Martin Indyk on the power of Islamic State

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2014/s4095810.htm

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 27/09/2014

Reporter: Steve Cannane

Former US Special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and US Ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, discusses the complexities of the war against Islamic State.

Transcript

STEVE CANNANE, PRESENTER: To further discuss the campaign against Islamic State in the Middle East I'm joined by Martin Indyk, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. He is a former US ambassador to Israel. Until recently he was the US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He's currently on a visit to his old home town of Sydney, where he spoke this week at the Lowy Institute.

Martin Indyk, welcome back.

MARTIN INDYK, DIRECTOR OF FOREIGN POLICY, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: Good to be here. Thank you.

STEVE CANNANE: Can we start by getting you to paint us a picture about what is happening in the Middle East at the moment? Can you outline for us the three conflicts, as you see it, that are causing so much chaos in the region?

MARTIN INDYK: I think it's important to understand that we're not just dealing with ISIL in isolation. It is a situation in which the age-old Israeli-Arab conflict, which has kind of morphed into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is now joined by a Shiah-Sunni conflict, with the predominant power Iran on the one side and Saudi Arabia on the other side, but finding its expression in Syria and Iraq and ISIL playing off on that conflict as well. And then there is a conflict within Sunni Islam between the Sunni monarchs and the new Egyptian regime on the one side and the Muslim Brotherhood and then the more extreme ISIL as well.

So you've got three different conflicts creating a great deal of cross-currents and turbulence, as well as a kind of breakdown of the old existing order in the region. And that makes it extremely difficult to try to generate some order out of this chaos.

STEVE CANNANE: In your many years living in the Middle East and engaging actively in the Middle East, have you ever seen it this volatile and this unpredictable?

MARTIN INDYK: You know, it's worth looking back. There have been many periods over the last 40 years, 50 years in which there have been wars, conflicts: Arab-Israeli, Arab-Arab, Arab-Iranian, Iraqi-Iranian. That one raged for 10 years, included the use of chemical weapons. So this is a region that is known for its volatility and its conflicts and its bloodshed.

But I cannot remember a time since the Second World War in which you have this confluence of revolutions, breakdown, failing states, ungoverned areas, rise of Islamic extremism, on top of all the conflicts we've had before.

STEVE CANNANE: So we're now seeing the US dragged back into the Middle East reluctantly to try and restore some kind of order. How are they going to go about that?

MARTIN INDYK: I think the first point is right: that President Obama is coming back with the American people in a very reluctant way and it's quite striking that the British parliament today should be voting to come back and join us in that effort.

We think back a year ago: it was last summer in the Northern Hemisphere when the British parliament refused to back up the prime minister and his desire to back president Obama in an effort to enforce a red line in Syria against the Syrian regime.

So now you've got a real turning point, but it's not because anybody really wants to do it; it's because there is a recognition on the part of the leaders and the people in the West that this is becoming so dangerous, not just to the region but our own shores, even here in Australia, that something has got to be done about it.

STEVE CANNANE: So how are they going to go about it?

MARTIN INDYK: Well, it's complicated. You notice that every leader that talks about doing it says it's going to take a long time.

Now, the reason they say it's going to take a long time is because for the first time you've got a situation in which ISIL controls a large swathe of territory across Syria and Iraq. They have a combination of a force that is trained and disciplined and determined and motivated, ideologically motivated. They have sources of revenue. We all heard about that now: their smuggling of oil which generates about $2 million a day, plus they robbed the bank in Mosul. And so they have... They control territory, they have funds, they've taken a lot of weapons from the Iraqi army which the United States provided. And therefore they're formidable.

But the great advantage that they have in terms of their taking territory is also their great weakness. Unlike Al Qaeda, which never set up the caliphate - always talked about doing it but never actually did it - they took control of territory. And when you control territory, you have to look after the people that you control. And they've got something like eight million people that they have to feed and take care of. And they're now in the dilemma of: do you fight the enemy or do you feed the public?

So the most important thing is to make it difficult for them: cut their sources of revenue, cut their ability to smuggle oil, cut their ability to generate funds from hostage taking, for example, and cut the inflow of funds from other sources, particularly in the Gulf: from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. If you can do that, then you can squeeze them. Then it needs to be kinetic: take the battle to them. That's what the air strike is about.

But it cannot be destroyed unless there are boots on the ground. And that's the one thing that you hear president Obama and the other Western leaders saying: "Oh, no, we're not going to put boots on the ground." If there aren't going to be our boots on the ground, then the question is: whose boots on the ground? And that's the key question.

That's why it's going to take time: 'cause we're going to have to train up a reliable Iraqi army. We're going to have to reinforce the Peshmerga, the Kurds in the north. And we're going to have to find a way to get the Sunni tribal militias - that were so important the last time we took down Al Qaeda in Iraq under General Petraeus - and we've got to mobilise them again against ISIL.

STEVE CANNANE: But how will you do that when they feel like they've been betrayed by the US and they have no loyalty whatsoever to the Iraqi government?

MARTIN INDYK: Well, it's going to take a long time, as they say. (Laughs) And we are going to have to convince them, essentially in the way that has been done for generation after generation: that is, with a good deal of money and a good deal of use of personal relationships. That's why president Obama brought in General John Allen. He was General Petraeus' deputy. He has those relationships with the Sunni sheikhs and his main job is going to be to try to rebuild that trust.

STEVE CANNANE: The trust is going to be critical in relation to the new Iraqi government, isn't it, the reconstituted Iraqi government? What's your feeling on their ability to unite Iraq, rather than divide it like the last government?

