DAVID KILCULLEN: Know Your Enemy at the Sydney Writers Festival 2015

I attended an event held by the annual Sydney Writers Festival this evening, where authors provide a opportunity to meet and discuss openly with their readership. David Kilcullen is promoting his latest work on a political journal called Quarterly Essay, his edition is called Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State.

Wit 25 years of military, counterinsurgency and strategic experience behind him, such as being a senior counter insurgency advisor to General Petraeus, & helped shape up the strategy for the Iraq Surge. He outlined a compelling analysis on the Middle East, and I found his explanation of the methods and strategies of the insurgents/non state actors helped to shed light on the conflict’s complexity.

Some interesting points I had noted down during his discussions are below

Al Qaeda had openly declared themselves as a resistant force against the US’s influence, one main selling point to the civilians in the Middle East was to indicated they needed Al Qaeda as a necessary force to overthrow the various authoritarian regimes that were supported by the US. Al Qaeda are mostly Sunni muslims, and had a role in inciting sectarian violence between the Shia and the Sunni’s, by organizing attacks on the Shiites to provoke a retaliation against the Sunni community on whole. For the conflicts in the Middle East, the divide between Sunni and Shia is the main focus, now that the international forces have drawn down. He described the different between a Sunni and Shia imminent attack, his own personal experience of travelling with US forces through a Shia neighbourhood, if there a no children playing and the streets are empty, there was a threat being hit as the Shia community would warn each other about a planned imminent attack. A Sunni attack would happen with no warning.

Al Qaeda was involved in the Syrian Civil War. Initially it started as a protest against the President Asaad in 2011, of which the Al Qaeda’s member of senior leadership Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri urged the Iraqi jihadis to enter Syria, take part in the conflict, and build a movement which increased violence. A question from the audience had asked what was Turkey’s role in the Middle Eastern conflict, which Kilcullen had advised was an important part. The jihadi, or “rebel fighters” would enter Syria through Turkey’s borders, which are not strongly enforced as Turkey’s governments priorities are to oust Asaad and then deal with the insurgents later. This made me a laugh out of dismay.

ISIS
Kilcullen mentioned a jail named Camp Bucca, which became a hub for the future ISIS leadership as they served time together, such as the current Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He went on to explain that the members of ISIS are not psychopaths like the media have portrayed. Instead they have a cold brutal political stance and are very rational. Kilcullen kept asserting this point that they are rational and their strategy is to generation a reaction from the world, he went on to say ISIS had formed due to the circumstance of the US Invasion that created the right environment, the way they had withdrawn in 2011 and left a power vacuum in the region. Members of ISIS have included various people of differing backgrounds such as Saddam’s intelligence officers and perculiarly a large quantity of Baathist air defense and also doctors etc. Importantly they are a state building enterprise, and the long game is to enter in relations with other states & demonstrate they are an effective government So far they have reformed hospitals, a tax system (e.g some Syrian public servants that have joined ISIS, are still getting paid by the Asaad regime, of which gets taxed by ISIS) schools and generate revenue by selling oil, Iraqi antiques, and most incredibly, selling electricity back to Syrian government. Another way that ISIS control their population is with checkpoints, which surrounds a city and its inhabitants (I think he mentioned Mosul for this example) if anyone were to leave, they had to provide three names of their relatives, and if they didnt return, they will behead the named relatives.

the question then came to Kilcullen on how he would suggest to take on ISIS. His response was the forces kept using counterinsurgency strategy focusing on special forces and wining hearts and minds to defeat the enemy, and its not working. They should combat them like as if they’re a state. He used the difference of airstrikes quantities as an example, during the Kosovo war, there were 200 airstrikes a day, in Iraqi for ISIS targets are 10 air strikes a day, Afghanistan had around 90 per day. But the political pressure to not escalate any military force in the Middle East, and not publicly legitimize the “state” of ISIS by addressing it as such. The other alternative was to ignore the situation and have it eventually reach you in some way. In recent times, a record has been reached for the highest level displaced people than ever in history and they are directly related to these Middle Eastern conflicts, that he himself said that we (the US and Australian coalition forces) have a role in and we owe it to these people to try to get it under control. And the preference was for a US force to take on the task of carrying out military operations as they will take into consideration international laws and norms, rather than leave the growing pressure to the other surrounding states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia or Israel of whom may not comply with international law and have the additional risk of nuclear weapons at their disposal.

I was incredibly impressed with his in depth knowledge and strategic analysis, I learned so much and can only hope to follow his example in some way. I’ll be forever grateful that so many of the competing narrative fueled by the media, has been cleared up for me!