The Islamic State’s European Front
March 23, 2016 -- The bombs that exploded in the Brussels airport and at a central metro station on Tuesday morning, killing at least 30 people, came as only the latest in a string of terrorist outrages on a continent that is starting to see horrific violence as the new normal. Hours later the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
This carnage must be seen in context: The United States and its Western allies are hitting the Islamic State hard in its bases in Iraq and Syria. The jihadist group may finally be on the defensive. But meantime, it is lashing out, taking its fight — and its struggle for supremacy among jihadists — global. Europe has emerged as a key battleground. Working with Western and Iraqi partners, American forces have pushed back the Islamic State. The group has lost an estimated 40 percent of its territory in Iraq and 20 percent in Syria from its peak in the summer of 2014. Major cities like Ramadi have been reclaimed, and Mosul, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Iraq, may be next.
American military officials say that the group has lost more than ten thousand fighters. These losses hurt the Islamic State twice over. The control of territory and the establishment of a “caliphate” is one of the big differences between the Islamic State and jihadist organizations that have preceded it. Qaeda leaders have long opposed such a move, arguing that it is premature, even foolhardy. The Islamic State, however, has gained legitimacy and popularity among radical Muslims by creating a “state” where they can live under their interpretation of Islamic law. Losing territory is a blow to its ambitions and legitimacy.
Even worse, military defeat damages its image. The Islamic State’s propaganda and recruiting pitches portray the group as winners, building a utopia for the devout while defeating Islam’s foes. The distance between losing territory and being a loser is not too great. The Islamic State cannot afford this as it competes with Al Qaeda for jihadists’ hearts and minds. When terrorist groups are stalled militarily and fear losing ground to rivals, they often try to attract recruits and funds through spectacular violence.
The Islamic State builds its image on success, and if it is failing militarily in Iraq and Syria it will need to win victories elsewhere. Days before the attacks in Brussels, an Islamic State-linked suicide bomber killed four people and wounded dozens in Istanbul. The group has also claimed responsibility for attacks in Lebanon and in Egypt. It has established “provinces” of varying degrees of strength on the Sinai Peninsula and in Yemen and other Muslim countries.
But Europe is an especially important theater. Attacks in Paris or Brussels — or, perhaps, eventually in London, which Islamic State leaders regularly threaten — enable the group’s leaders to claim they are taking the fight to their enemies. More than 5,000 Europeans have gone to fight in Syria, and France and Belgium contribute a disproportionate number of these fighters. Some returnees try to link up with locals, and the cycle of violence is becoming self-sustaining. The first volunteers were motivated primarily by adventure or out of a sense of defending their community, but now friends are recruiting friends, promising glory and God.
European security services are overwhelmed. Terrorists are free to cross Europe’s open borders, but security relationships are often far more confined. European security services often do not share lists of suspects and they do not have a common system for transliterating Arabic names. Even when they make progress, arrests and manhunts can lead to spikes in attacks, as other terrorists seek revenge or speed up their timetables because they feel the net is closing in. After the latest bombings, attention to terrorism will grow, as will the resources at security services’ disposal, but cooperation is likely to remain a problem.
The technical glitches can perhaps be solved, but Europe also faces another difficulty: Muslim integration. Across the Continent, Muslims often feel alienated from the broader population. Trust in the police and security services is particularly low. In the United States, many plots are disrupted because the American Muslim community reports them to the police and the F.B.I.; such trust is lacking in Europe.
The rise of far-right, xenophobic political forces, like the National Front in France or Alternative for Germany, will do little to improve relations between European Muslims and their governments. (More moderate conservatives feel the pinch, too: David Cameron, the prime minister of Britain, has promised to crack down on Muslim religious schools.) As chauvinistic voices become louder and societies less welcoming, Muslim communities feel more under siege. Islamic State recruiters welcome alienated people with open arms. They also know that new attacks empower the radical right in a vicious feedback loop.
Pushing back the Islamic State in the Middle East is necessary for long-term success, but in the short term we should expect the Islamic State to strike where it can. Unfortunately, the Western response in Iraq and Syria is much more promising than efforts to stop terrorism in Europe. Bombing the Islamic State’s leaders and forces in Iraq and Syria and building up a credible opposition there remain vital, but what is necessary to defeat — or, more realistically, weaken — the Islamic State and its supporters in Europe is even less straightforward and harder to achieve.
Daniel Byman, a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, is the author of “Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know.”
By Kamran Bokhari
Shaping a Presidential Legacy
The limits of Obama’s office played a significant role in creating his ‘doctrine.’
In an article published yesterday in The Atlantic titled “The Obama Doctrine,” U.S. President Barack Obama called on Saudi Arabia and Iran to establish a form of "cold peace" in order to manage the growing chaos in the Middle East. In the extensive interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama warned that the region cannot see an end to anarchy unless the Salafist kingdom and the Islamic republic can come to terms with one another on how to “share the neighborhood.” The interview clearly shows that the president is more frustrated with traditional U.S. ally Saudi Arabia than with Iran, which for nearly two generations has been a foe of the United States. In the article, Obama criticized the Saudis for the kingdom’s role in spreading violent extremism in the wider Muslim world and for oppressing women at home.
