With respect to the broader issue of my critics…I think that when you listen to what they actually have to say, what they’re proposing, most of the time, when pressed, they describe things that we’re already doing. Maybe they’re not aware that we’re already doing them. Some of them seem to think that if I were just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference—because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough. But I haven’t seen particular strategies that they would suggest that would make a real difference.
President Obama speaking at a Press Conference in Turkey on November 16, 2015
Last week both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush gave major talks outlining their respective plans for defeating terrorists. Those two presidential candidates’ views will be my focus for this blog. In a recent article in the Washington Post, the author noted that with the exception of both candidates calling for no fly zones, “overall the candidates and the president are talking about doing basically the same three things to fight the Islamic State: airstrikes, bolstering local forces, getting the world on the same page.”
I think that’s too broad a generalization and does not get at the heart of all the issues. As a Veteran and retired intelligence professional, when I sit down and listen to what each candidate has to say on national security issues, I’m looking for the answer to two questions. First, does the candidate really understand the depth of the problem and related issues? Second, what are their proposed solutions and third are they feasible?
Do the candidates understand the scope of the problem?
In 2012, at the request of the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, the Department of Defense published Decade of War Volume I Enduring Lessons from the Past Decade of Operations. The purpose was to ensure we learned the lessons from the previous decade of war. The first lesson learned discussed was “a failure to recognize, acknowledge, and accurately define the operational environment led to a mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions, and goals. The operational environment encompasses not only the threat but also the physical, informational, social, cultural, religious, and economic elements of the environment.” Bottom line is: if you don’t get that right, then the strategy you develop won’t work.
Jeb Bush says “Despite elaborate efforts by the administration to avoid even calling it by name, one of the very gravest threats we face today comes from radical Islamic terrorists.” I don’t dispute that but how do you explain the fact that there have been many reports that former members of Saddam Hussein’s Army now make up a lot of the military leadership and intelligence positions within ISIS? Why is that?
Clinton seems to have a better understanding of the complexity of the issues, pointing out that under former Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s regime the Sunnis tribes were betrayed and forgotten. She feels that if we are going to win on the ground, we need to bring the Sunnis back on board. Bush also stresses the need to bring the Sunnis on board, but says the problem was caused by the premature withdrawal of U.S. Forces leaving a void that ISIS filled. I agree with Bush that the U.S. withdrawal was a mistake but wonder: if Maliki’s regime had been more inclusive, would the end result have been the same?
I participated in a Department of Defense media program that gave me the opportunity to receive briefings and ask questions to many of the senior Generals involved in the training of Iraqi military forces. One question I asked concerned the Iraqi sectarian issues. Using our own history as an example, I said as long as northern military forces occupied the south after the Civil War, African Americans were able to integrate into southern society, holding government offices and positions. As soon as the troops left, white southerners enacted Jim Crow laws which restricted the freedom of the former slaves. It was not till 100 years later that a lot of the problems caused by these laws were addressed and reversed. What were the chances that the sectarian issues in Iraq between different ethnic and religious groups would prevent them from having an effective and inclusive government? I would pose the same question today to the Presidential candidates.
As the recent attack against an hotel in Mali by a group associated with al-Qaeda reminds us, it is not just ISIS nor is the conflict confined to just Iraq and Syria. Addressing the topic in their annual posture statement, United States Africa Command reported:
The network of al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents continues to exploit Africa’s under-governed regions and porous borders to train and conduct attacks. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is expanding its presence in North Africa. Terrorists with allegiances to multiple groups are expanding their collaboration in recruitment, financing, training, and operations, both within Africa and transregionally.
In its recently released 2015 Global Terrorism Index, the Institute for Economics and Peace stated that the Nigerian based group Boko Haram, which declared allegiance to ISIS in March of this year, was the most deadly terrorist group. “The country witnessed the largest increase in terrorist deaths ever recorded by any country, increasing by over 300 per cent to 7,512 fatalities.”
