Fred and Kim Kagan were key intellectual architects of the surge that saved the Iraq war and defeated the forerunner of the Islamic State the first time around–and were ringing the alarm bells long ago about the descent of Iraq after the U.S. withdrawal, when few were inclined to listen.
Now, they have published a proposed strategy for defeating the Islamic State. I recommend reading the whole thing. You will be struck by its modest tone. What they propose is much more robust than President Obama’s strategy, yet, even then, the risks are high and the prospects of success uncertain. A few key points.
People speak loosely of how we must rely on the peshmerga and the Iraqi army on the ground in Iraq. The Kagans argue this is entirely wrong-headed. The key potential ally, and the only one that will be accepted in the Sunni communities where this battle will be fought, are the Sunni tribes:
Al-Qaeda and like-minded groups such as ISIS can only flourish in distressed Sunni communities. They attack every other religion and sect, but their bases must be in Sunni lands because their ideology is an extreme, exclusionary interpretation of Sunni Islam. Doing anything to al-Qaeda — defeating, disrupting, degrading, destroying, anything else — requires working with the overwhelming majority of the Sunni communities within which it lives and operates. Those communities have shown their distaste for the ideology and the groups that espouse it, rising up against them in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Egypt, and almost everywhere else they have appeared, except Pakistan.
But al-Qaeda brings more than ideology to the table. Its affiliates are extremely lethal and use brutality to maintain their positions among populations who reject their ideas. The Islamic State has been assassinating Sunni tribal leaders who allied with the U.S. and the Iraqi government during the Awakening in 2007 and pre-emptively killing those it fears might ally with us again. It has also been cleansing the areas of Syria it controls of potential Sunni opponents in an attempt to nip any reprise of the Awakening in the bud. Sunni populations cannot expel al-Qaeda groups simply because they reject their ideas. They need outside help to defeat these well-organized, well-armed, skilled, and determined zealots. They have already shown that they can and will fight against
al-Qaeda groups with that help, and that they either cannot or will not fight effectively without it.
The core challenge facing the U.S. in Iraq and Syria, therefore, is the problem of enabling the Sunni Arab community stretching from Baghdad to Damascus and Turkey to Jordan to defeat al-Qaeda affiliates and splinter groups and persuading that community to rejoin reformed states in Iraq and Syria whose security forces can thereafter provide the help it needs to keep al-Qaeda from returning.
Meeting this challenge requires centering operations within the Sunni Arab community rather than strengthening Shi’a and Kurdish forces that are alien and threatening to that community. A strategy of basing in Kurdistan and Shi’a Iraq and providing air support to Kurdish troops and ISF forces intermingled with Shi’a militias and Iranian advisers may achieve some initial successes, but will ultimately fail. The prospect of Kurdish domination over Ninewa Province, including Mosul, and of the permanent Kurdish seizure of Kirkuk, could well spark an ethnic Arab-Kurdish war. ISIS has been working actively to stoke those ethnic tensions inorder to provoke precisely such a conflict, which would allow it to embed itself more deeply among an embattled Arab populace. Merely strengthening Iraqi Security Forces that are rightly seen as Shi’a dominated and militia-infiltrated may also achieve short-term gains, but at the cost of setting conditions for an even larger Sunni Arab mobilization against perceived Shi’a domination that would create new opportunities for ISIS or a successor group to establish itself.
The Sunni Arabs in Iraq and Syria are the only local partners who can be decisive in the fight against ISIS and JN. Our strategy must focus on making direct contact with them, coordinating our efforts with them, building their strength against ISIS, and finding out the terms on which they would be willing to reintegrate into reformed states in Iraq and Syria. They are the pivot of the entire effort and must be at the heart of every phase of our strategy.
The Kagans are clear-eyed about the opposition in Syria:
The moderate elements of the opposition have been especially degraded because they are fighting against both the regime and ISIS. They have also received far less international support than either of their opponents. JN [the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria] has penetrated the opposition thoroughly and interwoven itself with opposition forces across the theater. JN has close operational ties with other Salafist-jihadist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham (HASI), although many other opposition groups also cooperate with Jabhat al-Nusra in battle without necessarily being aligned with JN. This includes an array of groups ranging from members of the Islamic Front to groups falling under the umbrella of the moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA).
Jabhat al-Nusra’s fighting prowess keeps it central to opposition efforts in the southern Deraa and Quneitra fronts as well as the Hama and Idlib fronts. It is also influential in the fight for Damascus. Jabhat al-Nusra is quietly cultivating influence within rebel governance and shaping the opposition where it can, although it appears that most opposition groups are cooperating with JN opportunistically rather than ideologically.
Their strategy requires the commitment of substantial ground forces:
It is impossible to identify precisely the forces that will be required for all of Phase I, let alone for subsequent phases, before operations have commenced. The activities recommended in this paper will likely require the deployment of not more than 25,000 ground forces supported by numerous air and naval assets. The bulk of those forces will likely be comprised of various kinds of units supporting a much more limited number of Special Forces and other assets deployed in small groups with tribes, opposition forces, and Iraqi Security Forces. This plan does not envisage U.S. combat units conducting unilateral operations (apart from targeted attacks against individual enemy leaders and small groups) or leading clearing operations. It requires some combat units in the support and quick reaction force (QRF) roles described above.
And there will be substantial risks:
. . . the dispersed footprint of U.S. troops required by this plan and the immaturity of the theater support infrastructure exposes US soldiers to a high risk of capture and kidnapping. Individual U.S. teams are likely to find themselves threatened by overwhelming enemy force at times. Casualties, hostages, and beheading videos are extremely likely. These risks must be mitigated through the deployment of robust helicopter support and quick response forces. Such forces will greatly increase the total “boots-on-the-ground” requirement, which many will find distasteful. It is essential to keep in mind, however, that withholding those forces and capabilities in order to keep the U.S. troop presence inside Iraq and Syria below some arbitrary number enormously increases the risk to the small number of Americans who would be actually operating with indigenous forces.
Again, read the whole thing – it’s a remarkably well-informed and unvarnished analysis of where we are vis-à-vis the Islamic State.