What’s Their Plan?
Obama’s Strategy for Fighting ISIS Isn’t All About Us
SEPT. 13, 2014
THERE are three things in life that you should never do ambivalently: get married, buy a house or go to war. Alas, we’re about to do No. 3. Should we?
President Obama clearly took this decision to lead the coalition to degrade and destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, with deep ambivalence. How could he not? Our staying power is ambiguous, our enemy is barbarous, our regional allies are duplicitous, our European allies are feckless and the Iraqis and Syrians we’re trying to help are fractious. There is not a straight shooter in the bunch.
Other than that, it’s just like D-Day.
Consider Saudi Arabia. It’s going to help train Free Syrian Army soldiers, but, at the same time, is one of the biggest sources of volunteer jihadists in Syria. And, according to a secret 2009 U.S. study signed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and divulged by WikiLeaks, private “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”
Turkey allowed foreign jihadists to pass into and out of Syria and has been an important market for oil that ISIS is smuggling out of Iraq for cash. Iran built the E.F.P.’s — explosively formed penetrators — that Iraqi Shiite militias used to help drive America out of Iraq and encouraged Iraq’s Shiite leaders to strip Iraqi Sunnis of as much power and money as possible, which helped create the ISIS Sunni counterrevolt. Syria’s president,Bashar al-Assad, deliberately allowed ISIS to emerge so he could show the world that he was not the only mass murderer in Syria. And Qatar is with us Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and against us Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fortunately, it takes the weekends off.
Meanwhile, back home, Obama knows that the members of his own party and the Republican Party who are urging him to bomb ISIS will be the first to run for the hills if we get stuck, fail or accidentally bomb a kindergarten class.
So why did the president decide to go ahead? It’s a combination of a legitimate geostrategic concern — if ISIS jihadists consolidate their power in the heart of Iraq and Syria, it could threaten some real islands of decency, like Kurdistan, Jordan and Lebanon, and might one day generate enough capacity to harm the West more directly — and the polls. Obama clearly feels drummed into this by the sudden shift in public opinion after ISIS’s ghastly videotaped beheadings of two American journalists.
O.K., but given this cast of characters, is there any way this Obama plan can end well? Only if we are extremely disciplined and tough-minded about how, when and for whom we use our power.
Before we step up the bombing campaign on ISIS, it needs to be absolutely clear on whose behalf we are fighting. ISIS did not emerge by accident and from nowhere. It is the hate-child of two civil wars in which the Sunni Muslims have been crushed. One is the vicious civil war in Syria in which the Iranian-backed Alawite-Shiite regime has killed roughly 200,000 people, many of them Sunni Muslims, with chemical weapons and barrel bombs. And the other is the Iraqi civil war in which the Iranian-backed Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki systematically stripped the Sunnis of Iraq of their power and resources.
There will be no self-sustained stability unless those civil wars are ended and a foundation is laid for decent governance and citizenship. Only Arabs and Muslims can do that by ending their sectarian wars and tribal feuds. We keep telling ourselves that the problem is “training,” when the real problem is governance. We spent billions of dollars training Iraqi soldiers who ran away from ISIS’s path — not because they didn’t have proper training, but because they knew that their officers were corrupt hacks who were not appointed on merit and that the filthy Maliki government was unworthy of fighting for. We so underestimate how starved Arabs are, in all these awakenings, for clean, decent governance.
Never forget, this is a two-front war: ISIS is the external enemy, and sectarianism and corruption in Iraq and Syria are the internal enemies. We can and should help degrade the first, but only if Iraqis and Syrians, Sunnis and Shiites, truly curtail the second. If our stepped-up bombing, in Iraq and Syria, gets ahead of their reconciliation, we will become the story and the target. And that is exactly what ISIS is waiting for.
ISIS loses if our moderate Arab-Muslim partners can unite and make this a civil warwithin Islam — a civil war in which America is the air force for the Sunnis and Shiites of decency versus those of barbarism. ISIS wins if it can make this America’s war with Sunni Islam — a war where America is the Shiite/Alawite air force against Sunnis in Iraq and Syria. ISIS will use every bit of its Twitter/Facebook network to try to depict it as the latter, and draw more recruits.