The “so what” factor for me is that over two million Nigerians have been displaced internally because of the actions of Boko Harum. Another 175,000 have sought refuge in neighboring Chad, Niger, and Cameron. The UN says they’re critically short of funding needed to provide assistance. Are we witnessing the development of another major refugee crisis? Is it not better to destroy and/or neutralize terrorist groups rather than have another large number of people feel the only solution is to seek refugee status and to move to another country?
In her talk, Hillary Clinton stressed that this was a worldwide fight and required a worldwide solution. Two statements stood out for me:
Now, let’s be clear about what we’re facing. Beyond Paris in recent days, we’ve seen deadly terrorist attacks in Nigeria, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, and a Russian civilian airline destroyed over the Sinai. At the heart of today’s new landscape of terror is ISIS. They persecute religious and ethnic minorities; kidnap and behead civilians; murder children. They systematically enslave, torture and rape women and girls…
But we have learned that we can score victories over terrorist leaders and networks, only to face metastasizing threats down the road, so we also have to play and win the long game. We should pursue a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy, one that embeds our mission against ISIS within a broader struggle against radical jihadism that is bigger than any one group, whether it’s Al Qaida or ISIS or some other network.
Looking at Jeb Bush’s views expressed in his talk last week at The Citadel and his recent remarks at the Reagan Presidential Library, he says it’s a worldwide problem yet his proposed solutions only address two problem areas: “My strategy meets the unique circumstances in each of the two countries, Iraq and Syria, in which ISIS now has territory.”
He speaks of the importance of allies but again with the exception of Egypt and Tunisia, he only mentions countries in the Middle East:
In all of this, the United States must engage with friends and allies, and lead again in that vital region. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the most populous Arab country and the wealthiest, are important partners of the United States. Those relationships have been badly mishandled by this administration. Both countries are key to a better-coordinated regional effort against terrorism. We need to restore trust, and work more closely with them against common threats. We have very capable partners, likewise, in the United Arab Emirates, who are willing and able to take the fight to the extremists. We have a moderate and quite formidable leader in King Abdullah of Jordan. We have an ally in the new democratic government in Tunisia, and a fragile democracy in Lebanon—nations that are both under assault by radicals and terrorists. Across the region, responsible governments need no persuading of what the moment requires.
In contrast, Hillary Clinton remarked:
We’ve had a lot of conversation about ISIS in the last week, let’s not forget al-Qaeda. They still have the most sophisticated bombmakers, ambitious plotters and active affiliates in places like Yemen and North Africa, so we can’t just focus on Iraq and Syria, we need to intensify our counter—our counterterrorism efforts on a wider scope.
What are their proposed solutions and are they feasible?
Again Jeb Bush’s strategy solutions focus on Iraq and Syria. For Iraq he is proposing the following actions:
– Support the Iraqi forces
– Consistent air power to support local ground forces
– Give current forces greater range of action
– Provide more support to the Kurds
– Diplomatic strategy for enduring political stability in Iraq
For Syria he proposes:
– A coordinated international effort is required to give Syria’s moderate forces the upper hand
– Expand and improve the recruitment and training of Syrian opposition fighters
– Establish multiple safe zones in Syria
– Along with partners create an expanding no fly zone to prevent more crimes by the regime
For me, he left unanswered how he would fight terrorism in other regions of the world.
Hillary Clinton’s strategy has three main elements:
– Defeat ISIS in Syria, Iraq, and across the Middle East.
– Disrupt and dismantle the growing terrorist infrastructure that facilitates the flow of fighters, financing, arms, and propaganda around the world.
– Harden our defenses and those of our allies against external and homegrown threats.
For each of these points, she provides a great deal of detail. At least for now her more thorough and detailed views seem to be winning over support. A Washington Post/ABC news poll indicated voters find her more trusted on handling the terrorism issue than her Republican rivals.
