On Combinatorial Innovation, Extrapolation and Root Causes: Implications for Policy?

This morning, on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, Zakaria moderated a discussion with two military experts, retired U.S. Lieutenant General Mark Hertling and Michael O'Hanlon. co-director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings on  ISIS' military capability.
 
All were impressed by ISIS's tactics and it's adaptability. With the benefit of hindsight its ability to employ the tactics of a regular army rather than those of a terror organisation should not come as a surprise given that the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer de-Ba'athified the Iraqi army, creating a pool of unemployed, dissatisfied Sunni's, with more military training than the current army, on which ISIS could draw. And by interning them together in Camp Bucca, the religious zealots and the ex-military were brought conveniently under one roof.

Combinatorial Innovation

More interesting however is the organization's ability to innovate; drawing on this enlarged pool of tactics, those of conventional warfare and those of terrorism, it has created new strategies not previously available to either precursor organization. This has led to great adaptability and some recent military success such as its recent taking of Ramadi.
 Michael O’Hanlon suggested that ISIS has a weakness; that it needs not only to capture territory, but also to hold and govern it. Yet applying the same logic, it seems reasonable to expect that it will draw on dismissed Ba'athist government officials with the knowledge to help it govern. So relying on its need to govern as its Achilles heel seems rather optimistic.

Goals
What is often lacking from these discussion, and this was no exception, was a discussion of threats, targets, likelihoods and mediating mechanisms. The US must be clear whether its interest is in fixing Iraq, preventing sectarian violence in the Middle East, spreading democracy and ousting tyrants, or making life safer for US citizens. These do not all go together; making progress on one, for example preventing sectarian violence, may lead to a reduction in safety for US citizens. And the US has been fairly unsuccessful of late in its mission of spreading democracy; Iraq is in danger of becoming a failed state. In the remainder of this post, I will try to explore only the last goal, making life safer for US citizens.

Root Causes
 
Intervening in an sectarian armed struggle, even when this is done with good intentions and, theoretically, even handedly, makes the intervening party the target of one, if not both, sides. Think, for example, of the British Army and the RUC in Northern Ireland. So increasing US intervention will likely increase the degree of hatred towards it within ISIS.

ISIS projects power locally by drawing people into a vision of a new regime in which Sunni's will be better represented than under either the Shiite Iraqi regime or the authoritarian, secular regime of Bashar al-Assad. It recruits disaffected Muslim youth from around the world to come to Syria and Iraq to fight using social media. It hopes to bring Amreian troops back into Iraq or Syria for a final apocalyptic battle.

The threat it poses in the short term is largely to people living in Iraq and Syria. The threat to US citizens at home is through the radicalization of disaffected youth in the US, again through social media, who are turned into "home grown" terrorists.

At its root, ISIS' power lies in the resentment of the disenfranchised, whether they be those who have been stripped of positions of power, or those who see themselves as an excluded minority, both socially and economically. Eventually, I hope, planners will realize that destroying any group that is sustained by resentment from exclusion is a fools errand. Then we can start looking for more realistic solutions.

Implications for Policy?

If doing more of the same isn't working what might? Some suggest that we should go back with embedded special forces (boots on the ground by another name). But at best this will be a holding pattern which the US will have to maintain, absent any other ideas, indefinitely. As Larry Ellison remarked on Steve Job's and Apple's history: "We've tried that experiment before".

Doing less might not seem like a strategy but what about doing the opposite of what we've been trying to do? As repugnant as ISIS methods and values are, they appear to want to govern the Sunni population in Syria and Iraq; so why not let them, indeed encourage them? Iraq will inevitably be partitioned at some point. The Kurds will form their own independent state and further partitioning into two separate countries, one Shiite he other Sunni may be not only inevitable but possibly desirable. The breakup of Yugoslavia might be a model; eventually there would be a reduction in sectarian conflicts. It would also mean ISIS would set up institutions of power and governance which in turn would mean 1) that it would be permanently preoccupied principally with local issues and 2) that any efforts to export terrorism would be easier to track down. And while the problem of disaffected youth in this country is a hard one to solve, since it's partly economic, partly ethnic and social, removing one component, the claim that the US is oppressing Sunni Muslims around the world would be harder to make.

Clearly the approach has risks; but given the alternatives, might not a counter-intuitive solution be worth a look?

ISIS redux

Source: Institute for the Study of War

By The New York Times

Here’s some speculation.John Boehner observed, I think rightly that President Obama's strategy of air strikes, relying on rebel groups and the Iraqi army to fight the ground war, isn't working; the question however is: what are we trying to achieve and why? If the goal is to contain or eliminate ISIS, we are receding. So while he’s right, I wonder what John Boehner’s alternative might be (calling on the President to get a new strategy may be good political strategy, but doesn’t really help much with the ISIS problem).

One of the central elements of our current strategy is being seen clearly to be in the back seat, helping local actors in their efforts (and at their request) to battle ISIS, rather than in the driving seat. That was not helped by the recent Special Forces operation in Syria that killed ISIS’s ‘money man’, Abu Sayyaf. This was not only inconsistent with the rhetoric of “no boots on the ground”, it also put the US squarely back in the sights as a primary combatant in the eyes of all Sunis, ISIS included.

One option is to move further down this path – to intervene more robustly with a few more boots on the ground. Two questions arise; first will it work and second will it escalate? For an answer to the second, Viet Nam may be a guide. A few military advisers became over half a million military personal, 80,000 of whom were in a combat role. To answer the first, that looks very like a road we’ve already been down in Iraq; one that didn’t work out too well. Fighting a fanatically motivated, volunteer force that frequently uses terror and guerilla tactics is ultimately an winnable battle for the US, but one that makes us a target both there and here. So if more force isn’t the answer what is?

Perhaps it’s re-framing the question. If our aim is not to defeat ISIS but to reduce the likelihood of America and Americans being attacked by ISIS (and other similar religious extremists) then stepping away may be a better answer. True, ISIS will probably continue to commit atrocities (but Boko Haram is doing that in Nigeria and we’re not talking about getting into that mess). But the question should be not whether ISIS will continue to brutalize ‘non-believers’, but whether they there would be less of this were the US to intervene more aggressively?

Suppose ISIS isn’t stopped and incorporates most if not all of Iraq and Syria into the Califate? Is America safer with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi controlling (or trying to control) swathes of the Middle East? One argument is that trying to crush ISIS is a fool’s errand and that more fighters will appear to replace those killed in the struggle. On the other hand, letting ISIS try to manager and control the territory it has taken may prove sufficiently challenging that is has little capacity left for foreign adventures. Added to that, its focus will be far less on what is now sees as its Evil Empire, and more on the enemy within (the Shiites) or nearby (Iran). So perhaps if the goal is not to obliterate ISIS, bur to reduce the likelihood of Americans and America being attached perhaps less is more?

Structure matters (reprise)

 

In December last year I observed that the structure of the upstream end of the oil industry had changed, as a function of the reduced cost of entry, and that this would keep oil prices fairly low indefinitely. This week the Economist came to the same conclusion.