On Attacking the “Islamic State” in Syria

http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2014/08/23/on-attacking-the-islamic-state-in-syria/

by Elliott Abrams

August 23, 2014

The threat to the United States and to American interests from the “Islamic State” is now obvious and has been acknowledged by President Obama and his entire administration. The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security have stated that there is a threat to the homeland, and the President has spoken about the brutality of this group in commenting on its beheading of the American journalist James Foley.

It’s also obvious that IS grew in Syria and then snowballed, moving first into Iraq. Its size is now variously estimated at 10,000 to over 20,000. The growth of IS in Syria was materially aided by the Assad regime, as The Wall Street Journal reported today. In a story headlined “Assad Aided Rise of Militants,” the Journal tells us that IS “gained momentum early on from a calculated decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to go easy on it….”

It’s also now acknowledged by the Obama administration that IS cannot be defeated unless and until it is attacked in Syria. The air strikes the United States is now conducting against IS in Iraq, and help to the Kurds, will not be sufficient. Here’s what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said this past week in a press conference:

Q: General, do you believe that ISIS can be defeated or destroyed without addressing the cross-border threat from Syria? And is it possible to contain them?
GEN. DEMPSEY: Let me start from where you ended and end up where you started. It is possible contain — to contain them. And I think we’ve seen that their momentum was disrupted. And that’s not to be discounted, by the way, because the — it was the momentum itself that had allowed them to be — to find a way to encourage the Sunni population of western Iraq and Nineveh province to accept their brutal tactics and — and their presence among them.
So you ask — yes, the answer is they can be contained, not in perpetuity. This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated. To your question, can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no. That will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a nonexistent border.
And that will come when we have a coalition in the region that takes on the task of defeating ISIS over time. ISIS will only truly be defeated when it’s rejected by the 20 million disenfranchised Sunni that happen to reside between Damascus and Baghdad.
Q: And that requires airstrikes (OFF-MIKE)
GEN. DEMPSEY: It requires a variety of instruments, only one small part of which is airstrikes. I’m not predicting those will occur in Syria, at least not by the United States of America. But it requires the application of all of the tools of national power — diplomatic, economic, information, military.

All of this is a reminder of just how dangerous and indeed disastrous the Obama administration’s Syria policy has been. The death toll in Syria is now estimated by the United Nations at 191,000 (though other sources believe it’s much higher) and an incredible 9 million Syrians have been driven from or fled their homes due to the war. To that humanitarian price we must now add that the Obama hands-off policy has allowed IS to metastasize to the point where it is now a serious threat.

It is worth recalling the way this happened, and given Gen. Dempsey’s statement quoted above some of his previous statements are worth noting. I wrote about this at the time,here,  in a blog entry entitled “Syria and the 700 sorties.”

On June 18, 2013, about 14 months ago, Jeffrey Goldberg reported a story entitled “Pentagon Shoots Down Kerry’s Syria Airstrike Plan.” Here’ the key excerpt:

Flash-forward to this past Wednesday. At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces.
It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.
Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome.

Why didn’t the president, who was strongly opposed to any intervention in Syria, use Dempsey’s comments to support his own stance? Here’s Goldberg again: “One senior administration official explained it this way: The White House doesn’t want Dempsey to make an enthusiastic case on “Meet the Press” against intervention, just in case Obama one day decides to follow Kerry’s advice and get more deeply involved. At that point, Dempsey’s arguments against greater involvement could come back to haunt the administration.”

I suppose they could, if anyone remembered. Dempsey 2013 was telling us that attacking in Syria was nearly impossible. Dempsey 2014 seems to be saying that IS cannot be stopped unless we attack in Syria.

The Dempsey 2013 argument was embarrassing and ridiculous. As I wrote in that blog entry at the time,

the “700 sortie” argument is an old Pentagon line, updated for this particular argument about Syria, that can be translated simply as “I don’t want to.” As Goldberg noted, it is impossible to believe that Israel can do three air strikes in Syria (apparently stand-off strikes from beyond Syria’s borders) but the U.S. Air Force cannot do one–until it makes 700 sorties to take down Syrian air defenses. Israel lacks our stealth bombers; Israel does not have the mix of ground to ground or air to ground missiles that we do; Israel lacks the naval strength we have in the Sixth Fleet.

