Defeating Baghdadi: The War We Don’t Want But Will Have to Fight
Gary Anderson
FRAMING THE PROBLEM. With fires still burning in the Pentagon and a smoking hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood in 2001, former President Bush decided to invade al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan and deny that staging base to that group. Whatever failings one might attribute to the Bush administration, al Qaeda never successfully launched another strike on the US homeland from Afghanistan. The Bush administration realized that the threat could not be eliminated by aerial bombardment alone. Today, a group that even al Qaeda thinks is extreme, has established its own sanctuary in eastern Syria as well as north and western Iraq. The Islamic State of al Bakr Baghdadi makes no secret of its plans to punish infidels in Europe and the United States. Why then, does the current administration think that airpower alone will deal with the threat? The answer is that the American people believe they have had enough of war. Until the Islamic State begins sending its European and American passport holders home to shoot up shopping malls, airport ticket lobbies, and elementary schools; Americans won't know what real war is. The reality is that only American boots on the ground can destroy the conventional military power of the self described caliphate and the sanctuary it gives to those who mean to attack our homeland. If we do not destroy the conventional war making capability of the Islamic state to hold ground and provide terrorist sanctuaries, we will suffer the consequences.
A Political or Military Solution? It has become fashionable to say that there are no military solutions to insurgencies. That may be true, but the threat posed by the Islamic Sate is not an insurgency in the sense of the word that we have come to understand. Baghdadi's army is a skilled and professional light infantry force that uses infiltration when it can and frontal attack when it thinks the conditions are right. It is capable of using rockets and mortars as fire support, but it also uses information operations in the form of grisly social media images as a supporting arm to terrify and disorient its enemies. When its commanders choose, the army of the Islamic State is capable of blending in with urban and village populations to shield itself from airpower as it is extremely difficult to tell fighters from innocents from thousands of feet in the air.
Center of Gravity. The military force of the Islamic State is a close to being a conventional army as any unconventional force can get. Until that hard core cadre of professional jihadist light infantry is destroyed, it will remain Baghdadi's center of gravity. Without it, the Islamic State cannot hold ground, and it becomes a mere traveling band of terrorists. Until then, it should be treated as a regular army subject to destruction; that will require real war, not counterinsurgency. Its auxiliaries of convenience may be tribal sheiks and Baathist insurgents, but they will soon be eliminated as the jihadists tighten their stranglehold on the areas that they control. These Sunnis who were abused by the Maliki regime are "useful idiots" to be eliminated by the Islamic State once they are no longer needed.
Key Vulnerability. The brutality and absolute adherence to their perverse version of Sharia Law is quickly wearing thin on the occupied Iraqi and Syrian populations that the would-be caliphate holds subject. The population is also the key to pointing out who the foreign jihadists are and where they are located in each city and village they currently occupy. The jihadists failure to win the support of the population will be their critical vulnerability if a viable military force ever comes to eradicate the infestation with infantry on the ground. Therein lies the rub. Who will be the exterminator for the jihadist infestation?
Containment or Destruction? The Obama administration's strategy, if there is one, seems to be containment. The problem with containment is that it implies that we are willing to accept the existence of the enemy until he poses an existential threat. This is why we tolerated the Taliban/al Qaeda alliance until September 11, 2001. Destruction means by the joint military definition, "to render an enemy force unusable unless totally rebuilt". By that definition, we need to destroy the conventional combat power that allows the sanctuary for terrorist activity that Baghdadi has created. Until we do that, no American anywhere is safe. Mr. Foley's recent brutal murder was merely low hanging fruit for the Islamic State; that is what he wants to do to western civilization as we know it.
The Need for Combat Troops on the Ground. Until Americans and friends of Americans with tanks, armored vehicles, and counter improvised explosive devices (IEDs) go back into places like Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, and their Syrian counterpart cities; the Islamic State will remain an existential threat; not just to the region, but to our homeland. Airpower in this situation is cosmetic surgery. Ground combat is chemotherapy or perhaps even amputation. This is not a popular thing to say, but it needs to be said.