Clinton also stressed the importance of both political parties working together to defeat terrorism:
When New York was attacked on 9/11, we had a Republican president, a Republican governor and a Republican mayor, and I worked with all of them. We pulled together and put partisanship aside to rebuild our city and protect our country.
In his Reagan Library talk Bush stated:
Who can seriously argue that America and our friends are safer today than in 2009, when the President and Secretary Clinton—the storied ‘team of rivals’—took office? So eager to be the history-makers, they failed to be the peacemakers. It was a case of blind haste to get out, and to call the tragic consequences somebody else’s problem. Rushing away from danger can be every bit as unwise as rushing into danger, and the costs have been grievous.
I’m a firm believer in lessons learned but there is a lot of blame to go around. I think many would argue that Congressional gridlock and its bad relationship with the President has had a major negative impact on national security policy. I’ve blogged before about the toll sequestration has taken on our military forces.
Have Presidential Candidates Proposed Anything New In The Fight Against Terrorism?
President Obama has been steadfast in his refusal to put large numbers of U.S. ground forces in the fight. Both Bush and Clinton advocate using ground forces in coordination with Iraqi and moderate Syrian Forces; but Clinton also stresses the need “to move simultaneously toward a political solution to the civil war that paves the way for a new government with new leadership, and to encourage more Syrians to take on ISIS as well”. Both candidates also advocate establishing no fly zones something President Obama has also resisted.
I’m an avid football fan. One of the mantras the experts always say is defense wins championships. During my time in the military, the mantra was: you can’t win a war with out putting troops on the ground. I agree. As to the feasibility of Clinton and Bush’s proposals, I’m not sold on an approach that relies heavily on local forces to fight terrorism. I still believe the best approach is establishment of an organization like NATO but focused on fighting terrorism. It would also have a standing rapid deployment force made up of coalition members that could be called upon when needed. If I were Queen for a day, I would add that concept to both of their strategies.
Again my views are my own. I think I’ll end here.
À l’occasion du lancement de la COP21 (21e Conference of Parties) qui a lieu à Paris jusqu’au 11 décembre, la rédaction de Politique étrangère vous invite à relire le Contrechamps publié dans le numéro d’été 2015 de Politique étrangère (2/2015) : « Climat : avant la Conférence de Paris », ainsi que la partie « Climat : vers la COP21 » publiée dans le RAMSES 2016.
Le premier article de ce dossier, « Climat : l’injustice faite au Sud », écrit par Sunita Narain, montre que les négociations sur le climat ne portent pas seulement sur la réduction des émissions mais également sur le droit au développement, et souligne l’un des enjeux majeurs, qui est de s’accorder sur une répartition équitable du budget carbone du monde.
« Le Forum économique mondial – qui rassemble chaque année à Davos la crème des puissants de ce monde – a dressé une liste des principaux dangers auxquels le monde serait confronté. Selon cette analyse, le changement climatique vient en première position des risques menaçant le monde pour les années à venir, si l’on conjugue les facteurs de probabilité et d’impact. Les liens étroits existant entre le changement climatique et les autres risques principaux doivent retenir encore davantage notre attention. Parmi ceux-ci, l’on pourrait citer : les inégalités économiques (en 3e position), les événements météorologiques extrêmes (5e position), la volatilité extrême des prix de l’énergie (6e position), les conflits géopolitiques (7e position), et enfin les inondations et la sécurité hydrique (9e et 10e positions). Même les plus fortunés du monde s’accordent donc à dire que le monde est dans une situation critique, peut-être désespérée. »
Pour lire gratuitement l’article de Sunita Narain en intégralité, cliquez ici.
***
Le second article de ce dossier, « COP21 : quelles chances de succès ? », co-écrit par Christian de Perthuis et Raphaël Trotignon, montre que l’enjeu principal de la Conférence de Paris est de dépasser les visions concurrentes, en mettant en place un jeu d’incitations économiques pouvant conduire à un accord universel où chaque joueur s’engagerait à réduire ses émissions.
