Western airstrikes and Kurdish resistance appear to have slowed the Islamic State’s takeover of Kobani, a Syrian town on the border with Turkey, for now. But the situation in the area, where Syrian Kurdish rebels have been steadily losing ground to the jihadists, demonstrates the inadequacy and incoherence of President Obama’s strategy.
The Obama administration has said that losing Kobani isn’t a big setback for the fight against the Islamic State. But if our goal is to degrade and destroy the group, it is.
The president has prioritized driving the jihadists out of Iraq, but this is senseless when the border between it and Syria has essentially ceased to exist. Regardless, even our air campaign in Iraq is too limited and poorly focused to have strategic significance.
The only real success of the campaign so far has been diplomatic: getting Arab states to join NATO in bombing missions. Unfortunately, this isn’t all that helpful on the ground, because when it comes to actual American priorities, our allies are often either ineffective or incorrigible.
This problem is clear in Kobani, where our two potential allies, the Syrian Kurdish rebels and the Turkish government, despise each other. The president has tried to lean on the much less malleable faction, the Turks, as part of his strategy to enlist local state allies. But for a number of reasons, the Turks aren’t interested, and the Kurds don’t really want their help anyway.
So we ourselves should be helping, to the extent possible, the Syrian Kurds. They represent the most effective non-Islamist fighting force in the country, and yet we have been reluctant to back them. Why? They have not joined the peace process between the rebels and the Assad regime in Geneva, because the rebel leadership is not open to the idea of a federal Syria, as the Kurds want. The rebels are likely wrong about that, and the Geneva process is at the moment essentially a hopeless endeavor among expats anyway. There are also concerns that the Kurds have not been determined enough in fighting the regime, but that’s no longer (if it ever was) our priority.
They have been fighting al-Qaeda and the Islamic State the best they can, and they deserve, to the extent possible, our help in doing it. That means getting small arms and supplies to Kobani and to Kurdish fighters elsewhere, however we can do it. (It will require securing some cooperation from the Kurdish regional government in Iraq, over which we could have plenty of leverage if the Obama administration were willing to use it.)
Even the airstrikes in the area have been at best half-hearted: Thursday, there were six strikes. Some days this week, there were just three or four. We could be launching dozens of such strikes a day. Of course, it is difficult to run a full air campaign without intelligence assets on the ground, which is why the Obama administration should not be ruling out a limited ground component.
Backing the Kurds, who have ties to insurgent groups in Turkey that only recently reached a ceasefire with the government, will upset Ataturk’s heirs. But right now, our NATO ally is not acting like an ally at all. President Obama ought to realize that and act accordingly. Stopping the Islamic State will require a more frank assessment of the abilities and motivations of our regional allies, and, above all, more American effort.