David Kilcullen
May 16, 2015
ISIS has become the subject of intense debate. Is it a "death cult" defined by extreme barbarity and a 7th century view of Islam? Is it the successor to al-Qaeda, a media-savvy transnational terrorist movement propagating a new-and-improved "Jihad 2.0"? Is it a confederation of groups opposed to the Iraqi government, with primarily regional goals? Is it one side in a Sunni-Shiite version of Europe's ghastly Thirty Years' War?
Over time, I've come to believe that Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS and ISIL) is more than any of these things. In my view, ISIS is fundamentally a state-building enterprise. Simply put, the Islamic State is, or is on the verge of becoming, what it claims to be: a state. I know this assertion is controversial, given that international leaders have been eager to deny ISIS the legitimacy of statehood. I understand the political logic - or, if you prefer, the propaganda value - of that standpoint.
But consider the definition of a state in international relations, which is generally agreed to require the fulfilment of four criteria: (1) a state must control a territory, (2) that territory must be inhabited by a fixed population, (3) that population must owe allegiance to a government, and (4) that government must be capable of entering into relations with other states.
Islamic State meets the criteria for becoming what it claims to be: a state, writes David Kilcullen. Photo: Louise Kennerley
As of mid-2015, the Islamic State already meets, or is well on the way to meeting, all these criteria. It controls a territory that includes several major cities and covers a third each of Iraq and Syria, giving it an area significantly larger than Israel or Lebanon. This territory's resident population is roughly 4.6 million, a higher head-count than New Zealand, Kuwait or Qatar, and almost as high as Norway, Denmark, Singapore or Finland.
This territory and population is administered by a government that includes not only military forces, but also civic officials responsible for public utilities, hospitals, taxation, construction and food production, a judiciary that tries cases according to a consistent legal code, and an intelligence and police service.
It issues birth certificates, marriage licenses and even parking tickets, levies taxes, and undertakes public works. (We might quibble over how effective this government is, or squirm at its brutality, but that is irrelevant. It's the existence, not the character, of government that meets this requirement under international law; otherwise places like North Korea wouldn't count as states.)
Clearly, also, the Islamic State is capable of entering into relations with other states: it exports oil through Turkey, sells antiquities on the international market, has been accused of receiving state funding from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, employs an official spokesperson, and issues communiques and proclamations.
True enough, it maintains no formal embassies and isn't recognised by other states, but the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (to which the United States is a signatory, and which is one of several sources for the criteria I just listed) explicitly notes that the "existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states".
If ISIS is a state, then what kind of state is it? Pretty clearly, it's a revolutionary totalitarian state, which seeks to expand by military conquest, refuses to recognise the legitimacy of other states (specifically, those defined by the Sykes-Picot Agreement that created the modern Middle East, or Iran or Israel) and wants to redraw the map of the Middle East and North Africa.
It's a state that claims extraterritorial jurisdiction (under the caliphate) over Muslims, wherever they may be, and propagates a totalitarian ideology based on a specific interpretation of Islam. It seeks overseas dependencies (the wilayat or provinces in Sinai, Khorasan, Libya, Sana'a and Algeria) and maintains an international underground that supplies volunteers and furthers its interests.
It's a state that sees itself in a world-historic struggle against Shiite Islam and the West, and expects an apocalyptic showdown from which it will emerge victorious. Substitute the Comintern for the global underground, revolutionary Bolshevism for Islam, fraternal parties for the wilayat and the proletariat for the ummah, and we might be talking about revolutionary Russia circa 1923. My point is not that ISIS equates to communism, just that we've seen this movie before.
As a state, ISIS is also less vulnerable to disruption by the killing or capturing of its senior leaders. By late April 2015 there were claims, of varying credibility, that senior ISIS leaders had been killed or seriously injured. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was alleged to be wounded, paralysed or even dead as a result of a coalition airstrike, while Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri was reported killed by an Iranian-backed Shiite militia.
Even if both these claims prove true, because of its extensive command-and-control structure, the size of its Baathist and former al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) cadres, its diversified administration and leadership team, and its state-like structures at every level from central institutions to local branch offices, ISIS resiliency is likely to prove far greater than that of a loose terrorist network - precisely because it is structured like a state.
ISIS also fights like a state. As of mid-2015, even taking into account its losses in Iraq, ISIS fields more than 25,000 fighters, including a hard core of ex-Baathist professionals and AQI veterans. It has a hierarchical unit organisation and rank structure, populated by former regular officers of Saddam Hussein's military.
It fields tanks, heavy artillery, mortars and armoured vehicles by the dozen, reconnaissance units mounted in technicals that operate more like conventional light cavalry than guerrillas, internal security forces and infantry units of various levels of quality. It runs propaganda, intelligence and cyber-warfare activities, a recruiting network and training camps. There's documentary evidence that professional soldiers, not terrorist amateurs, designed this structure.