We keep making this story about us, about Obama, about what we do. But it is not about us. It is about them and who they want to be. It’s about a pluralistic region that lacks pluralism and needs to learn how to coexist. It’s the 21st century. It’s about time.
A Risky Bet on Syrian Rebels
SEPT. 13, 2014
President Obama’s new strategy for routing ISIS, the extremist Sunni group that controls large areas of Iraq and Syria, rests substantially and precariously on having rebels in Syria fight ISIS, even as they battle the forces of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. The plan is full of hope and fraught with obstacles.
During the three-year-long Syrian civil war, Mr. Obama has been rightly reluctant to provide significant weapons and military assistance to the Syrian rebels. From the beginning, it was nearly impossible to determine the makeup and character of the rebel groups, of which there are about 1,500,according to James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence.
Groups identified by Western intelligence agencies as the moderate opposition — those that might support democracy and respect human rights — have been weak, divided and without coherent plans or sustained command structures capable of toppling the Assad regime. Today, those so-called moderates are even weaker and more divided; in some cases, their best fighters are hard-line Islamists.
In ruling out sending American combat troops into yet another Muslim country, Mr. Obama’s plan relies on these rebels to serve as ground forces to defend and seize territory after American airstrikes in Syria, for which he needs to seek congressional approval. Buttraining and equipping them will be complicated and risky, and will take months, if not longer. ISIS, which the C.I.A. saidThursday has as many as 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria, is already well-equipped and has proved to be stunningly skillful at waging war and seizing territory in both Iraq and Syria.
Despite efforts by the United States and others to persuade the insurgent groups to unify under a common political and military command structure, there is still no shared leadership. In fact, these groups may be close to defeat in Aleppo, where they are fighting both the Assad forces and ISIS.
In April 2013, Mr. Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a secret mission to train Syrian rebels in Jordan. The total number trained so far is between 2,000 and 3,000. Last September, the C.I.A. began delivering light weapons like rifles and ammunition to a rebel faction commanded by Gen. Salim Idriss, whom Americans considered a competent leader and whose forces were not connected to terrorist groups. But since then, the Supreme Military Council, which General Idriss headed, has broken apart, and he has been sidelined. Its weapons and supply storerooms have been looted by Islamist groups or stolen by its members.
As the ISIS threat became clearer, Mr. Obama announced a plan in June to spend up to $500 million to send some American Special Forces troops to train as many as 3,000 rebels over the next year, but it stalled in Congress. Now the administration proposes training twice that number of fighters in neighboring countries in the Middle East, including a facility that Saudi Arabia has agreed to host.
One complication is the federal ban on sending military aid to people with a history of human rights abuses. The C.I.A. has been working for some time to vet the Syrian rebels, but on a limited scale; the expanded mission, which would include more fighters, is likely to make vetting even more difficult.
Beyond that, there are bigger questions. The main target of the United States right now is ISIS, but for the mainstream rebel groups, getting rid of Mr. Assad is the main goal. How do you reconcile those competing goals? How do you avoid a flare-up of anti-American sentiment? The Assad government and its allies Russia and Iran have condemned Mr. Obama’s plans, but how will they react when the military campaign begins? And how can weapons shipped to rebel fighters be kept out of the hands of ISIS?
America’s success at training security forces in other countries is mixed at best. Billions of dollars have been spent building up the Iraqi army, only to have key units collapse in the face of the ISIS invasion of Mosul. Unless the Obama administration can do better with the Syrian rebels, there is no chance the fight against ISIS can be successful.
To Stop ISIS in Syria, Support Aleppo
By JEAN-MARIE GUÉHENNO and NOAH BONSEY
SEPT. 14, 2014
President Obama’s speech last week signaled a likely expansion into Syria of American airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, yet offered little indication of an immediate strategy to halt ISIS’ gains there. The administration’s first focus thus remains on Iraq, while familiar pledges to work with regional allies and increase support to moderate rebels in Syria — if Congress approves sufficient funding — appear divorced from the urgency of the situation on the ground.
Though Western attention is drawn to Iraq, it is Syria that has witnessed the most significant ISIS gains since June. It is Aleppo, Syria’s largest metropolitan area, that presents ISIS’ best opportunity for expanding its claimed caliphate. An effective strategy for halting, and eventually reversing, ISIS’ expansion should begin there, and soon.