« La construction d’un accord international sur le climat renvoie à la question du « passager clandestin ». La perturbation climatique est liée au stock global de gaz à effet de serre présent dans l’atmosphère, qui n’est que faiblement corrélé au flux annuel d’émissions de chaque pays. Pour chaque acteur pris isolément, il n’y a pas de corrélation directe entre le niveau de l’effort engagé pour réduire ses émissions et le bénéfice qu’il en tirera sous forme de moindres dommages. De plus, les impacts les plus sévères sont éloignés dans le temps, ce qui incite chacun à reporter l’intégralité des coûts du changement climatique sur les générations futures. Dans un tel contexte, chaque joueur à intérêt à attendre que ses voisins lancent l’action ; la position idéale étant celle du « passager clandestin », qui ne ferait aucun effort quand tous les autres s’engageraient pour protéger le bien commun. Inversement, aucun acteur n’a intérêt à s’engager unilatéralement tant qu’il n’a pas la conviction que d’autres suivront dans le cadre d’une coalition plus large. »
Pour lire la suite de l’article de Christian de Perthuis et de Raphaël Trotignon, cliquez ici.
***
Composé 8 articles, le dossier « Climat : vers la COP21 » publié en septembre dans le RAMSES 2016 éclaire les enjeux décisifs de la conférence de Paris sur le climat et pose des questions essentielles. La COP21 réussira-t-elle: 1) à définir une nouvelle donne internationale ? ; 2) à proposer des solutions crédibles aux problèmes de court terme ? ; 3) à crédibiliser définitivement une nouvelle forme de négociation universelle ?
« Pour qualifier ou non de succès la conférence de Paris, il faudra observer la cohérence de l’ensemble des textes adoptés, tant sur la complémentarité des engagements que sur leur degré de contrainte juridique. Si la construction est cohérente, les bases de la transformation seront posées. » (Marie-Claire Aoun, « S’adapter aux effets du réchauffement climatique »)
Pour en savoir plus sur les différents articles de ce dossier, en lire certains en intégralité, et découvrir des interviews de leurs auteurs, cliquez ici.
In the wake of the Paris attacks, American politicians of all stripes are rushing to burnish their security credentials. In their proposals they are undermining the one measure that might exhibit America’s basic motives in Syria, while adding nothing to U.S. security. House bill 4038, imposing extra screenings on Syrian refugees, and calls by governors, including at least one Democrat, to deny them entry, ignore what refugees are.
Of course we must be vigilant against terrorism. Many measures aimed at border security, some very uncomfortable, may well prove necessary. But the politicians are aiming at exactly the wrong target. They need to recall certain facts.
First, a widely overlooked point: “refugee” has a very specific meaning in law and administrative practice, distinct from other types of migrant. The UN formally defines refugees as persons fleeing persecution, which is the necessary condition even to consider anyone for U..S refugee status. The Paris attackers were not refugees; they already lived in Europe. Several travelled to and from the Middle East, but only one attacker seems even to have moved along current refugee routes.
Second, fear that terrorists could infiltrate the refugee system is understandable for anyone unfamiliar with the U.S. process. But our existing system has multiple layers of monitoring and support, in effective, long-established practices. As noted by Ambassador Ryan Crocker in the Wall Street Journal, multiple agencies, including Homeland Security and the FBI, vet all refugee candidates under consideration. A U.S. diplomat, with experience processing Middle Eastern refugees, corroborates to me that every case undergoes a multi-phased examination before gaining refugee status.
Third, even before embarking for the U.S., refugees are connected to a resettlement organization, from one of several, long-established networks. These organizations, including my friends at the International Institute of Connecticut, work closely with incoming families and individuals. Agency staff implements the rigorous State Department-funded refugee resettlement program. Volunteers mentor each family, visiting regularly to aid in their settlement. It is a service rather than security monitoring, but the relationship keeps citizens of the local community in touch with resettling refugees.