Since then Israel has done more air strikes, without losing a plane, making the argument that we just cannot do anything in Syria even more absurd. The argument lives on: in The Washington Post today we find that air strikes in Syria are impossible because of the danger not to our airmen but to our drones:

An expanded covert program that would allow Islamic State forces to be targeted by drones, such as the CIA effort against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, is deemed risky. Not only do the extremists have surface-to-air missiles, but Assad’s forces control the air over Syria.

Once again here is the argument that Assad’s air defenses and air force make any attack in Syria impossibly risky; once again I wonder how the Israelis then manage it without losing an aircraft. Moreover, the United States possesses drones and cruise missiles in part so that we can strike in places where the risks to manned aircraft are deemed too high. The argument that Assad’s air defenses make Syria too dangerous for our drones is simply stating what Dempsey was really saying back in June 2013: “I don’t want to.”

There are a number of lessons here. One is that the President’s policies on Syria have been disastrous for Syrians, Iraqis, and now for the United States—starting with James Foley’s execution but now presenting a real threat to the homeland. Another is that the American military should not be permitted to make policy arguments camouflaged as military advice, as Dempsey did back in 2013 in saying we’d need “700 sorties” before anything could be done in Syria. Now Dempsey is saying something must be done there if IS is to be defeated. As the Obama administration weighs additional military action in Syria, he may well have to eat those words.

Obama Insiders Frustrated Over Reluctance to Attack Syria and Iraq

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/08/obama-insiders-frustrated-over-reluctance-attack-syria-and-iraq/92237/?oref=d-skybox

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
22 august 2014
President Barack Obama recently dismissed his criticswho argue that arming the Syrian moderate opposition long ago would have made a difference in the fight against Bashar al-Assad. But louder than ever those critics – some from within his own administration – are saying, “We told you so.”

That notion, the president said, “has always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”

As the Islamic State grows and gains territory in not only Syria but Iraq as well, some within the administration say they feel “extreme frustration” that their long-standing warnings have come true—warnings about the likely gain of extremist groups on the ground in the face of American inaction in Syria. They also reject the hardening narrative that the rise of the Islamic State was inevitable.

“Two years ago we told them if we did not train the moderates it would be the regime versus al-Qaeda and you would have transnational terrorist networks in Syria,” says one administration official. “The real fear they always had was: arming the opposition means empowering the extremists. And now they say, ‘See? We told you,’ and we say, ‘No, you didn’t arm the moderates and you ended up with the extremists.’”

The back-and-forth within the administration on Syria has played out in public and in private since 2011. Both former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton write in their books about the policy debate on whether and how to arm the moderate opposition in Syria as the Assad regime’s crackdown grew increasingly brutal, eventually with backing from Russia and Iran. 

Clinton said that she did believe that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled. They were often armed in an indiscriminate way by other forces and we had no skin in the game that really enabled us to prevent this indiscriminate arming.”

In June, the president said, “The question has always been, is there the capacity of moderate opposition on the ground to absorb and counteract extremists that might have been pouring in, as well as an Assad regime supported by Iran and Russia that outmanned them and was ruthless. And so we have consistently provided that opposition with support. Oftentimes, the challenge is if you have former farmers or teachers or pharmacists who now are taking up opposition against a battle-hardened regime, with support from external actors that have a lot at stake, how quickly can you get them trained; how effective are you able to mobilize them. And that continues to be a challenge.”

But those who supported and continue to back arming of moderate rebel opposition forces say that it is not entirely accurate to label these forces farmers and pharmacists as the president did again in his recent interview. They note that many of the moderates, especially in 2011, were former regime fighters, and that all Syrians are conscripted to do military service. 

And they say that the Islamic State extremists they are now up against were hardly more qualified when they entered the fight.

“Where were these ISIS guys three years ago? They were not part of Jihadi West Point cadres,” said former U.S.Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey. “They very quickly have been trained.”

Others who agree say that there were no guarantees that the plan to arm the moderates would have worked. But as Congress faces the president’s June 26 request to provide $500 million to train and arm Syrian moderate rebels, they take issue with the idea that the plan to provide arms two years ago would have made no difference.

“What we do know and what we did know was that the longer we delayed this, the less likely it was going to work,” said the administration official.  “Maybe it would have failed, but it had a much higher chance of succeeding then than now.”

Now some inside the administration are arguing for arming the moderate rebels quickly—as well as for striking the Islamic State group within Syria, where they hold territory and have their headquarters. The biggest fear is that the Syrian town of Aleppo will fall, striking a psychological blow and sparking a massive humanitarian catastrophe. The group is said to be closing in on the city, taking a series of surrounding villages in the last week.