Stopping ISIS requires addressing the problems that enabled its rise. Among other factors, like lax Turkish border controls, ISIS has profited from the sectarian politics and indiscriminate military tactics of autocrats in Baghdad and Damascus. With Iranian support, these leaders have worked systematically to prevent the emergence of credible, moderate Sunni alternatives.
The Syrian opposition’s Western and regional allies have inadvertently aided that effort, as their blend of tough talk and weak, poorly coordinated support has undermined the Syrian rebels whom, ostensibly, they back. ISIS has exploited the resulting vulnerabilities among its Sunni competitors by combining the allure of empowerment to those who join with the threat of brutal punishment to any who resist.
These dynamics are on display in Aleppo. Even as ISIS forces in eastern Syria fight to evict the regime from its remaining outposts there, the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus has concentrated on defeating the mainstream, non-jihadist opposition. Regime forces, backed by indiscriminate aerial bombardment, continue to encircle the rebels who control the eastern half of the city.
Meanwhile, just 15 miles to the north, ISIS is fighting the same poorly organized and underequipped rebel factions. ISIS’ strategic objective is to capture valuable ground that can serve as a gateway to the heart of rebel-held territory in the country’s northwest. The killing last week of several senior leaders in the rebel organization Ahrar al-Sham, a key adversary of ISIS, may ease its path.
Given Aleppo’s strategic and symbolic importance as a rebel stronghold, the very viability of mainstream anti-Assad forces in northern Syria is at stake in this battle on two fronts. The vital significance of this is that it is they who must take the lead on the ground in rolling back ISIS gains in Syria.
Among all who have fought ISIS since it emerged in 2003 (as Al Qaeda in Iraq), local Sunni insurgents have the most promising record. It was Sunni fighters who routed the organization in Iraq during 2007 and 2008, and in northwestern Syria early this year. Other forces on hand — what remains of the Syrian and Iraqi Armies, and the pro-Assad, Shiite and Kurdish militias — lack the necessary credibility with local populations to take and hold ground within ISIS’ main areas of control.
Without effective support, the opposition in Aleppo faces defeat. There are two ways of preventing that.
The first would be through a local cease-fire between regime and rebel forces in Aleppo. Regime forces would have to agree to withdraw from recently captured areas where they pose an immediate threat to the rebels’ one remaining supply line into the city. A deal like this would enable the rebels to shift resources to the fight against ISIS.
A local cease-fire would require a fundamental shift in the Assad regime’s strategy: Instead of prioritizing the defeat of the mainstream opposition, it would have to train its fire exclusively on ISIS. That is highly unlikely. The best hope for such dramatic change can come only through pressure from Iran and Russia, if they wish their Syrian ally to be part of the solution to the ISIS problem rather than one of its causes.
Failing that, the only alternative is for the mainstream opposition’s backers (including, but not limited to, the United States) to rapidly increase and improve their support to the rebels in greater Aleppo. That would entail funding, ammunition and anti-tank weapons, as well as improvements in cooperation among the backers themselves. Besides greater American investment in the process, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey must make coordination a higher priority than their respective relations with rebel groups.
The international partners must also work together to create incentives for pragmatic behavior and political engagement among rebel factions, while punishing indiscriminate tactics, sectarian rhetoric and criminal actions. One useful effect could be to strengthen the position of nonideological groups within the rebel balance of power.
The risks of boosting support to rebels are well known. Arms supplies might leak to Al Nusra Front, a jihadist group that has proved important to mainstream rebels as a tactical ally against the Assad regime and ISIS forces. Worse, matériel might even end up in ISIS’ hands, should its gains continue. Barring a significant de-escalation in the regime’s war against anti-ISIS rebels, however, there is no palatable alternative — airstrikes alone will not stop ISIS in Syria.
If mainstream opposition is defeated in Aleppo, ISIS will expand westward. And by appearing to be the sole Sunni force capable of sustaining war against the regime, ISIS will win still more recruits. There may be no second chances: As America is finding in Iraq,credible Sunni partners in the fight against the jihadis, once lost, are not easily replaced.
Jean-Marie Guéhenno, a former deputy joint special envoy for the United Nations and the Arab League to Syria, is the president, andNoah Bonsey is the senior Syria analyst, of the International Crisis Group
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