WHAT WOULD A COMBINED ARMS CAMPAIGN OF EXTERMINATION LOOK LIKE? Each major population area occupied by the jihadists will likely take the equivalent of a Marine Expeditionary Brigade (a four battalion regiment of tanks and infantry supported by air and logistics) to destroy the Islamic State's combat capability. It might be the same unit moving city to city, but it would be better to have two converging units to prevent retreat. One would move east from Baghdadi's strongholds in Syria and one would move north to liberate Mosul and then west to clear Iraq's Anbar province with a link up at the old Iraq-Syria border. This pincer movement would resemble a miniature reenactment of the destruction of the Germany army in World War II. Make no mistake, it would be bloody business on both sides.
Shaping the Battle Space. Although this is a kinetic problem, there is a definite need to strategically and politically prepare for the battles to be fought. Baghdadi filled a political vacuum in the Sunni majority areas of Syria and Iraq by portraying himself a champion against Shiite and Alawite (a Shiite offshoot) oppression in Iraq and Syria respectively. If we do not prop up a legitimate moderate opposition to the Assad regime in Syria and demand a regime inclusive of all Sunnis in Iraq, this problem will fester for decades. If we cannot accomplish those political objectives the present ineffectual military containment policy will be the best we can do, and it will likely fail.
End State. If we do what is proposed here, the best end state we can hope for is not Nirvana by any means. It would have three components:
The first would be a shattered Islamic State's conventional military capability that could not hold a sanctuary area for future terrorist attacks and whose financial capabilities are crippled.
Second, would be legitimate moderate armed resistance to the Assad regime in Syria which might be able to reach an accommodation on reform that would allow power sharing in the government. The near term fall of the Assad regime is probably a pipe dream at this point.
Finally, an Iraqi federal government where Sunnis and Shiites can share power. We may have reached a point where the Kurds go their own way, but they would probably be economically better of in some kind of partnership with Iraq for resource sharing. That is something the Kurds and Arab Iraqis need to sort out for themselves.
None of the above is likely given the venality of politics in the region; the real end state is likely to be messier. However, an outcome that sees the caliphate "wanna-be" eliminated as a major player is better than the alternatives.
NOWHERE TO HIDE. The picture I have painted here is grim. As stated earlier, the American people may believe that they are sick of war and the Middle East, but the reality is that the vast majority have never seen war; they are merely tired of hearing about it. What most Americans fail to realize is that their mere existence is an affront to radical jihadists. Our very lifestyle is repugnant to them. There is no negotiating, nor is there any escaping. In this case, Leon Trotsky was correct when he stated that; "you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps officer who has been a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an Adjunct Professor at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.
About the Author(s)
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who has been a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.
Comments
+1 to all that. I think we are being baited.
Hey Rant or David or MF or others, what do you think of this piece by Patrick Cockburn:
<blockquote>The point at which jihadis should be best identified, intercepted and stopped is not within Britain or even Europe, but as they cross from Turkey into Syria. The Turks have a 560-mile border with Syria and it is across this that jihadis must travel if they are to reach their destination, primarily but not exclusively the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), to offer their services. Those who head for Iraq must also take what Turkish journalists call "the Jihadist Highway", a network of roads across Turkey and Syria.</blockquote>
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/an-obvious-first-step--clos…
Ukrainian, "AfPak", or whatever, I am obsessed with borders it seems....
IMO sending in the Marines to solve the IS problem in Syria and Iraq makes as much sense as sending in the Marines to solve the societal problems in Fergerson Mo.
GA draws a parallel with the fruitcake who flooded into AF and the fruitcake who are flooding into the ranks of the IS. There are several important differences that unfortunately do not bode well for the West but regrettably bolsters the ‘everything is a nail’ approach.
