Lessons of the Past Hint at Hurdles in Fight to Stop ISIS

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/world/middleeast/lessons-of-the-past-hint-at-hurdles-in-fight-to-stop-isis.html

By ANNE BARNARD, DEC. 8, 2015

Kobani, Syria, in October, nine months after the Islamic State was driven out. Despite forces lining up to crush the group, ISIS’ threat continues to spread. CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Nine years ago, after the Lebanese militant groupHezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a risky cross-border raid, Israel declared it would crush the organization once and for all.

Instead, the ensuing war provided a textbook case of how overwhelming firepower can fail to defeat a determined or ideologically driven guerrilla force in the absence of a coherent and well-executed strategy — a cautionary tale, Middle East analysts say, for the powers now lining up to fight the Islamic State.

In 2006, Israel, wielding the region’s most powerful military and solid American support, leveled whole city blocks and village centers along with Hezbollah bunkers and offices. But Hezbollah remained standing, and soon it accumulated more political and military power than ever.
Today, the Islamic State, having developed a hybrid fighting force combining conventional military tactics, guerrilla abilities and far-flung attacks on civilians, faces a similarly lopsided fight. Arrayed against it, at least notionally, are both the United States and Russia, the regional archenemies Saudi Arabia and Iran, and even Hezbollah.




American politicians and presidential candidates say the United States is at war with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, with some comparing the conflict to a new world war. But even as some of the strongest militaries on earth line up to crush the militant group, with countries like Britain and Germany recently joining the campaign, the Islamic State threatens and strikes in new places — now even China.


“We’ve been ‘at war’ with terrorism for quite some time now,” said Andrew J. Bacevich, a military historian and retired Army colonel, “and the war is not working.”


The region, and indeed the world, is littered with evidence that in asymmetrical conflicts, even the most powerful military responses can end up stoking the violence and opposition they seek to quell, especially without solutions to underlying conflicts.


If overwhelming firepower alone could guarantee success, the United States would have won the Vietnam War and emerged victorious from Afghanistan and Iraq. And 14 years after 9/11, the threat from Al Qaeda might have disappeared, rather than persisting, morphing and re-emerging as the Islamic State.

As if to underscore the inadequacy of a conventional military approach are terrorist attacks like the one last week in San Bernardino, Calif. It appears not to have been directed by the Islamic State, American officials say, but was simply inspired by it.

Middle East analysts across a broad spectrum — whether they call for more, fewer or different military interventions in the region — say that when it comes to the Islamic State, the West is acting as if it has failed to learn the lessons of the past.

Mr. Bacevich says “the lessons of these failures” are too rapidly forgotten as many Americans succumb to what he calls a form of militarism, “clinging to the illusion that because we have a splendid military, putting it to work will make things come out all right in the end.”

Unfortunately, he says, “little evidence exists to support any such expectation.”

Just as after 9/11, the temptation has again been to strike back hard — a course President Obama has resisted — often reinforcing the narratives of oppression that opponents thrive on, the analysts said.

Then there are the political responses of fear and reaction, as in France, which gave the far-right National Front party its biggest regional wins over the weekend, and in the United States, where Donald J. Trump, who is running for president, promised on Monday to bar all Muslims from entering the United States.

The Islamic State thrives on a claim to be standing up to the entire world — especially Christians and Shiites, whom it considers infidels and apostates — to defend a pure Islam, and its enemies, analysts say, seem determined to oblige.

With the group claiming to defend Sunnis, even though they make up the majority of its victims, the campaigns by predominantly Christian and Shiite powers “may strengthen ISIS rather than the contrary,” said Imad Salamey, an associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.

Militarily denying territory to the Islamic State — deflating its claims to build a so-called caliphate — is a precondition for progress against it, he said.

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Israeli forces destroyed a building in July 2006 in Tyre, Lebanon, during a war with Hezbollah.CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times

But real inroads against the group, Professor Salamey said, will require a comprehensive political solution with “a satisfactory regional Sunni share of power.”

That, he said, would allay the insecurity among both Sunni leaders and populations, which have festered with the deposing of Saddam Hussein and the rise of a Shiite-dominated Iran, and with the crushing of popular uprisings in Sunni-majority countries.

The sense that the Islamic State’s opponents are playing into its hands, and that “war on ISIS,” like “war on drugs” or “war on cancer,” may be unwinnable, is shared across a deep ideological divide.

It can be heard from those like Professor Salamey who advocate more robust efforts to remove Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad — whose own attempt to use overwhelming force on Syrians fighting for a cause, his ouster, has led to five years of insurgency and given the Islamic State a breeding ground.

But the criticism is also echoed by analysts who oppose increased American intervention, some of whom locate the problem in a deeper dysfunction in the Islamic world.

“ISIS is merely a symptom of a much larger problem,” said Mr. Bacevich, a professor emeritus at Boston University, whose forthcoming book, “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,” elaborates on long-held skepticism of decades of American policy. “Destroy it, and a similar organization will likely arise in its place, much as ISIS emerged to take the place of Al Qaeda in Iraq.”

Mr. Bacevich argues that fighting an all-out war against Islamic extremism — what his intellectual sparring partner Eliot A. Cohen advocates and calls “World War IV” — would require sacrifices Americans are unwilling to make and that Mr. Bacevich considers “collective suicide.”

Even then, victory is not assured, especially against the Islamic State, which tries to stand for both territory and religious ideology, to be a hybrid of two types of resilient insurgent groups.

It embraces abstract ideas, like Al Qaeda or the hard-line leftist groups like the Red Brigades that bombed Europe in the 1970s. But it has also sought to co-opt oppressed locals who see themselves as fighting for homes and territory, more like the Irish Republican Army, the Viet Cong or Palestiniannationalist groups.

That “potent blend” of causes can resonate with Muslims, said Randa Slim, tapping into a sense that Islamic societies have declined from a golden age of power and innovation and have fallen under Western domination.

“It reminds me very much of Hezbollah and the struggle that many Shiites have in standing up to it” without being seen as traitors, added Ms. Slim, an analyst who directs Track II programs at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, and whose family is from the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah grew popular and powerful there both for its appeal to Lebanese seeking liberation from Israeli occupation and for its Shiite ideology.

To deflate the Islamic State, she said, Western countries need to ask why there are “ghettos of immigrants” in Europe and why the United States, more successfully integrated, could still produce the man suspected in the San Bernardino shooting, Syed Rizwan Farook.

Most concerning, Mr. Bacevich contends, is that even as the United States pursues what amounts to an endless and expanding conflict around the globe, without success, no alternatives are on offer, with no “antiwar party” and Democrats and Republican candidates “vowing to continue that war.”
Continuing to insist that there is no other choice is abdication and folly, he said. “How can it be that the most powerful nation in the world has no alternatives?”