.