Despite the Critics, White House Insists it Has a Plan to Fight Islamic State by Karen DeYoung, Washington Post
To its critics, President Obama’s strategy to combat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is weak and incoherent. Even some of the staunchest U.S. allies and partners in the fight worry that the time for what they see as the administration’s incremental approach has long since passed.
The White House maintains that its strategy is comprehensive, and that it’s working. Sharp increases in airstrikes and Obama’s recent decision to deploy Special Operations troops, officials say, are part of a fundamental change in the military’s mission developed this fall, along with a new diplomatic push to end the distraction of Syria’s civil war.
Last week’s San Bernardino shooting has abruptly shifted attention from the carnage in the Middle East to the threat at home. In his Sunday night address to the nation, Obama is expected to focus on domestic security, while assuring Americans that there is a viable plan underway to decimate the Islamic State where it lives…
Comments
If the IS documents are valid as discussed in this article THEN Obama's strategy just went out the window---I have stated a number of times you cannot win militarily against an ideology based on the radical Takfiri view of Islam.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/07/leaked-isis-document-revea…
The Isis papers: leaked documents show how Isis is building its state
Blueprint lays bare new contours of Islamic state, complete with civil service, regional government and Soviet levels of economic control
Taken from the article and it has an impact again if the IS documents mentioned are indeed valid.....
But Tamimi said the playbook, along with a further 300 Isis documents he has obtained over the past year, showed that building a viable country rooted in fundamentalist theology was the central aim. “[Isis] is a project that strives to govern. It’s not just a case of their sole end being endless battle.”
Gen Stanley McChrystal (retired), who led the military units that helped destroy Isis’s predecessor organisation (ISI) in Iraq from 2006 to 2008, said: “If it is indeed genuine, it is fascinating and should be read by everyone – particularly policymakers in the west.
McChrystal
Gen Stanley McChrystal: ‘If the west sees Isis as an almost stereotypical band of psychopathic killers, we risk dramatically underestimating them.’ Photograph: Jerry Lampen/Reuters
“If the west sees Isis as an almost stereotypical band of psychopathic killers, we risk dramatically underestimating them.
“In the Principles in the administration of the Islamic State, you see a focus on education (really indoctrination) beginning with children but progressing through their ranks, a recognition that effective governance is essential, thoughts on their use of technology to master information (propaganda), and a willingness to learn from the mistakes of earlier movements.
“It’s not a big departure from the works of Mao, the practices of the Viet Minh in Indochina, or other movements for whom high-profile actions were really just the tip of a far more nuanced iceberg of organising activity.
Charlie Winter, a senior researcher for Georgia State University who has seen the document, said it demonstrated Isis’s high capacity for premeditation.
“Far from being an army of irrational, bloodthirsty fanatics, IS [Isis] is a deeply calculating political organisation with an extremely complex, well-planned infrastructure behind it.”
Lt Gen Graeme Lamb, former head of UK special forces, said the playbook carried a warning for current military strategy.
Referring to sections of the statecraft text in which Isis repeatedly claims it is the only true representatives of Sunni Arab Muslims in the region, Lamb said it was all the more important to ensure wider Sunni leadership in the fight with Isis, or risk “fuelling this monster”.
“Seeing Daesh [Isis] and the caliphate as simply a target to be systematically broken by forces other than Middle Eastern Sunnis … is to fail to understand this fight.
“It must be led by the Sunni Arab leadership and its many tribes across the region, with us in the west and the other religious factions in the Middle East acting in support.
Kinds of sounds like what Robert Jones has been saying here at SWJ for a long while now........