Fourth, America does not have the communities of disaffected Middle Eastern immigrants that a terrorist needs, to build networks to plan, equip, stage, and launch attacks. Europe’s large populations of alienated Muslims are not present here, and our resettlement agencies do not dump new arrivals in any shadow-lands.
The terrorism risk posed by refugees, even specifically from Syria and Iraq, is effectively zero. Yes, rapid expansion could strain a network geared to earlier levels of activity; this would explain in part the small number of Syrian refugees—10,000—that the administration proposed to accept this fall. Large increases should be carefully planned and rigorously monitored. But to worry about radicals posing as Syrian refugees is to ignore the meaning of “refugee.”
Beyond the question of domestic security, Syria itself gives us very few pieces on which to build a palatable U.S. policy. The only real forces are ISIS and the Assad regime —which started a civil war in response to the Arab Spring. Two approaches are raised in our public discourse. The first is to establish a safe haven in Syria for Assad’s non-ISIS opponents. This keeps our hands unsullied, but requires collaboration with countries of many different stripes, and will have little direct effect on either ISIS or Assad. The second is to join pro-Assad Russia in an anti-ISIS coalition; aside from the difficulties highlighted by Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian plane, the moral compromise here is clear.
If we must choose among such options, we will need somehow to assert a basic moral context around what will be a pragmatic choice. Islamist terrorists voice an anti-Liberal, anti-Western narrative calling us amoral and imperialistic. Choosing an evil that we calculate to be the lesser, without somehow exhibiting our overarching moral values, will help our enemies, “proving” their narrative for them.
Taking in refugees is a long standing sign of America’s best nature. The system is one of the functions in the U.S. government that has been managed, quietly and collaboratively between Congress and State, for years. Through long practice it meets the standard of responsible handling in all respects, including security.
Everyone is entitled to their concerns—fear is a response to danger. Some will still worry about refugees, even if they understand that our process already eliminates the risks. Exactly to the extent that we still carry this fear, taking in Syrians who cannot abide either ISIS or Assad becomes an act of courage, undertaken out of conviction in our values.
Whenever something unexpected happens, the airwaves immediately fill with the sound of pundits calling for the President to scrap whatever it is the government has been doing that is tangentially related, and start over again with something else. Thus, the recent terrorist attacks in Paris were met with assertions that Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was not working and had to be changed. This, however, is not the right way to look at it. I think it is more accurate to say that the president’s strategy has been working in Iraq and Syria, but ISIS is now reacting to the setbacks in innovative ways.
In 2014 ISIS spread across eastern Syria and western Iraq in a rapid, sudden, and unexpected way. The advance left such a strong impression that some people seem to think that it is continuing. Yet, at this point, ISIS has largely been brought to a halt. Moreover, it has been losing territory.
According to the Pentagon, as of April 2015, ISIS “can no longer operate freely in roughly 25 to 30 percent of populated areas of Iraqi territory where it once could.” (This calculation, presumably, leaves out the extensive empty desert areas that fall within ISIS’s borders.) The road between Raqqa and Mosul has been cut. Thousands of fighters have been killed. The Iraqi army has not been vigorous in its attempts to retake the most recent ISIS acquisition, the city of Ramadi (and in some cases may actually be happy to see the Sunnis kept outside of Baghdad’s jurisdiction and elections), but even there ISIS is physically surrounded and isolated.
War, however, is a highly interactive enterprise. Rather than simply taking its hits on the ground, ISIS has responded by shifting part of the fight to a different theater—one that features a different balance of advantages and disadvantages. As I have noted before, ISIS does not have a tradition of terrorist attacks against distant targets. This was a point of dispute between al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and the founder of ISIS’ predecessor organizations, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Both sought ultimately to depose the (un-Islamic or insufficiently Islamic) regimes of the Middle East (the near enemy). Bin Laden, however, saw these regimes as sustained by the West (the far enemy) and therefore directed his attacks at the West to induce Western countries to drop their support. Al-Zarqawi attacked Middle Eastern regimes directly or sought to incite civil conflicts within these countries as a way to increase local support for his cause. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, by bringing the far enemy near, led to a temporary alignment between the two, and to Zarqawi’s founding of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In recent weeks, however, ISIS and its affiliates have engaged in an unprecedented series of attacks at distant targets.* Although some of the details have yet to be confirmed, these acts include suicide bombings at a Kurdish peace rally in Ankara, Turkey; the destruction of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; suicide bombings in a Shiite neighborhood in Beirut, Lebanon; and most recently, the attacks against random civilians by three coordinated teams of gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris. Unable to prevail against technically advanced forces on the battlefield, ISIS is shifting the battle to a place where it is in a better position to inflict costs directly on those countries that have taken up arms against it.