1: Most of the foreigners who came to AF did so after the Soviets let it be known they were pulling out. The widely held notion that these Arabs had been there much sooner and fought the Soviets is ALQ contrived bullshit. Today it appears to me that many of the foreign fighters are actually doing some of the fighting. So you will have a more battle-hardened version of fruitcake.
2. 99% of the thousands of foreigners who poured into AF were born in the ME and North Africa. The number of Western passport holders in AF prior to the end of the Taliban could be counted in the dozens. According to media reports (easily the world’s worst source of factual information) currently there are an estimated 10,000 Western passport holders fighting in the region, of whom 500 are American. If 9/11 and a 5 trillion dollar war is the damage a few dozen helped create, god help us what 10,000 may bring down.
3. I read somewhere a gentle observer’s hope that returning fighters will have had their fill of violence and return to a normal life in the West. IMO it is more likely they have tired of the threat posed by heavily armed opponents but kids dancing in nightclubs or commuters riding the subway are a threat they are very eager to - ‘Smite down with the wrath of Allah!’
4. IMO sending in the Marines will mean the USG is choosing to go to war with the KSA. Many folks will balk at that suggestion (especially when they are at the gas station) and forward the argument that the House of Saud cannot control all of its citizenry. Well if that is true (and I have my doubts) we simply have a law enforcement problem that needs more resourcing.
In a country where women can’t drive and adultery is a capital offense I’m sure the KSA Penal Code grants powers of arrest somewhat more effective and constructive than the ‘law enforcement’ on offer from a MEF. I’m assuming the KSA can afford the money to pay for it – which would be a nice change.
5. The blatant ‘Hi everyone, I’m a Londoner ‘ of the Jim Foley murder is a deliberate ploy by the IS leadership to divert attention away from the KSA COG. I mean thousands of locals have been getting their heads hacked off in the region over the last two years.. In the Western media the carnage got a few lines on page 7 or an occasional mention before a commercial break. A Brit hacks off a Yank head and its front page, inside color-spread in every paper in the world. On TV the demand for air-time even pushed the Gaza killing-kids-war-porn off the radar.
The IS leadership’s hope is the Foley murder and the way it was presented will lead posturing Western political leaders to instigate a ‘get tough’ approach in the West that will inescapably be framed by religious and racial profiling.
6. IMO if we approach it as a military, religious or ethnic problem and not a law enforcement problem we will lose and the IS know it. As in AF many of the IS fighters have criminal records. Oddly enough very few have criminal records for violence. Petty crime, drug dealing, GTA etc. got most of them in prison or a police record.
More often than not upon release from prison they were ostracized from their local ethnic communities and thus rendered unemployable. A jaundiced vain-glorious version of Islam (picked up in prison) filled the void. Subsequently many of these Western passport holders are already known to police. I imagine it is very similar in the KSA, Jordon and the Gulf.
If the West instigates draconian violations of civil liberties upon these ethnic communities the intelligence that currently facilitates precise targeting (remember many of them were/are already shunned by their local communities) will be completely lost in a tsunami of civil unrest that will flood across the West.
If you will a Western version of the Arab Spring.
We need to stop dancing to the Wahhabi fruitcake fiddle.
RC
This comment stands out:
<i>If we do not prop up a legitimate moderate opposition to the Assad regime in Syria and demand a regime inclusive of all Sunnis in Iraq, this problem will fester for decades. If we cannot accomplish those political objectives the present ineffectual military containment policy will be the best we can do, and it will likely fail.</i>
First off, the Sunni/Shi'a feud has been around for centuries, and it will be with us for at least decades no matter what we do.
Second, these political objectives are simply unrealistic. I have no doubt that US forces could defeat ISIS on the ground. But can they "prop up a legitimate moderate opposition to the Assad regime"? Realistically, no. Before we can prop up a moderate opposition, we have to find one that has a half chance of winning, and have to square our definition of "legitimate" with those of the various Syrian factions. This is not a task we can achieve with military force. Trying to create an "inclusive" regime in Iraq... well, we have been there and done that, and we can all see how well that worked. We can defeat any armed force that takes the field against us, but we cannot impose our models of governance or dictate how these countries will be governed. If we have not learned this by now, we have learned nothing.
