By JOHN NAGL
October 12, 2014
America Needs a More Aggressive Strategy Against ISIL. Now.
President Obama’s pledge to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, is plainly failing. Despite an unrelenting series of air strikes the Islamist extremists appear poised to take Kobane, a key Syrian town along the Turkish border, and the critical Iraqi province of Anbar. Today the barbarians are literally at the gates of Baghdad.
ISIL has had a really good year, which is very bad news for U.S. interests in the Middle East. Contained almost entirely on the Syrian side of the admittedly porous Syria-Iraq border in January, a scant 10 months later ISIL forces control the western third of Iraq and are able to hit Baghdad with short-range mortar rounds. What accounts for the extraordinary success of a newly formed terrorist army against an Iraqi force trained and equipped by the United States over the past decade at a cost of tens of billions of dollars?
Strength of opposition, combined with an inadequate U.S. response, is the primary answer. The American decision to abandon Iraq at the end of 2011 without leaving behind a cadre of 15,000 advisers—as many in the Pentagon wanted—doomed the Iraqi Army to failure. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency David Petraeus and the uniformed Joint Chiefs of Staff all recommended maintaining an advisory presence in Iraq; the White House decided otherwise, contending that the Iraqi government would not supply the necessary legal immunity for our boots on the ground. The absence of advisers has had predictably horrific results.
The advisers would have served two purposes. Embedded with Iraqi battalions and brigades, they would have provided conduits for American intelligence to the Iraqi units and access to American air power should the intelligence indicate the existence of a threat. They also would have had a dramatic impact on the Iraqi Army’s logistics system, the Achilles heel of any army but particularly of this one; news accounts detail Iraqi soldiers complaining of a lack of food, ammunition and even water while attempting to repel ISIL’s attacks. The advisers would have provided a steel spine around which the Iraqi units would rally; an Iraqi battalion with a dozen embedded advisors (and the airpower and logistics assets that would have been at their beck and call) would have been two to three times more combat-effective than the same Iraqi units were without American support earlier this year.
Even more important than their military role is the political leverage American advisers would have provided against the Iraqi government. Nuri al-Maliki, the former Iraqi prime minister, feared a coup instigated by the predominantly Sunni Iraqi Army more than he did an attack from ISIL. Following the departure of American troops in 2011, he systematically purged the most capable senior officers from the Iraqi Army and replaced them with Shiite cronies who were personally loyal to him, but were incompetent—and, under fire, proved to be cowards. Many fled at the approach of ISIL forces, contributing to the collapse of their units and to ISIL’s stunning success. An American presence would have kept Maliki more honest, resulting in improved leadership of Iraqi forces that would have fought harder against the ISIL assault.
The other primary cause of ISIL’s success has been the virulent nature of its ideology. Al Qaeda central, the organization that planned and conducted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States from the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region, has been effectively defeated by drone strikes and Pakistani counterinsurgency efforts; it has not conducted an effective operation in several years. Radical Islamists inspired by propaganda on the Internet and seeking their opportunity for jihad now have a far more inspiring employer looking for their talents. The best terror talent in the world is flocking to this startup and lending it their enthusiasm and skills; worryingly, many of the recruits have Western passports.
ISIL is now the most rapidly growing, and most dangerous, terrorist group in the world; it has accomplished the until-now unthinkable coup of seizing a significant amount of territory in which to plan and prepare for terror attacks worldwide. ISIL has thus at one swoop defeated our post-9/11 strategy of not allowing terrorists to hold ground; the Maryland-sized swath of Iraq and Syria now under ISIL control is providing significant oil and tax revenue to fund future terror operations.
This is both extremely unfortunate and entirely predictable, given America’s abdication of its responsibility to continue to support an Iraqi government that we spent more than a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives establishing. Now, territory that my friends lost limbs and eyes and lives seizing from radical Islamist insurgents will have to be purchased again, at the cost of another butcher’s bill. Doing so will require more American advisers and dollars and cost the lives of more innocent Iraqis than it would have taken to prevent ISIL from seizing the ground in the first place.
In war, time and decisiveness are assets as important as guns and ammunition. The administration missed the opportunity to arm moderate Syrian rebels in the summer of 2012; many of them are now dead at the hands of ISIL fighters. It will take years to form a Free Syrian Army to fight ISIL inside Syria, but there are still Kurdish and Iraqi forces able to fight ISIL inside Iraq, to keep Baghdad from falling and to prevent greater humanitarian tragedies. America should abandon the idea of limiting its response to a tiny continent of U.S. advisers who stay out of combat and immediately send a Special Forces team of combat advisers to embed inside each remaining Iraqi and Kurdish battalions—a force of thousands rather than of the hundreds currently on the ground. These forces will wear boots and engage in close combat. Some will be killed, but fewer than if we wait until ISIL seizes even more territory and gathers even more recruits.
The threat to U.S. interests of the takeover of a critical swath of oil-rich territory in the center of the Arab world—a base for terror that would make al Qaeda’s former base in Afghanistan look like a mild threat by comparison—is imminent and real. More and more voices—even, most recently, former President Jimmy Carter—are now calling for the response that Obama has resisted, a real U.S. ground force, for the simple reason that there is no other way to achieve the president's stated objectives. Defeating ISIL will require American troops in numbers far greater than have been committed to date. And ISIL grows stronger by the day—and harder to defeat—as we dither.
John Nagl, headmaster of the Haverford School in Haverford, Pa., is retired Army officer who served in the first two Iraq wars andis the author of Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/america-needs-a-more-aggressive-strategy-against-isilnow-111821_full.html?print#.VEFjd8WSxIw
No comments:
Post a Comment