Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science and international relations at George Washington University, wrote in The Atlantic last month that there is not a lot we can do to defeat ISIS in the short run, or even medium run. Let me quote from Professor Biddle’s article:
“The Islamic State threat is likely to persist, in one form or another, for a long time. In the meantime, we’re going to be stuck with a policy that amounts to containment and damage limitation, whose shortcomings will frustrate many Americans. …
The real problem, however, runs much deeper than just the Islamic State. The war in Iraq and Syria pits a host of groups against one another, many of whom are almost as dangerous to U.S. interests as the Islamic State, and many of whom seek the same status of jihadi vanguard against the West that ISIS now enjoys. ISIS itself achieved this position at the expense of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, with whom it competes actively for recruits and resources. Even if some U.S.-allied proxy succeeds in conquering the nominal Islamic State capital of Raqqa and pulling down the ISIS flag from its citadel, this is unlikely to end the war, stabilize Syria, or even remove the threat of jihadi terrorism against the United States from Syrian (or Iraqi) soil – it would just open the war to its next phase, in which Islamic State’s rivals compete for the status that group had enjoyed before them. …
[R]eal U.S. leverage to bring about a real end to the war – and actual realization of American interests in that war – is distinctly limited. None of the proposals popular in today’s Washington debate offer any meaningful prospect of achieving this.”
But it’s when Professor Biddle discusses what it would take to bring about a real end to the war that it gets really depressing. Professor Biddle again:
“According to U.S. military doctrine, to defeat even an insurgency (much less a proto-state like ISIS) and stabilize a threatened population requires something like 20 counterinsurgents for every thousand civilians. That means 50,000-100,000 well-trained troops would be needed to hold the area now under Islamic State control (depending on how much of the population has fled), much less the rest of Syria. No one is now proposing a realistic plan to accomplish anything close to this – whether such a force comprises American troops, Iraqis, Kurds, Saudis, Turks, or anyone else. In the absence of this, bombing raids or offensives from Iraqi or Kurdish allies can accelerate the rate at which ISIS burns through its capital and perhaps hasten the day when the Islamic State is replaced by the next militant group in the queue – but limited efforts of this kind cannot end the war.”
The reason this is depressing, of course, is that the first part of what Professor Biddle talks about above is exactly what General David Petraeus did, successfully, during the surge in Iraq in 2007-08. While he did not have 20 American counterinsurgency troops for every 1,000 civilians, he was able to use Sunni forces of the Anbar Awakening as a force multiplier to achieve much of what Professor Biddle is talking about here. But that was then. Now we are left with the bombing, etc., that Professor Biddle talks about in the last half of this quote, efforts that cannot end the war. Rather, Professor Biddle says:
“If this war plays out the way so many others have, its end will come not through an allied offensive to conquer a capital city but through the mutual exhaustion of multiple actors with multiple, often wealthy outside benefactors. This will eventually happen – but it will likely take many years yet.”
As to what American policy should be in the meantime, Professor Biddle says:
“[T]he most important contribution Americans can make in Syria and Iraq might well not be on the battlefield at all. A smart containment strategy should include serious efforts to assist regional powers in coping with the humanitarian fallout of Syrian and Iraqi violence …. So too must be active diplomatic engagement with the Iraqi government to ensure it provides reasonable governance to its Sunni population, something it did not do for three years prior to the Islamic State’s military successes in Iraq in 2014.”
The last part of his suggestion, that we need active diplomatic efforts to ensure the Iraqi government treats its Sunni population fairly, something that Professor Biddle says it did not do for the three years before ISIS’s emergence in 2014, is also depressing. It is depressing because it is exactly what Ambassador Ryan Crocker was doing in 2007-08 at the same time General Petraeus was implementing his counterinsurgency strategy.
In other words, the very things that we would have to do now to beat ISIS, and to ensure the safety of Sunnis in Iraq so that they are not a recruitment pool for ISIS, are the things we were doing in 2007-08. If we had continued those efforts, both military and diplomatic, with the same skill and commitment after January of 2009 that we put into them in 2007-08, ISIS might never have had the population and space in which to grow in Iraq. While that would not have solved the problem of Syria, without Iraq in which to grow, too, ISIS would not be the problem it is today.1
However, the commitment and effort, especially from the highest levels in Washington, was not there after January of 2009. It was almost as if President Obama’s view was that, since, in his mind, he was right about not going into Iraq in 2003, as long as he got out of Iraq, it didn’t matter how he did it – because we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But it did matter how we left – and that we left. And we are where we are today in large part because of how he got us out.
----------
1 I understand that the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq immediately in after the invasion, and pretty much until 2006, were a disaster. But President Bush eventually realized this, and changed our people and policies in Iraq at the end of 2006. That change resulted in the success we achieved in Iraq in 2007-08
Comments