"Winning" is achieving your political objectives. If we enter a fight with political objectives that are unrealistic and not achievable with the means we are deploying, we will not achieve our objectives, and we will lose.
It seems strange to me that the conflict is being framed as "ISIS vs the US" when it is actually a direct outgrowth of the Sunni/Shi'a fight. When we removed Saddam and took it on ourselves to determine how Iraq would be governed, we essentially imposed ourselves as mediator in that fight. Naturally, we didn't do a very good job at that, in part because we didn't seem to realize the role we'd adopted. Now that fight has flared, both in Iraq (a situation we created) and Syria (a situation we didn't create). Do we really want to try to impose ourselves as mediator between Sunni and Shi'a? Do we want to take sides in that fight? If so, what specifically are we trying to achieve, and are those goals realistic, practical, and achievable?
I do understand the point that ISIS knows how to fight. They are on a collision course with Hezbollah and the Quds force, more than they are with us, and I'm told those guys know how to fight too. All of the parties in that fight hate us. Do we really want to jump in between them?
Col Anderson writes well, as always. His basic OpOrder to defeat the ISIS/Murderers of the Month is flawless.
However, I disagree with his contention the ISIS (or ISIL) is something new. It is perhaps an upgraded version of the Taliban or AQ or the Shi'a---but it is not new. Since the death (murder?) of Muhammad and the initial schism of Islam in 632, there have been literally hundreds of groups of Muslims (Muhammad predicted 73) that have clothed themselves in the robes of the prophet. With their "personal relationship with God", and their infallible interpretation of the Qu'ran, they all have been willing to slaughter as many of their co-religionists as necessary to prevail. Those who did not share their religion were not treated as kindly, as those under the sword of ISIS know well.
Power was the object, and religion the enabler---as always.
ISIS is a new name, not a new movement. An operation the size that Col Anderson proposes will not be supported by the Constitution, the Administration, the Congress or the American people.
Speaking of movements, I admit that I was with Bush43 when he said we ought to bring "the Taliban to justice, or justice to the Taliban." I agreed at the start with the two wars, and his basic premise that liberty and security in free Western societies was linked to liberty and security and free societies in the Middle East. We both thought nation building was doable. We both thought there were scalable lessons learned in the aftermath of WW11 with the transformation of two martial societies---Germany and Japan---that were applicable to the Middle East.
We were wrong.
In spite of or because of Islam, the Middle East is a Stone Age society in which might makes right. And "compassion", "mercy" and "love" are words for women and children in yet to be written Books.
So, what to do about the current Murderers of the Month? It's a given that Western ideas of freedom, democracy and equality are a long way from ripe in any Islamic country. Nation building, therefore, will not work. Even more, our country will not support another extended military foray into the Middle East. Congress might even straighten their spines...
What to do with regard to military actions?
We do what we can: "rearrange the furniture," as we used to call brief, limited-objective combined arms actions. While we still have air superiority, establish where the critical ISIS administrative, training and logistics nodes are. If we can find troop concentrations, even better. As the nodes reach a certain mass, heavy use of air power and properly supported and equipped troops---perhaps up to brigade size---are inserted for a limited time--not longer than a week, surely-- to "rearrange" all the furniture we can find. Then get out.
Repeat as necessary.
Airpower, combat support and ingress/egress security are all no-go items.
There will be political repercussions. In addition, going in somewhere uninvited, and killing a bunch of bad guys and blowing up their stuff seems like a tactic rather than a strategy. But the strategy is: if you threaten us and get big enough we will come for you. Why not stop threatening us?
These limited actions are probably constitutional, and may receive support from the American people if successful and low cost. They won't win the USA any overt thanks from the political classes of the world. Yet, POTUS called ISIS a "cancer." The world body knows that a cancer in the bowel will spread if untreated...