 “If you think thousands of Yazidis stuck on a mountain is terrible, wait until Aleppo falls,” said the official.

Jeffrey and others who support arming the rebels say that time is of the essence when it comes to fighting the Islamic State, including in Syria. “You don’t want to wait, you have to use judgment, you don’t want to wait until it is incontrovertible that you are facing a huge threat,” Jeffrey said. “We should be arming and providing air support for and air cover for local people.”

Indeed, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said on Thursday that the Islamic State could not be defeated by airstrikes in Iraq without also striking them on the Syrian side of the border.

Others who served in the administration say that criticism surrounding its reluctance to act stems from its “very linear perspective, on or off, all or nothing perception of what military action does.”

“It is hard to prove you prevented something bad from happening; it is always hard to prove that,” said Janine Davidson, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations who served until 2012 as the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for plans.

“To have influenced the course of events in Syria would have required a steady, strategic effort focused on identifying a certain group of people in Syria and actively helping that group grow,” Davidson said, noting that nothing would have been resolved either easily or quickly and that both risks and costs were significant.

 “People just want quicker fixes than that and there was no guarantee

Why Obama Should Get Congress to Back the Fight Against the Islamic State

WILLIAM INBODEN, AUGUST 22, 2014

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/08/22/why_obama_congress_back_fight_islamic_state

The growing threat from the Islamic State and the Obama administration 's accelerating campaign of airstrikes against it serve reminder of history's continual capacity to surprise. If even one year ago someone had predicted that Iraq would mark the next site of a major American military intervention, such a forecast would have been dismissed as hopelessly far-fetched, even delusional. Yet with the Obama administration now giving persistent indications that this will be a sustained and multi-pronged campaign in Iraq and potentially Syria, the White House needs to take the next step of going to Capitol Hill and requesting Congressional support for this newest phase of the war against militant jihadism.

The IS resurgence has already forced the administration to confront some uncomfortable truths about its past mistakes, including dismissing IS as the "jayvee" team, assuming that disengagement from Iraq and passivity on Syria would carry little cost, failing to develop a robust counter-radicalization strategy, and declaring "mission accomplished" against the terrorist threat. To their credit, the administration is now beginning to approach the IS threat with the gravity it deserves. Doing so will mean marshalling domestic and international support for the sustained campaign that will be needed to defeat IS, and requesting that Congress grant a new authorization to use military force is the most important first step in this direction.

I am not a legal scholar, and am sure that skilled lawyers could make good arguments on either side for the legality of the Obama administration 's current use of force against IS without Congressional authorization. Yet even though I take a fairly expansive view of a president's Article II authority as commander-in-chief, a combination of prudence, politics, and policy all point towards the merit of seeking Congressional support.

Even before the Islamic State's resurgence, some national security legal scholars were arguing that the Obama administration 's campaign against al Qaeda and its proliferating franchises was skating on increasingly thin legal ice. For our academically-inclined readers, myStrauss Center and University of Texas faculty colleague Bobby Chesney last year published a compelling argument in the Michigan Law Review on the growing obsolescence of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) and the need for a new AUMF. In light of ongoing U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Chesney and his colleagues at the indispensable Lawfare blog are making similar arguments this week on the need for Congressional authorization for our current operations.

Substantively, a new AUMF, especially focused on IS and its affiliates, could take into account the evolution and adaptation of militant jihadist groups in the 13 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the shifts and drawdowns of American ground force deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Islamic State's nihilistic wickedness may be generating the headlines now, but over time even more danger may be posed by its magnetism towards other al Qaeda franchises and its potential leadership of militant jihadist groups spanning the broader Middle East and points beyond in Africa and South Asia.

No president enjoys showing any deference to Congress, of course, and this president in particular suffers from an especially dysfunctional distance from Capitol Hill. A recent New York Timesarticle described Obama's relationship with Congress with words like "disengaged," "indifference," "distant," "frustrating" -- and that is just with Members of his own Democratic Party. To rally bipartisan support from both Democrats and Republicans for his counterterrorism policy, President Obama will need to travel quite far down Pennsylvania Avenue, both literally and metaphorically. Yet for a matter as grave as the IS threat, I hope that Congress will be willing to set aside its frustrations and take some steps to meet this president halfway.

