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?
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