Dr. Kimberly Kagan President and Founder The Institute for the Study of War American strategy in Iraq and Syria continues to suffer from a fatal flaw. President Obama explicitly ordered that it focus only on degrading and destroying the Islamic State to the exclusion of any other American national security interests and regardless of the likelihood of the long-term success of any such effort undertaken in isolation. As a result, the strategy has achieved some limited successes against the Islamic State, but those isolated successes are coming at the expense of other important American security concerns. The current approach, in particular, has strengthened the position of Iran, its armed forces, and its proxies in Iraq, and has allowed al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra to expand its control and influence in Syria. These trends are very likely to continue if the U.S continues to pursue the present strategy. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, recently said that the battle against the Islamic State is beginning to turn, but that the campaign to defeat it would take several years. He also said that he might have to recommend the deployment of additional American forces and their use in combat alongside Iraqi troops to retake the city of Mosul. I agree with his assessments and I continue to believe that U.S. forces will, indeed, be needed to clear Mosul. The current change of momentum provides a good opportunity to consider the likely outcome of the present effort in Iraq, its potential stability, and the degree to which it coheres with American national security interests. It is also an important moment to remember that there is no parallel campaign in Syria, where the situation continues to worsen as Jabhat al Nusra gains territory, the Islamic State retains the lands it had taken, Bashar al Assad continues to murder his own people, and such moderate opposition as there is receives little meaningful support. U.S. strategy in Iraq today relies on a combination of Iraqi Security Forces (which are fundamentally different from what we left behind in 2011), Popular Mobilization Units (hastily-trained anti-ISIS volunteers, largely from Shia areas), Iranian-controlled Shia militias, a limited number of Sunni tribal volunteers, and some Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Qods Force advisers (including Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Qods Force, himself). American strategy complements Iranian goals, perhaps inadvertently. Iran is pursuing a strategy in Iraq that is analagous to the one it has been pursuing in Syria. It will create in Iraq a security structure in which anti-American Iranian-backed militia commanders operate side-by-side and overtly with Iraqi Security Forces with a degree of interdependence that will make them inseparable. Such a force can never be representative of Iraq as a whole, and will never be accepted over the long term by any of Iraqs minority populations. It will also be antithetical to American interests in the long term, while remaining a vector for Iranian control and influence. The outcome of this approach will be unstable and will entrench Iran in Iraq at the expense of America and our allies. The Obama Administration still has not articulated any strategy in Syria. U.S. efforts there appear confined to a limited number of airstrikes, carefully restricted to hit only Islamic State or Khorasan Group targets. On the rare occasions when Jabhat al Nusra fighters have been hit, the White House has moved rapidly to deny that it was targeting them. The U.S. has taken no measures to weaken the Assad regime militarily. Assad therefore continues to fly combat aircraft and helicopters and to use them to conduct barrel-bombing attacks and other atrocities against his own people. Assad has nevertheless lost ground to the Islamic State, and is struggling to maintain a presence in eastern Syria. He has also lost ground in Deraa and Quneitra south of Damascus to Jabhat al Nusra and other rebel forces. The forces that the U.S. has nominally been backing have suffered losses at the hands of the Islamic State, Jabhat al Nusra, and the regime. The current trajectory in Syria, therefore, will likely lead to a situation in which Jabhat al Nusra and some of its Salafist allies control significant areas south of Damascus and in the Idlib countryside; the Islamic State retains control of much of the Euphrates River Valley; the regime continues to fight for Damascus, controls the M5 highway to just past Hama, and controls the coast; and the moderate opposition remains marginal and incapable of shaping the battlefield in any material way. President Obama has misdefined our mission in Iraq and Syria by attempting to deal with one problem in isolation from its context and from the many other challenges facing the U.S. We have seen this movie before. The Bush Administration also misdefined the problem in Iraq before 2007, believing that an inclusive political process combined with assistance to the nascent Iraqi Security Forces would solve the problem. Both administrations then fell into the trap of focusing on measures of progress that were relevant only within the narrowly-constrained view of the situation they had decided to confine themselves to. Thus the Bush administration kept briefing the acres of territory turned over to Iraqi security leads and highlighting Iraqi security operations that were actually sectarian cleansing undertakings that made the underlying problem worse. The Obama administration is likewise focused on reporting progress only in limited areas--strikes conducted against Islamic State positions, however trivial, and limited tactical gains made by the highly-sectarian and Iranian-dominated security forces on the ground. We must raise our gaze from the tactics of fighting the Islamic State. We need a strategy not only to disrupt and defeat the Islamic State, but also to reduce Iranian influence in the region rather than expanding it, to develop inclusive Iraqi security forces rather than sectarian units intertwined with militias and the Qods Force, and to bring the Sunni tribes in Iraq once more to the negotiating table to hammer out a revised political deal with the Shia dominated government in Baghdad rather than helping that government try to simply crush them. Read the rest of this statement online here.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 10:52:54 +0000
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