As a matter of politics and operational policy, securing Congressional support would bring significant benefits, including:

• providing firm political and legal support for the use of lethal force against IS elements in any region that pose a threat to the United States;

• mobilizing domestic support from a skeptical American public;

• strengthening our diplomatic leverage with the new Iraqi Government under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi;

• reassuring other skittish American allies and partners that the United States is committed to this fight (such a message would especially resonate in the United Kingdom, where national security officials are still bruised over last year's embarrassing Syria vote while also grappling with the appalling number of British citizens in IS);

• offering a more sustainable basis for detention and interrogation policies of captured IS-affiliated fighters;

• helping repair some of the political damage the White House inflicted on itself with its refusal to seek Congressional support for the Libya War and its vacillation on the Syria resolution.

Finally, as Jack Goldsmith notes, it would compel Congress to take some ownership over American national security policy. Securing Congressional support now for the campaign against IS could also help lay the groundwork for marshalling Congressional support to repeal the reckless defense cuts in the 2011 Budget Control Act, as both the Obama administration  and Congress will realize that such a conflict cannot be sustained or won on the cheap. My Shadow Governmentcolleagues Dov Zakheim and Tom Mahnken both supported the work of the National Defense Panel and its emphatic bipartisan recommendation to restore the defense budget soon.

As someone who has worked as a staff member in both the Executive branch and Congress, I am all too familiar with the mutual disdain felt by both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue towards each other. Congress generates enough ill-conceived and ill-informed ideas on foreign and defense policy that it can be easy for the Executive Branch to dismiss Capitol Hill as nothing but institutionalized ignorance. But such an attitude disregards the fact that some Members bring considerable expertise and insight on national security policy.

For example, in April the Clements Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft (where I serve as executive director) hosted Senator Marco Rubio for a lecture on American national security policy here at the University of Texas-Austin. In his remarks, Senator Rubio warned that the territory in Syria and Iraq controlled by IS has "increasingly has become the premiere operational space on the planet for radical jihadists to train and operate. I will make a prediction to you tonight that if things continue the way they are, soon we will see attacks staged against our interests and, God forbid, perhaps even our homeland from those ungoverned spaces in Syria." Along with a few other Congressional voices, Rubio has been consistently warning that American negligence could, as he put it in the Wall Street Journal over two years ago, "allow Syria to hurtle toward becoming a radicalized, failed state whose violence will spill over and threaten its neighbors."

Rubio's April speech in Texas generated some anxious headlines. With each passing day of IS territorial advances and threats against the United States, and with the horrific beheading of James Foley, it appears more and more prescient. We are entering an ominous and uncertain new phase in the Long War; waging it requires the White House and Congress to come together and prepare the nation.

This post has been updated.

Airstrikes on ISIS Should Expand to Syria

Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Syria and Iraq, is the dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

UPDATED AUGUST 22, 2014, 6:21 PM
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/08/22/should-the-us-work-with-assad-to-fight-isis/airstrikes-on-isis-should-expand-to-syria
The rise of ISIS presents the gravest threat to United States national security since 9/11. Although disavowed by Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri as too extreme, ISIS shares the same agenda: the establishment of a twisted version of the Prophet Muhammad’s Islamic caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. That ISIS is a mortal enemy of ours is beyond question after the vicious murder of journalist James Foley.

But ISIS has a much broader agenda. In spite of some setbacks in northern Iraq, thanks in large part to U.S. airstrikes, they continue to make gains. In the region, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are at risk. The Saudis know it; that is why they have mobilized troops near their border with Iraq. There is nothing between ISIS and them except sand.

We too are at risk. This Al Qaeda mutant is far better armed, equipped and financed than the original. Unlike any variant of Al Qaeda since 9/11, it controls significant territory where, secure from attack, it has the space and time to plan its next set of operations. Anyone who believes the U.S. is not on that list is delusional.

So this is not just about protecting refugees or helping allies in Iraq secure limited objectives. This is war. The Obama administration has said our aim is to disrupt, degrade and defeat Al Qaeda. This is Al Qaeda Version 6.0. A sustained, focused air campaign supplemented by a significant number of Special Forces advisers, and including help from Iraqi tribes, can make a difference. But we cannot limit ourselves to Iraq. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has declared the Iraq-Syria border nonexistent – the caliphate cannot be divided. We should carry our air campaign to targets in Syria. This is a unified enemy and must be met by a unified strategy.