"But we have failed to defeat the Taliban & have created yet another enemy against America, arming them with modern weapons also."
The Taliban are far weaker than they were in 2001, or relative to their resurgence from 2006-2009. They were clearly the most powerful insurgency in the world until ISIS and more recent developments. Insurgencies can last for decades, and the ongoing war in Afghanistan/Pakistan has many conditions that will likely allow it to join the list of insurgencies that have lasted that long.
"Then THEY need to rise up & defeat ISIS...Not the U.S." In insurgency/counterinsurgency you aren't going to get meaningful cooperation or support from a population if the control is so lopsided as to create a credible sense of doubt of whether a side can protect its collaborators against retaliation. You can make the argument that the Iraqi army will have to do the heavy lifting in terms of making that happen when taking back major population centers, but it's clear so far that limited U.S. intervention has already reaped some progress in enabling Kurdish forces and blunting the ISIS advance.
"I find writers, such as Mr. Anderson, who seem to be oblivious of the myriad of problems facing us at home, but promoting yet another adventurous military escapade overseas, falsely assuming that the U.S. taxpayer will just sit idly by why the military continues to bankrupt our nation fighting losing wars, all in an effort to shore up their own personal service fiefdoms...The Civ/Mil leaders have had over a decade in Iraq & Afghanistan to get it right, but have yet to even come up with even a workable doctrine to defeat the enemy & leave these two countries in better shape than when we entered them...time to come home & lick their wounds..."
I suppose you haven't read the counterinsurgency field manual that guided the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were both successful in regaining large amounts of lost or contested territory from the insurgents. COIN is an extremely complex concept, and more often than not its critics make arguments that make it seem as if they haven't understood its ideas properly or even read the field manual. It is also very common for people who do not understand COIN to declare failure because they do not understand the myriad of metrics that goes into defining success. I believe SWJ has an interview with Petraeus and McMaster which is about the closest you will get to finding a "sparknotes" sort of overview of COIN. My point? There is a doctrine, it has been implemented, and it has worked, although it clearly could have worked better. But then again, performing a nation wide counterinsurgency campaign is an extreme challenge, certainly in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan.
In terms of isolationism, it doesn't make sense in a globalized world, with the U.S. being the hegemon, to suddenly retrench itself and focus on domestic issues. If any country can influence the international order for better or for worse it is the U.S., and has done so for decades like any other country or polity would or has when in a similar position. The U.S. is in fact recognized as a leader by many, many countries for lots of issues. And a more on topic point, the jihadist war is a transnational insurgency. The conditions are set for the conflict to last for generations, it's not about abstaining from action on principle, it's about using an appropriate amount of resources to deal with a certain level of threat, and its a threat whose trajectory isn't trending downward.
"Whatever failings one might attribute to the Bush administration, al Qaeda never successfully launched another strike on the US homeland from Afghanistan."
But we have failed to defeat the Taliban & have created yet another enemy against America, arming them with modern weapons also.
"The brutality and absolute adherence to their perverse version of Sharia Law is quickly wearing thin on the occupied Iraqi and Syrian populations that the would-be caliphate holds subject."
Then THEY need to rise up & defeat ISIS...Not the U.S.
To have American Conventional unit "Boots on the Ground" once again, with all of the support train that goes along with them, will only mire the U.S. into another decade or longer war, which we will not or cannot win. Our attention should be focused on our own country & securing our wide open borders, removing Illegal Aliens & riding our shores of ISIS sleeper cells. I find writers, such as Mr. Anderson, who seem to be oblivious of the myriad of problems facing us at home, but promoting yet another adventurous military escapade overseas, falsely assuming that the U.S. taxpayer will just sit idly by why the military continues to bankrupt our nation fighting losing wars, all in an effort to shore up their own personal service fiefdoms...The Civ/Mil leaders have had over a decade in Iraq & Afghanistan to get it right, but have yet to even come up with even a workable doctrine to defeat the enemy & leave these two countries in better shape than when we entered them...time to come home & lick their wounds...