MARTIN INDYK: I think it's possible but it's untested. First of all, Maliki, the former prime minister who did so much damage by advancing a sectarian Shiah agenda against the Sunnis is still there. He is in the wings but he is capable of subverting the efforts.

Secondly, it's not clear how the Iranians who back the Shiahs are going to play the game now. Will they cooperate tacitly with the effort because they see ISIL as a greater threat? Will they be willing to reduce the sectarian tensions and allow for Sunnis to have a part in the government? There is a big question mark about that as well.

So I don't place a lot of store on the Iraqi government coming together in a way that they represent all of Iraq, or for the Iraqi army, other than some special units, being particularly capable. As I say, the efforts are going to have to be focused very much on these Sunni tribal militias. And we may reach the point where the American chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is already saying is: "We may have to in the end put boots on the ground."

STEVE CANNANE: What about Iran and Syria? There are concerns in Washington that the US, by initiating these strikes, is in effect acting as the air force for Iran and Syria. What kind of unintended consequences could be there in that area?

MARTIN INDYK: Well, it is a real dilemma. There is no doubt that if we succeed in taking down ISIL in Syria, it will play to the benefit of the Assad regime that we want to see overthrown. And we have to be kind of pragmatic about it: deal with the greater threat first and then turn to the lesser threat. And at the moment the greater threat is ISIL.

The fact that the Iranians or the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad will gain benefit from it is an unfortunate reality. It was true when we took out Saddam Hussein that the Iranians benefitted greatly from it. When we took out the Taliban in Afghanistan the Iranians benefitted greatly from it. So it's not as if this is a new phenomenon.

But at the same time we have to find a way to keep the pressure on them, curb their nuclear program and find a way to keep the pressure on Assad as well. It is an extremely complicated situation because of these cross-currents and different conflicts that we're dealing with. And the only thing that we can do is try to prioritise, take care of business as best we can and then deal with the other problems later on.

STEVE CANNANE: Let's look at the long game here. What should the West's strategy be in the Middle East? Can it pursue both stability and democracy, or does it need to pick which one it goes for?

MARTIN INDYK: Well, look, this is the age-old dilemma for the United States. And for a long time we chose stability over democracy and we ended up with neither. And there were revolutions in the region, particularly against Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and ultimately Syria, and so we got a great deal of instability out of the greater emphasis we put on democracy; first of all when we took out Saddam Hussein and tried to promote democracy in Iraq - and we saw where that ended up.

So I think again we need to be pragmatic because of the dangers of the current situation threat that ISIL face- we face from them. So therefore we start by focusing on trying to stabilise the situation, recreate some order there based on bolstering our allies, containing and then rolling back the threat from ISIL. And then we can start to look again at the issue of how we promote greater freedom.

It's going to take time. It took time for democracy to develop in the West, more than 100 years, and a lot of conflict in between, so we should not imagine that this is going to be resolved quickly. But the priority, the urgent priority is to try to deal with the threat that we face now, try to build some stability into the system. And then we can look at the broader questions of freedom and democracy.

STEVE CANNANE: So in pursuing stability in the short term, that makes for some uncomfortable bedfellows, doesn't it?

MARTIN INDYK: Indeed it does. Indeed it does. That is the dilemma that we face in a region that always breaks your heart. But in the end we have to try to do what we can to protect our interests and protect our homeland.

STEVE CANNANE: Until a few months ago you were the US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, until those efforts ultimately broke down. Was it even harder to negotiate peace when other players in the region were looking over their shoulder at ISIS?

MARTIN INDYK: You know, it is an interesting question. When we started that effort a little more than a year ago, there was a feeling expressed by both the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to me and to secretary Kerry that, because there is so much turmoil around them, this created an incentive for them to try to deal with their conflict and resolve it so as to prevent being engulfed by it.

And we saw what happened when it broke down: in fact, they were engulfed by the conflict in Gaza that lasted for 50 days and caused an immense loss of life on the Palestinian side and great trauma on the Israeli side. And so that incentive in the end was not enough to overcome the deep distrust between the two sides, the deep gap in terms of the issues that they faced and the great difficulty we had in forging a compromises. We could do that in terms of working with them directly, developing our bridging ideas, but ultimately the kind of gut-wrenching compromises that were necessary: it wasn't possible to make that happen.

And so now they have in a sense been engulfed by the conflict, but they also now find themselves in an unusual ironic twist, which is typical of the Middle East: on the same side against Iran with its nuclear ambitions and its hegemonic ambitions; against Hezbollah with its efforts on the northern border with Israel; against the Assad regime; against the Muslim Brotherhood; against Hamas. There is a strange and interesting alignment emerging.

STEVE CANNANE: So you're seeing opportunities here?

MARTIN INDYK: Well, I don't want to raise expectations here. But what's happening is that Israel, the Sunni monarchs, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas have common enemies across the board, as I said, whether it's Iran and Hezbollah and Assad or Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and ISIL. They face common threats and out of that is emerging an alignment of interests.

Israel shares a common interest with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and the Palestinian Authority. And if they could find a way to resolve their differences between the Israelis and the Palestinians, then you would have an alliance that would come out of the closet and serve as the basis for a more stable order in the region, backed by the West.

STEVE CANNANE: Martin Indyk, unfortunately we've run out of time. Thanks very much for coming in tonight.

MARTIN INDYK: My pleasure. Thank you.