"The ISIS, not bomb it back to the Stone Age"

Here’s why we can only contain "the Islamic State, not bomb it back to the Stone Age"

But the past 14 years’ experience reveals serious limits on what allied militaries can achieve in such roles.

The underlying problem here is interest misalignment. War is a fundamentally political undertaking, and political interest lies at the heart of effective performance. But U.S. interests and local allies’ rarely align in these kinds of wars.

In Syria and Iraq today it is far from clear that Shiite Iraqis, Iraqi or Syrian Kurds, or even Syrian Sunni warlords care enough about Raqqa (or Mosul or Ramadi) to wade into urban close combat for American purposes that those allies only weakly share.

Kurds are willing to die for a future Kurdish state in northern Iraq and Syria. Iraqi Shia are willing to die to defend the Shiite homeland. Syrian Sunni warlords often see one another as prospectively existential threats. None see defeating the Islamic State and policing the territory it now holds as their first priority.

Post-2001 U.S. military experience suggests that we can’t expect such allies to take on risky, complex ground combat that could take advantage of American airpower and hold and govern what’s now Islamic State territory.

What experiences are we talking about? Consider the 2001-2 campaign in Afghanistan, which succeeded largely because of a rare alignment of U.S. interests with Northern Alliance allies who wanted the Taliban out of Kabul as much as Americans did. That combined with reasonable tactical proficiency to enable local U.S. allies to take ground against determined resistance, with the support of American airpower.

But even in 2001-2, the U.S.’s allies were a mixed lot. When the local ally lacked either the motivation or the skill, even 21st century precision U.S. airpower wasn’t enough.

Massive U.S. efforts to train and advise allied militaries in post-2002 Afghanistan and post-2003 Iraq foundered on similar shoals. In Iraq and Afghanistan the U.S. dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars and many thousands of advisors, hoping to create allied militaries that could hold ground against insurgents after U.S. troops withdrew. But the U.S.-built Iraqi Army in Mosul collapsed in 2014. The Afghan National Security Force is losing ground now that NATO’s combat mission has ended.

In places like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, our allies focus on neutralizing political rivals within their own ranks rather than carrying out the mission that the U.S. wants: politically disinterested warmaking against the external threat of the Taliban, AQI, or Islamic State.

And how do our allies buy off or contain internal rivals? In ways that undermine their militaries’ effectiveness against what the United States sees as the main threat. Corruption, for example, is the natural way to buy loyalty, but it erodes effectiveness–and has undermined most of the U.S.’s efforts to build security forces to help us fight the terrorists we see as the real enemies. And it will continue to do so, as long as the United States and our allies have systematically misaligned interests.

Taking and holding the Islamic State’s territory would require at least 100,000 troops

Some hope that we will see another uprising like the one in 2006-7 in Iraq, called the Anbar Awakening. In this vision, Sunni tribes will rise up and fight against Islamic State rule as they did against AQI in 2006-7.

But frustration with despotism isn’t enough to sustain such uprisings. The 2006-7 Awakening was brutally counterattacked by AQI, and survived only because the U.S. military could protect it. The Islamic State today will be at least as harsh with any Sunnis who try a similar rebellion. But in 2006-7, large numbers of U.S. ground forces protected the rebels. That’s not happening again. It will be a long time, if ever, before the preconditions that enabled the 2006-7 Awakening are replicated for the Islamic State.

So experience counsels caution about expecting local allies to take and hold the territory now controlled by the Islamic State. Even 20,000 U.S. troops wouldn’t be enough to do what critics say they want; to solve the real problem any time soon would require well over 100,000 Western troops.

If you’re not willing to pay that price (and not even John McCain is proposing anything remotely like 160,000 U.S. troops for Syria and Iraq), then we’re not actually going to solve the problem and all we can do is manage it. Realistically, that means long-term containment and suppression — or just what the Obama administration now seeks.

What’s left: Containing the Islamic State until it collapses from within

A containment strategy would try to limit the Islamic State’s lethality and contagion, and wait for the Islamic State to collapse from within — as it almost certainly will.

The Islamic State will eventually exhaust its ability to support a war effort. Its territory is mostly desert with little economic activity. Oil production is dropping, partly because equipment is bombed or failed and partly for lack of experienced management. What oil is sold goes at a discount rate. Taxes are the main source of revenue, and they appear to be high and unpredictably imposed.

Those who can flee often do, resulting in serious drain of human capital. The group’s treasury will surely erode over time: two decades of research in economics and politics have shown that highly extractive autocracies cannot sustain economic growth.

Of course this is far from ideal. It could take many years for the Islamic State to exhaust its economy. Meanwhile it would still pose a terror threat. And the way containment would end that threat is by slowly strangling the Islamic State’s economy, which means impoverishing the population. Containment thus means real suffering for millions of innocents trapped in places like Raqqa, Mosul, and Ramadi, innocents who are already being kept in place with coercive measures.

But what alternative is there? Moving a little bit further, a little bit faster, up the escalation ladder by adding only 10-20,000 more troops will increase the costs to Americans—without much changing the outcome. We’ve seen this movie before.

To paraphrase Churchill, the evidence suggests that containment is the worst option except for all the others. Nothing in the Paris attacks changes this regrettable fact.

Stephen Biddle is professor of political science and international relations at George Washington University, adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle.”

Jacob Shapiro is associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and co-directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. He is the author of “The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations.”

Source: By Stephen Biddle and Jacob Shapiro - The Washington Post (washingtonpost.com) - December 1, 2015

Photo: U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles taxi the runway after landing at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, Nov. 12, 2015. Six F-15Es are deployed in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and counter-Islamic State missions in Iraq and Syria. (USAF/Tech. Sgt. Taylor Worley/Handout via Reuters)



(12.12.2015)