What this does not mean is any form of coordination, let alone an alliance, with the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad. We need to fight an enemy of the United States, not involve ourselves in the Syrian civil war. But it might be that the systematic degradation of ISIS will allow the secular opposition to gain some momentum. After all, these terrorists probably have done more damage to them than to Assad.

But we need to move forcefully and quickly. As Senator Diane Feinstein rightlysaid, using an alternative name for ISIS, “It takes an army to defeat an army… we either confront ISIL now or we will be forced to deal with an even stronger enemy in the future.” And it may be on American soil.

An American-Led Coalition Can Defeat ISIS

U.S. air power and special forces are essential, but so is a political and economic strategy. It's also time to give Qatar an ultimatum.

By 

JACK KEANE And 

DANIELLE PLETKA

Aug. 24, 2014 6:27 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com/articles/jack-keane-and-danielle-pletka-an-american-led-coalition-can-defeat-isis-in-iraq-1408919270

Two months ago we laid out a plan on these pages to bring Iraq back from the abyss of terrorist domination, turn the tide in the Syria conflict, and crush the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. The need for such a plan is now more urgent as ISIS has since advanced dramatically, the Iraqi army and Kurdish militia initially performed poorly, and the terror group has threatened to kill more Americans as it did James Foley last week.

President Obama has so far ordered some 1,100 troops into Iraq and conducted close to 100 airstrikes. While it is important that the president has recognized the growing threat to U.S. security, these limited tactical measures will neither permanently reverse ISIS gains nor address the maelstrom in the Middle East. A combined political, economic and military strategy is needed, and one element without the others will likely doom the effort.

First, the political challenge: The Islamic State, like its predecessor al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda itself, has its roots in the swamp of Arab political life. Extremists gain purchase because the region's leaders have delivered so little to the hundreds of millions over whom they rule. The Obama administration appeared to recognize this problem when it demanded the ouster of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had estranged the nation's Sunni tribes, leading some to welcome ISIS from Syria.

Regional leaders are aware of these problems and exploit them through proxy wars in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya and the Palestinian territories. This is a recipe for endless conflict, and those leaders should be forced into a dialogue to resolve grievances and develop a regional strategy to defeat ISIS, al Qaeda and their ideological brethren.

Only the United States has the clout to convene such a summit. Only the U.S. can demand real change, and only the U.S can offer security reassurances to turn the political tide in the Middle East.

In particular, the time has come to confront the government of Qatar, which funds and arms ISIS and other Islamist terrorist groups such as Hamas. The tiny Gulf potentate has never had to choose between membership in the civilized world or continuing its sponsorship of regional killers. The U.S. has the most leverage. We have alternatives to our Combined Air and Operations Center in Doha, the al Udeid air base, other bases and prepositioned materiel. We should tell Qatar to end its support for terrorism or we leave.

Second, the economic challenge: ISIS may now be the richest terror group in the world. Through hostage taking, criminality, conquest and outside financial support, ISIS is building a war chest measuring in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It has portfolio managers, bankers and other accouterments of a proto-Treasury.

These facilitators have not come under pressure in the way the West has challenged al Qaeda and Iran's bankers. The intelligence is available to exert this pressure, but the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world are moving at a glacial pace.

Third, the military component: ISIS is at war and wants to control as much territory as possible. Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanon are in the group's sights. The Islamic State wants to control oil fields, financial and political centers and create a quasi-state with self-proclaimed emir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in charge.

President Obama has "limited" action to protect American personnel and selected refugees, but even his tactical air strikes to help reclaim the Mosul Dam and the slow ramp-up of advisers are inadequate to meet the threat. A military campaign is needed to defeat ISIS, not merely stop or contain it.

Contrary to some claims, this is not a plan for a new American ground war in Iraq seeking to reconstitute a failed state. It is a mission to help Iraqis and Syrians on the ground help themselves. A U.S.-led international coalition can provide the military capability, including air interdiction to deny ISIS freedom of movement, take away its initiative to attack at will in Iraq, and dramatically reduce its sanctuary in Syria.

Political and military leaders must recognize that Iraq and Syria are indivisible in this conflict. The group must be defeated in both places.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey has said ISIS cannot be defeated "without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria." Like the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq, the Free Syrian Army needs heavy weapons, ammunition and supplies. And Washington is also blocking the delivery of much-needed weapons and equipment already purchased by the Iraqi military. Arming allies to fight a common enemy cannot be an afterthought.