The phrase “The Obama Doctrine” is just a way of describing the decisions Obama had to make in the past seven years. The driving force behind the doctrine was ultimately not Obama’s personal ambitions or ideals, but rather the U.S. moving toward a balance of power strategy. It's a retrospective designation, trying to make sense of eight years of decisions, rather than an orienting principle through which Obama directed U.S. policy. Policy is what someone wants to happen – geopolitics is what does.
The article and the debate it has generated in the news and on social media is focused on Obama’s personality and the popular assumption that individual presidents have a great degree of latitude in making policy decisions. Geopolitics, however, teaches us that individual presidents are highly constrained in their ability to effect change. All leaders - more or less - inherit the same narrow menu of options that was available to their predecessors. Indeed, constraints upon political actors (individuals, groups and states) remain highly under-appreciated.
Leaders are criticized by their opponents either for a decision they made or for one they did not. A good chunk of the Goldberg article focuses on the domestic and international criticism of Obama’s policy toward Syria. The view of these critics is that, had Obama come to the aide of the Syrian rebels early on, the battlespace would today not have been dominated by the Islamic State, al-Qaida’s Syrian branch called Jabhat al-Nusra and most of the other rebel groups that subscribe to one form of Salafist-jihadism or another. Among the most vocal in this criticism are some key American allies in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia and other Sunni powers.
The Saudis have long been upset with Obama for what they consider his reckless foreign policy that seeks to upend the U.S.-Saudi alliance (which dates back to the FDR administration) by reaching out to Iran. What the Saudis easily forget is that their bitterness towards their historical great power patron goes back to the days of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. It was the Bush administration, in complex cooperation with Iran, that toppled the Sunni-dominated Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003, leading to the rise of a Shiite-dominated polity closely aligned with Iran. It was the same Bush administration that began the negotiations with Tehran on the nuclear issue, which Obama was able to build upon after the current Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, came to power.
The point is that no individual president is able to radically alter course. The Republican debate for the 2016 election is saturated with vows by different candidates, especially Donald Trump, on how they will be markedly different from Obama, especially in dealing with with foreign policy issues. Indeed, the American president, as per the founders’ intent, has more room to maneuver on the foreign policy front than on the domestic one. However, there is no escaping constraints, and therefore whoever becomes the 45th president, even if it is Trump, will not be able to deliver on many of the campaign promises – as has been the case with Obama and all those who have come before.
Obama came into office in 2009 with the optimism that outreach to the Arab/Muslim world would make a difference. Hence his famous June 2009 speech in Cairo titled “A New Beginning,” in which he sought to repair relations with the Islamic world. It did not take long for him to realize how hard it would be to change U.S. relations with the Muslim world. As Goldberg notes, “the rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed – not on his watch, and not for a generation to come.”
Goldberg’s interview with Obama is highly instructive in that it highlights the limits of presidential – and with it American – power to shape events around the world. In fact, Obama openly acknowledges this when talking about his resistance to intervening in Syria. He goes into considerable detail about the U.S. strategy to let regional players (Turkey as well as Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states) take the lead in managing the Mideast turmoil – as we have consistently pointed out in our assessments. Obama’s call on the Saudis and the Iranians to reach an understanding underscores our analysis that the United States has for some time now been pursuing a balance of power strategy.
In many ways, this strategy predates the Obama administration, however, it has emerged more clearly during his term in office given the way in which pandemonium has engulfed the Middle East. This is not just a two-way balance of power involving the Saudis and the Iranians, but rather a more complex one involving the strongest regional player, Turkey. We have been making the argument that the United States is relying on Turkey to play a lead role in dealing with the situation in the Middle East. Obama expressed dismay over Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s refusal to use Turkish military power to stabilize the situation in Syria.
The Turks do not want to be left doing the heavy lifting in Syria and the wider region for decades to come. However, eventually they will have no choice but to intervene in Syria – and not because Obama wants them to. The impersonal objective forces of geopolitics will force them to act. At that time, the subjective preferences of Erdogan, or whoever will be at the helm in Ankara, will not matter.
Obama’s interview in The Atlantic was motivated by the president’s desire to shape his legacy by explaining his various foreign policy decisions. It is unlikely that the president intended it to shed light on the nature of geopolitics and the position of the American president and all world leaders. However, it certainly has been instrumental in showing how personalities only matter so much and emphasizing the serious limits presidents must deal with when making decisions.
Presidents and individuals can exert power at particular moments, but the moments are not often of their choosing. Obama opposed the Iraq War and wanted to withdraw all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but his presidency is going to end with American forces still on the ground in both countries. He realized very quickly that he had to play the hand he was dealt, even if it was not the hand he may have wanted.
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