Defeating Islamic State is Not Success
In September of 2014, President Obama introduced his comprehensive strategy to degrade and ultimately destroy the Islamic State. This plan was consistent with his priority to defend the people of the United States by taking the fight to the terrorists. Now, Four years after quitting the war in Iraq, 18 months since announcing that strategy to defeat the Islamic State, and four months since publicizing the return of special operations forces boots on the ground to Iraq, we find an Islamic State only marginally reduced in territorial size. Meanwhile, the possibility that it could strike targets in the West has become a reality on more than one occasion.
The Islamic State, like Al-Qaeda before it, is not an existential threat to the United States. It has little possibility of becoming an existential threat in the future. Nevertheless, it has the potential to threaten the peace and security of our communities and fundamentally alter the way we live and secure our daily lives. Because of this micro level threat to the unhardened American way of life, the President is correct in targeting it for destruction.
I do not question the wisdom of defeating the Islamic State. My question is what happens the day after we defeat the Islamic State?
For the remainder of my argument please suspend your disbelief and forget the limited reach of Kurdish Peshmerga forces; the abuses of the Syrian Regime and Iraqi Shia militias; and ineffectiveness of the Syrian rebels. Believe that in the next few years the Islamic State is militarily defeated and ceases to hold any territory in Iraq and Syria.
The day after the defeat of the Islamic State, the Sunnis of the levant are left with the Government of Iraq and Shia Militias; the Government of Syria with supporting actors Hezbollah and Quds Forces; Syrian Kurds; Iraqi Kurds; and a variety of Islamist and not-quite-Islamist Sunni insurgent groups. Across this terrain where the group holding the monopoly of the use of force varies from town to town, who holds political legitimacy to rule and govern the Sunnis living in the territory of the defeated Islamic State?
Running through the list above yields about as many viable good candidates to rule the Sunnis as we have running for President in 2016: ZERO. The two government establishments seem like the obvious candidates, but they have shown an inability to either govern or kill their way to legitimacy. The two sets of Kurds will be able to govern themselves but will not be able to expand that governance beyond their ethnic majority strongholds into the majority Sunni Arab population centers.
This leaves the various insurgent and rebel groups as the last remaining candidates. None of them have shown the military or political ability to hold and govern territory effectively. These groups mostly lack the technocratic cadre needed to govern and provide public services. The only advantage they have is their connection with the people they could rule — which is not much of an advantage in light of the other weaknesses and their many enemies.
For the past year and a half the Sunni majority regions of Iraq and Syria have been under the control of fellow Sunnis. They may be under the control of tyrannical and violently expansionist Sunnis; but, those tyrants fellow Sunnis nonetheless. I am not sure that in liberation, the governments of Iraq and Syria, the rebels, the United States, or anyone else has anything better to offer them the day after the defeat. The Sunnis will likely trade one tyranny for another under the current set of options for the resolution of the conflict.
Furthermore, let us not forget that the forefathers of the Islamic State — Al-Qaeda in Iraq — fought a complex and effective insurgency against Baghdad and the United States military for the better part of a decade without militarily holding any terrain. Even in military defeat, the Islamic State will continue to exist and operate in the Levant and beyond in Libya, Afghanistan, and small cells throughout the globe. But we are suspending disbelief for now; so, we can assume the total defeat of the Islamic State. All of their cells are destroyed, their leaders assassinated, and its ideology discredited.
The only problem is that the day after the total destruction and eradication of the Islamic State, the Sunnis of Iraq and Syria will be just as prone to falling back into insurgency as they were in 2011 through 2014 when the Islamic State took off. We can predict this propensity for insurgency through the widely cited work of Fearon and Laitin. They found that conditions favorable to insurgencies correlate with their occurrence. All of the current candidates to govern the Sunnis will likely suffer the conditions favorable to insurgency that existed throughout most of the U.S. occupation, and even more so after the withdrawal. Namely: institutional weakness and corruption, rough terrain and poor infrastructure, and an asymmetry of local knowledge favoring the insurgency over the government.
The governments of Iraq and Syria are institutional weak and corrupt. The local institutions of civil society have collapsed or been actively dismantled by the combatants. Whoever rules the Sunnis will need to establish institutions of governance that are organizationally straight, financially stable, and politically strong. Weak and corrupt institutions lead to the population seeking alternatives that the next generation of insurgents are will be ready to promise in exchange for the population’s support.
The terrain provides many places to hide and the infrastructure is failing or destroyed. Whoever rules the Sunnis will need to have commitments of long-term external support to rebuild the infrastructure to reduce the distance between the government and the governed.
When a population feels occupied by its government — whether by suburb-dwelling cops in Baltimore or by Shia militias in Ramadi — the local alternative to government will carry the advantage over the occupying government force. This advantage in local knowledge gives a critical edge in an insurgency. The success the U.S. surge was largely the success of the Al-Anbar Awakening and the reversal of the advantage of local knowledge. Whoever rules the Sunnis will need to have the support and participation of the local Sunni population and tribal leaders to deny the informational advantage to any potential insurgency.
While I harbor serious doubts about the ability of the Abadi and Assad regimes to recover their effective rule over the Sunnis between Baghdad and Damascus, It is difficult to determine who are alternatives that should or even could govern the Sunnis in the future. What is easy to determine is the role of the United states. Despite recent assessments of the decline of its pull in the region, the United States and its allies hold considerable influence over the outcome of the conflict through their military operations, humanitarian aid, and other support to the actors in the conflict. Where the Americans focus makes a difference. But focusing on the destroying the Islamic State will not achieve the success President Obama expects. This is because defeating the Islamic State — either militarily or comprehensively — will not solve the underlying systemic problem in the levant: the lack of coherent governance for the Sunnis since the fall of Saddam.
The challenges of defeating Islamic State, securing the homeland and our allies from terrorism, and the refugee crisis are not discrete problems. They are merely symptoms of the lack of effective Sunni governance. Instead of reactively leading from behind in response to the increasingly severe manifestation of symptoms, the United States should be focused on leading our allies and the greater international community towards a local solution to coherent governance in the region. This solution must provide the Sunni families of Iraq and Syria with stable governance and public services. The President’s comprehensive strategy should be focused on Sunni governance construction not Islamic State destruction.