U.S. military support will be key: The U.S. Central Command has a list of ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq, including staging bases for equipment and troops, supply bases, training areas for foreign fighters, command and control and frontline troop positions. Advisers and trainers are also needed by the thousands, not hundreds, to assist the Peshmerga, reconstitute the Iraqi army, and assist Sunni tribes now opposing ISIS who must join this fight. Close air support will also be vital.

Baghdadi and his senior leaders aren't invulnerable, and U.S. special operations forces should be given the mission to target, kill and capture ISIS leaders. We targeted senior terrorist leaders once in Iraq and still do in Afghanistan and elsewhere. ISIS should be no different, particularly after its brutal murder of Foley.

None of these steps are sufficient by themselves to defeat a capable, motivated and well-armed terrorist group. Much will depend on the effectiveness of the combined ground force backed by consistent air power. But failure means the destabilization of the Middle East, terrible bloodshed and, ultimately, the murder of more Americans. A comprehensive strategy is the only realistic choice to defeat ISIS, and the time is long past to get serious.

Gen. Keane, a retired four-star general and former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, is the chairman of the Institute for the Study of War. Ms. Pletka is the senior vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

FPI Bulletin: U.S. Needs New Strategy to Stop ISIS

By Evan Moore | August 25, 2014
http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/content/fpi-bulletin-us-needs-new-strategy-stop-isis

The beheading of American journalist James Foley at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (also known as ISIS or ISIL) is a brutal reminder of the group’s threat not just in the Middle East, but also against Americans.  To defeat this threat, the United States should expand the range of its airstrike campaign, increase the number of personnel deployed to Iraq, and empower its regional allies to roll-back ISIS’ territorial gains.

First, the United States should expand the scope of its air campaign against ISIS.  U.S. military commanders in the region are reportedly urging the White House to intensify the air campaign against ISIS.  According to U.S. officials, many of ISIS’ fighters have remained in the open and are vulnerable to airstrikes.  The Obama administration should seize this opportunity to deal a heavy blow to ISIS in Iraq.

In addition, the United States should target ISIS forces in both Syria and Iraq, an action which policymakers are reportedly considering.  As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey said on Thursday: “Can [ISIS] be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no.”  Without U.S. pressure on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, ISIS could simply return to a safe-haven and recover from any strikes.  Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. Ambassador to Syria and Iraq, made the case for expanded airstrikes in The New York Times: “The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has declared the Iraq-Syria border nonexistent – the caliphate cannot be divided…This is a unified enemy and must be met by a unified strategy.”

Second, the United States should increase the number of its personnel on the ground to advise and assist the Iraqi Security Forces, Kurdish Peshmerga militia, and Sunni tribes.  Additional U.S. military and intelligence can improve America’s situational awareness in Iraq,  advise Iraq’s weakened security forces, and conduct independent counter-terrorism operations.  Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution notes that U.S. personnel are essential to  improve U.S. airstrikes, because “It remains very hard to find and destroy an enemy from the air without good intelligence, gained largely on the ground.”  Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that 10,000-15,000 U.S. troops would be required for these missions.

Third, the United States should provide the arms that Syria’s mainstream opposition groups need to defeat both ISIS and the Assad regime.  In his remarks on Wednesday, the President said that the Syrian people “do not deserve to live under the shadow of a tyrant or terrorists."  However, Mr. Obama has not taken the necessary action to allow them to escape that shadow.  Indeed, he has even said that it is a “fantasy” to believe that providing arms to the mainstream opposition would allow them to defeat the Assad regime. 

The President should heed the advice of his former Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, who told PBS Newshour that “We need and we have long needed to help moderates in the Syrian opposition with both weapons and other nonlethal assistance. Had we done that a couple of years ago…the al-Qaida groups that have been winning adherents would have been unable to compete with the moderates, who, frankly, we have much in common with.”

In particular, the Obama administration should accelerate and expand its $500 million initiative to train and arm Syrians to fight both the Assad regime and Islamist extremist groups like ISIS.  It should also immediately provide mainstream groups anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons to enable them to defend themselves from a potentially-devastating attack against the rebel stronghold of Aleppo. 

Critics have argued that arming these mainstream groups could lead to U.S. weaponry falling into the hands of extremists.  However, as the Associated Press reported, the Assad regime “has long turned a blind eye to the Islamic State’s expansion in Syria - in some cases even facilitating its offensive against mainstream rebels.”  Izzat Shahbandar, a senior Assad regime official, told the Wall Street Journal this weekend that the purpose of this policy was to force the world to choose between supporting the regime or Islamist extremists by undermining the third option of supporting the secular, mainstream opposition.

