BY HYPING ISIL THREAT, US IS FILLING INTO INTO GROUP'S TRAP Expanded
military campaigns in Iraq and Syria will strengthen ISIL’s position
domestically and abroad.
September 30, 2014 8:30AM.
by #Musa_al-Gharbi:
On Sept. 19, just days before the U.S.-led airstrikes against the
Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) expanded into Syria, the
militant group released a 55-minute documentary, “Flames of War,”
warning about direct military confrontation with the United States. ISIL
made similar taunts when it executed Western hostages, seized U.S.
weapons sent to Syrian rebels and co-opted groups that were trained to
fight against them.
Why is ISIL so eager to lure the United
States into battle? While ISIL has unrivaled access to multiple revenue
streams, a vast array of arms and command tens of thousands of soldiers,
the one thing it lacks is local popular legitimacy — a big problem for a
group that aspires to form a caliphate. However, the expanded foreign
intervention will likely help ISIL mitigate this challenge by
galvanizing the public against the U.S.-led coalition, with ISIL
portraying itself as the only force capable of repelling these malignant
invaders. Meanwhile, the U.S. will be drawn ever deeper into a war of
attrition in which its enemies, nonstate actors, have little to lose and
everything to gain.
Bolstering ISIL’s legitimacy
Resistance organizations such as ISIL are defined nearly as much by
their enemies as they are by their own actions. For ISIL’s leadership,
it is an honor when U.S. politicians declare them a major threat that
must be resisted before, as Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., put it, we “all
get killed here at home.” It is also a propaganda victory for ISIL when
the United States marshals more than 50 nations to join its campaign of
ill-defined goals and likely ill-fated results. That ISIL’s leader, Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his forces could warrant such a global response
is a testament to their apparent significance and strength — a message
that is reinforced the longer ISIL remains defiant in the face of such
overwhelming opposition.
While the contribution of most of these
allies is largely symbolic, each addition to the anti-ISIL coalition
bolsters the group’s credentials as a major world actor more than it
boosts Washington’s image as a global collaborator. It further
strengthens the extremists’ legitimacy that the latest campaign is led
by the world’s unipolar superpower, with kinetic support drawn primarily
from the region’s autocratic states and former colonial and imperial
European overlords. ISIL’s struggle against these powers, which are
widely perceived as the biggest enemies of Muslims’ self-determination,
will go a long way toward distracting any sympathetic public from its
military excesses and failures in governance. Civilian casualties will
only exacerbate this effect.
Despite initial White House denials
of collateral damage, the first raids on ISIL killed 70 of its fighters
and eight noncombatants; contemporaneous attacks on Khorasan, a group of
Al-Qaeda veterans, killed 30 militants and at least 11 noncombatants.
On Sept. 24, strikes on ISIL’s Syrian oil refineries killed 14
terrorists and five noncombatants. In the first week since the Syrian
campaign began, roughly 17 percent (more than 1 out of 6) of the
casualties have been civilians, including children. And these strikes
were against easier-to-identify hard targets, meaning the ratio of
civilians to militants killed is likely to get worse as the campaign
deepens and ISIL fighters integrate themselves more heavily into
civilian areas.
There is little means of increasing the precision
of airstrikes without boots on the ground. This leaves Barack Obama’s
administration with three options: scale back its offensive in Syria,
tolerate ever higher rates of collateral damage or break its vow of not
committing American ground forces in a combat mission. Every option,
however, represents a victory for Baghdadi. Because all his fighters who
are killed are glorified as martyrs and used to recruit others, the
campaign offers little downside for ISIL but entails big risks for U.S.
and its allies.
Western powers risk glamorizing the very actors
they are ostensibly seeking to undermine while their reactionary
policies play into the hands of the enemy. In a word, the best way to
defeat ISIL is to simply refuse to play its game.
Given the complex
dynamics involved, military interventions typically last much longer
than projected and cost much more in terms of lives and resources. They
rarely achieve their initial stated goals and often result in adverse
second-order effects. Campaigns against ideologically driven nonstate
actors tend to be even more risky and less successful because the enemy
is extremely flexible and often has little to lose. This fact was
underscored by former Defense Intelligence Agency head Lt. Gen. Michael
Flynn’s recent testimony that the United States is “no safer” as a
result of its 13-year war on terrorism. In many respects, the problem
has grown worse. As an official extension of this indefinite war, the
campaign against ISIL will probably be equally counterproductive.
The blowback has already begun. Thousands have turned out across Syria
to protest coalition airstrikes. Even moderate Syrian rebels, who are
funded and trained by Washington, have condemned the strikes as
ineffective, citing the fact that their leadership was not consulted or
briefed in the selection of strategic targets. The protesters and some
members of the armed Syrian opposition deplored the civilian casualties
and the fact that the coalition has already begun targeting non-ISIL
rebel groups, such as the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, while there
have been no strikes against Syrian government targets.
Once an
ally of the moderates, al-Nusra Front has evolved into a rival in part
because of U.S. policies designed to help distinguish the “good“ rebels
from al-Qaeda. Until now, al-Nusra Front was focused on and has been
extremely effective against the Syrian government, but it is now vowing
reprisal attacks against the United States for the latest strikes. Worse
still, the attacks have pushed al-Nusra Front toward rapprochement with
ISIL. Far from being divided against one another, the militants are
uniting against a common enemy: the U.S.-led coalition and its proxies,
including the moderate Syrian rebels. These developments will not only
endanger the United States and its regional interests, allies and local
agents but they will also strengthen the Syrian regime and the region’s
extremists.
A better alternative
Washington’s strategy is
doomed to fail because fundamentalism, radicalization and terrorism are
inherently sociological problems that can be easily exacerbated but
never resolved by military means. In fact, the most effective action the
international community can take in response to ISIL is to stop feeding
the beast.
This would mean cutting aid to nonstate actors in
Syria and the broader region. It also entails Western powers’ revisiting
the level and types of cooperation afforded to Israel and Middle
Eastern dictators and monarchs in order to reduce complicity in their
abuses — depriving militants of new fodder for propaganda. Measures to
restrict the flow of fighters into the region should be joined by
policies to cut trafficking of illicit funds and (especially) arms.
However, the single most effective way to delegitimize ISIL is to
portray and deal with its threat in a less hyperbolic manner. While it
should not be taken lightly, ISIL is a manageable challenge that can
still be contained and largely subdued by the states and local
populations they occupy. The more the U.S. government responds to the
so-called Islamic State as an existential threat to the world order, the
more these proclamations will become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Western powers risk glamorizing the very actors they are ostensibly
seeking to undermine while their reactionary policies play into the
hands of the enemy. In a word, the best way to defeat ISIL is to simply
refuse to play its game.
Musa al-Gharbi is a research fellow at
the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts. He has
an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Arizona.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
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