It is highly unlikely that the leaders of ISIS have ever read the works of Thomas Schelling, but these actions can be interpreted in terms of his notion of coercive threats, which include both deterrence and compellence.** Schelling, who played a large role in the development of deterrence theory, was the originator of the notion of compellence. The basic concept, deterrence, uses threats of retaliation to induce an adversary not to engage in some behavior that you want to prevent (e.g., Don’t attack me!). The derivative concept, compellence, is the use of threats or actual violence to compel an adversary to stop or change some behavior that is already under way (e.g., Stop attacking me!). Schelling reasoned that compellence would be the more difficult of the two inasmuch as it required a change in the status quo rather than the maintenance of the status quo. Both, however, entailed the manipulation of the adversary’s perceived costs and benefits so as to convince the adversary of the wisdom of avoiding, or ceasing, the undesired behavior.
Thus the recent attacks most likely represent a further round in the “natural” escalation of the sectarian war in Iraq and Syria—one carried out in the spirit of compellence. The expanding war on the ground has drawn in a number of outside powers who are concerned about the balance of power in the Middle East and eager to prevent an ISIS victory. These interventionists supply their preferred local factions, directly participate in ground combat, or in the case of the Western powers, bomb ISIS positions from the air.
Unable to defeat modern air forces, ISIS is raising the costs of intervention by attacking their homelands and killing their citizens, hoping to undermine their willingness to remain engaged in a distant fight in a foreign land. In the Vietnam War, the United States similarly used bombing in an attempt to raise the costs of war to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, in the hope that they would recalculate their relative costs and benefits, pack their bags, and go home. Unfortunately for the strategy in that instance, the Vietnamese were already home and it was the United States that packed its bags. Compared with that, ISIS’s use of compellence is far more logical.
ISIS runs the risk, of course, of eliciting a backlash in the form of even more intense bombing. Deterrence theory suggests an additional response. The Western powers should strive for “escalation dominance.”*** ISIS is seeking to fight on a battlefield of its choosing, one where the circumstances favor it over its adversaries. Its adversaries will have to make sure that no such battlefield exists. That does not necessarily mean changing strategy in Iraq and Syria (although one may choose to adjust it for other reasons). It means creating the capacity to defeat ISIS at other levels—thus removing the incentive to escalate—while the fight in Iraq and Syria continues.
Since the nature of the fight differs, the means will have to differ as well. Stealthy terrorist attacks against soft civilian targets in home cities cannot be combatted with battalions or fighter jets. It calls for police action, surveillance of suspected terrorists, cutting communications and travel links between ISIS headquarters and its operatives abroad, countering ISIS ideology and recruitment efforts, and improving relations between Muslim communities in the West and their host societies.
This approach will not satisfy those seeking a quick and easy answer. Unfortunately, quick and easy answers have a tendency to make things worse.
*For this argument’s sake, we shall assume that these actions have been directed by a central ISIS command and are not simply the products of inspiration or loosely networked organizations.
**The noun normally associated with the verb “compel” is compulsion, but Schelling was not happy with all of that word’s existing connotations, so he invented a new word.
***Herman Kahn developed this notion with reference to escalation among finely measured gradations of nuclear war. In my opinion, the expectation of controlling nuclear war with such precision is unrealistic. In the present context, however, the idea might be more useful.