ISIS is now attempting to hold and defend cities using conventional urban tactics, seeking to control lines of communication, and trying to govern the area under its control and extract resources for its war effort. These resources are considerable, and include oilfields, refineries, industrial and agricultural facilities, access to strategically located water supplies, and millions of dollars a day in revenue.
ISIS as a state has two critical military weaknesses. One is territorial, the other a question of personnel. ISIS doesn't govern a large, fertile, evenly-populated block of territory. Rather, it controls a network of cities separated by significant distances, surrounded by sparsely populated desert and mountains, and connected by road networks, fibre-optic and telecommunications links, smuggling routes and water sources including the Euphrates River and several major lakes and dams.
This renders it highly vulnerable to interdiction: it's a "network state" that can be defeated piecemeal if sufficient pressure is brought to bear on the connections between its constituent cities. Furthermore, 25,000 fighters may seem a lot, but ISIS has nowhere near enough troops to simultaneously defend its cities against external attack and secure them against internal opposition.
And there are anti-ISIS movements in Mosul, Ramadi, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor - even, after all this time, in the ISIS capital of Raqqa. An internal armed resistance against ISIS, if co-ordinated with an external attack on the cities it controls, could quickly overwhelm Islamic State defences.
Such an internal uprising is unlikely, though, while the forces attacking ISIS in Syria belong primarily to Bashar al-Assad, and those attacking in Iraq are largely Iranian-backed Shiite sectarian militias.
Local Sunni populations in ISIS-controlled areas may hate the group, but they often see the alternatives as even worse, in part because the militias have committed horrendous sectarian abuses after recapturing ISIS territory (most recently near Tikrit in April 2015) but also because ISIS is still peddling sectarian fear of Shiites, or of the chaos that would result from its fall, presenting itself as defender of the Sunnis.
This goes back to AQI and Zarqawi and their cynical manipulation in 2005-06, but the fact that it's cynical doesn't make it untrue. The technique has a long pedigree in Iraq, and that's my last point on ISIS as a state - it is a state of fear.
Kanan Makiya, in his book on modern Iraqi politics, Republic of Fear, showed how, after the Iran-Iraq war and its defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's regime moved from being overtly secular to overtly attempting to Islamise Iraqi society as a bulwark against Iran. Saddam stocked sectarian fears and sought to present himself as defending Sunni Arabs against Shi'a Persians. Thus ISIS, with its Ba'athist lineage and jihadist facade, isn't a departure from history: a straight line runs from Saddam's republic of fear, through Zarqawi and al-Douri, to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's Islamic state of fear.
If Islamic State is a state, albeit a revolutionary, totalitarian, aggressively expansionist one, then this also tells us what it's not. It is not (or is no longer) an insurgency. Nor is it a transnational terrorist movement in the al-Qaeda sense - one that uses violence in a strategy of "propaganda of the deed" to provoke a global revolution.
Sure, ISIS uses exemplary violence as an instrument of policy and a means of terrifying its enemies, but so do plenty of states. As Audrey Cronin has persuasively argued, ISIS "uses terrorism as a tactic, [but] it is not really a terrorist organisation at all ... it is a pseudo-state led by a conventional army. And that is why the counterterrorism and counter-insurgency strategies that greatly diminished the threat from al-Qaeda will not work against ISIS."
I'd quibble with the term "pseudo-state", but I couldn't agree more with Cronin about the inapplicability of counterterrorism and counter-insurgency strategies.
There's been a lot of hand-wringing, since the beginning of the air campaign against ISIS, about the potential for the Western coalition to be dragged back into counter-insurgency, sucked once more into the quagmire of Iraq. This fear, in my view, is massively overblown. There is no chance that Western powers would seek, or the Iraqi government would allow, a repeat of the long-term occupation and reconstruction of Iraq that was attempted after 2003.
After 2003 in Iraq, Western powers had a legal and ethical obligation to stabilise the society we'd disrupted, establish a successor government to the regime we'd overthrown, protect an innocent population we'd put massively at risk, and rebuild the economy and infrastructure we'd shattered. No such obligation exists now - not for Iraq, which is sovereign and independent, and certainly not for Bashar al-Assad's odious dictatorship in Syria.
Western countries have a clear interest in destroying ISIS, but counter-insurgency should not even be under discussion. This is a straight-up conventional fight against a state-like entity, and the goal should be to utterly annihilate ISIS as a state.
It's worth mentioning that the choice here is not between stepped-up Western intervention and no intervention: it's between intervention led by the international community and conducted in accordance with international norms, or intervention led by an aggressively expansionist Iran and carried out on the ground by Assad's shabiha and Iraqi sectarian militias, which in turn would draw an armed response from countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel.
This is an edited extract of Quarterly Essay 58, "Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State" by David Kilcullen, available Wednesday, May 20. David Kilcullen is appearing at the Sydney Writers Festival.
No comments:
Post a Comment