Policymakers and lawmakers should instead view the mainstream Syrian opposition as they view the Kurdish Peshmerga militia—a group that shares U.S. interests and values, and badly needs U.S. support.  With over 191,000 Syrians having been killed since March 2011, the Obama administration should make every effort to end this conflict—which means supporting America’s natural allies in the mainstream opposition.

Fourth, the United States should work with the Iraqi government to create a political and economic strategy to defeat ISIS. As U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said Wednesday, ISIS “is as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen.” Indeed, the RAND Corporation notes that ISIS brings in up to $1 million a day in revenue. In turn, the group uses this income to consolidate control of their territory by providing essential services to areas that they take over.

As the new Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi works to form a new power-sharing government, the Wall Street Journal reports that the “Obama administration is preparing to significantly increase U.S. diplomatic, military and economic assistance to Iraq.”  This effort is welcome, and should be strategically used to prevent ISIS from making further inroads into Iraq.  

In addition to incorporating Sunnis and Kurds into meaningful roles within the national government, the United States should persuade Baghdad to politically and economically empower its local governments by returning larger portions of the country’s revenue to the local governments.  If al-Abadi does not target Sunni politicians as his predecessor did, ends harsh de-Ba’athification measures, and ensures due process for detainees, then many of the grievances that ISIS exploited to come to power would be remedied.

Conclusion

ISIS poses a severe threat to the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.  Left unchecked, the group will not only undermine more governments in the region, but also launch attacks against the West.  Defeating ISIS will certainly require significant time and resources, and the administration must articulate a clear strategy for this effort.  Indeed, President Obama described ISIS as a “cancer.” Over the past two years, this cancer has metastasized, and the United States will need to use every tool at its disposal to remove this danger.

- See more at: http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/content/fpi-bulletin-us-needs-new-strategy-stop-isis#sthash.o6DDfPlb.dpuf

Obama Is Just 'Tickling' ISIS, Syrian Rebels Say

Josh Rogin

08.25.14

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/25/syrian-rebels-to-obama-airstrikes-in-syria-will-never-stop-isis.html

The Free Syrian Army is not impressed with President Obama’s new threat to attack ISIS inside Syria. That’s like ‘tickling’ the terror group, the FSA says—and is too little, too late.

U.S. airstrikes against ISIS, even if they extend into Syria as several Obama administration officials are signaling, don’t have a chance of destroying the terror group, moderate political and rebel leaders inside the country are cautioning. They have told The Daily Beast that air strikes will only make things worse unless there’s a coordinated plan to defeat ISIS.

For the Free Syrian Army, the Obama administration’s recent bluster about possibly using U.S. military force to strike ISIS inside Syria is too little, too late. On the one hand, moderate rebels say they can’t prepare for U.S. military intervention in Syria because they don’t have confidence President Obama will make good on his threat. On the other hand, if Obama does expand the U.S. air war against ISIS into Syria without a real plan to combat it on the ground, the American intervention will do more harm than good.

“Airstrikes against ISIS inside Syria will not be helpful. Airstrikes will not get rid of ISIS. Airstrikes are like just tickling ISIS,” Hussam Al Marie, the spokesman for the FSA in northern Syria, told The Daily Beast. “ISIS is not a real state that you can attack and destroy; they are thugs who are spread all over the east of Syria in the desert. And when they are in the cities, they are using civilian buildings. So airstrikes will not be enough to get rid of these terrorists and at the same time, they might hit civilians. That’s the problem.”

Several leaders and representatives of the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian Military Council, and the Syrian Opposition Coalition told The Daily Beast in a series of interviews that the Western powers’ support for the fight against ISIS has been ad hoc, disjointed, and unenthusiastic ever since the FSA and ISIS began fighting in earnest at the beginning of this year. As a result, ISIS got stronger and the FSA was left weak and fractured.

Led by the United States, international military operations coordination cells in Turkey and Jordan have given meager and inconsistent support to FSA brigades fighting ISIS all over northern and eastern Syria, leaving the moderate rebels outmanned and outgunned all year. Meanwhile, ISIS amassed resources, money, and heavy weapons brought back as spoils from their military victories in Iraq.

Now, following the murder of American journalist James Foley in Syria, the United States and European countries are scrambling to play catch-up and figure out a strategy to disrupt and then somehow defeat ISIS. Two FSA leaders said that in the past week, with Foley dead and the city of Aleppo about to fall, the West has been calling on the FSA to fight ISIS and again holding out the prospect of more robust international support, including U.S. airstrikes.

“If you come after Americans, we’re going to come after you, wherever you are,” Deputy National Security Adviser for Communications Ben Rhodes said Friday. “We’re actively considering what’s going to be necessary to deal with that threat, and we’re not going to be restricted by borders.”

But the FSA has heard this tune before, and its leaders are skeptical that the American cavalry is on the way or that it will do any good.

“The ISIS killing of James Foley and the threatening of the other American journalists reflects that America didn’t pay much attention to the threat and growth of ISIS inside Syria,” said Iyad Shamsi, the commander of the FSA Eastern Front, in an interview. “We were very clear that we wanted to cooperate with the Americans. They didn’t listen. They paid a price.”

Shamsi led the FSA brigade in the Syrian city of Der al Zour, the largest city on the Syria-Iraq border. ISIS took over the city in July, after months of desperate warnings from the FSA to Western countries went unanswered. Now Shamsi and other FSA leaders are warning their Western contacts not to repeat that mistake in Aleppo, the biggest front against ISIS now.

“Since a week ago, now we are getting a lot of communication from Western powers saying, ‘What can we do to help you against ISIS?’ They ask us go to fight ISIS and say ‘We will support you,’” he said. “From our experience we can see that when ISIS gets near the Turkish border, they are very serious. Whenever the fighting moves eastward toward the Iraqi border, they are not serious at all.”

FSA forces are nearly surrounded in Aleppo, squeezed by ISIS in the north and the regime in the south. If ISIS is able to cut off Aleppo’s access to the Turkish border, Syria’s second-largest city will be cut off from humanitarian aid and the moderate rebels will lose one of their most important links to vital supplies.

“ISIS is attempting to retake Aleppo, and the FSA is locked in a desperate battle against them,” said Oubai Shahbandar, spokesman for the Syrian Opposition Coalition in Washington. “If ISIS succeeds, it’s going to significantly endanger humanitarian aid and you’re going to see more atrocities, and you will absolutely see more kidnappings.”

Early this year, when ISIS first threatened to take over northern Aleppo, the international powers through the coordination center in Turkey sent small arms and ammunition to the FSA, which pushed back ISIS. The FSA even liberated an ISIS prison inside the children’s hospital and freed 30 civilians, including two Syrian journalists.

But when the FSA then took the fight to other parts of Syria, including near Raqqa, where ISIS has its stronghold, the flow of military aid to the moderate rebels just stopped. This time around, small arms won’t be enough: ISIS now has heavy weapons and heavy armor. To be sure, the FSA has been asking for advanced weapons for years to fight the regime, but now its leaders say they need them to combat ISIS, as well.

“The FSA has been fighting against ISIS since the beginning of this year,” said Al Marie. “We continue to fight them. The problem now is that they came back to the fight with sophisticated weapons, weapons they stole from the Americans. We are losing our brave fighters on the front against ISIS. We’re just asking the West for some cooperation, some support to be able to fight these monsters and free our lands with our hands. That’s what we want.”

While Obama administration officials often talk about the lack of good intelligence about ISIS, the FSA says it has lots of information about ISIS, including about its foreign fighters and foreign hostages. The United States didn’t consult with the FSA before launching the unsuccessful July raid to free Foley. But if the Obama administration wants to find the other Western hostages, it might consider working with the FSA, Al Marie said. For example, he added, many highly valuable Western hostages are held in an ISIS prison beneath a dam near Raqqa.

“Working with the FSA is always better. We are Syrians, we know how and where and when to move in this country,” said Al Marie. “We live on this land. We know it. We know its geography, its tribes, its people. We are the most capable people to identify where the foreign fighters are. But we need support.”

For members of the Syrian opposition in Washington, America’s policy to fight ISIS in Syria has to consist of much more than helping the FSA; the opposition is calling on Washington to do more to support civil society in Syria and combat ISIS’s ideology as well as its military prowess.

“If the United States is serious about fighting ISIS, and not just a policy of containment, it will require a robust strategy in Syria,” said Bassam Barabandi, a Syrian opposition activist at People Demand Change, an American NGO.