William F. Wechsler, Mark N. Katz, Charles Lister, Audrey Kurth Cronin

Transcription

1 Symposium: The ISIS Threat to U.S. National Security The ISIS Threat to U.S. National Security: Policy Choices William F. Wechsler, Mark N. Katz, Charles Lister, Audrey Kurth Cronin The following is a transcript of the eighty-third in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, on January 21, 2016, with Patrick Theros, former U.S. ambassador to Qatar and an MEPC board member, as moderator and Thomas R. Mattair as discussant. The video can be accessed at WILLIAM F. WECHSLER, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress; Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism, U.S. Department of Defense I want to briefly go through my assessment of where we are in the fight against the Islamic State, how we got here, where we re going, and the lessons we should take from our experience thus far. Until last year, I was deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combatting terrorism, where I worked on these issues on a daily basis and saw the evolution of our policies and our approach towards the Islamic State throughout that period. If you look at the benchmark the president laid out for us to degrade and ultimately destroy the Islamic State we have clearly not met that goal. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, we re not even at the beginning of the end. I think it s questionable whether we re at the end of the beginning. We are at a very early stage in this effort, unfortunately. Why, fundamentally, are we here? As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said just recently, first and foremost because of the decisions made by the local actors, because of what s happened in Syria, and because of the leadership of the Assad regime and its decision to make war on its own people, and because of decisions in Iraq by the former leadership there and its decision to stoke sectarian tensions and dismiss legitimate Sunni grievances and desires. But that s not the only reason we re here. We haven t met our goals, because virtually every single player, every nation that is either in the Middle East or has significant interests in the Middle East, does not have as its top priority the destruction of the Islamic State including the United States. If we had it as our top priority, we would have already passed a specific authorization for the use of military force. If this was truly our top priority, many of our policies would be changed. But you can look around the region and see that, for many of the countries, the fight against Bashar al-assad has been a higher priority than the fight against the Islamic State. For many of the people in the region, the support of the Shia has been more of a priority than the fight against the Islamic State. For others, the proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia is more important than the fight against the Islamic State. 2016, The Authors Middle East Policy 2016, Middle East Policy Council 1

2 Middle East Policy, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Spring 2016 Every country has priorities that exceed the priority they place upon the fight against the Islamic State. When you pull all that together, you end up with the space a vacuum for the Islamic State to accomplish what it has accomplished. The challenge posed by the Islamic State is unchallenged only in the abstract; it is definitely de-prioritized in reality and has been for years by many of the actors. How important is this threat? I argue that it is very significant, and it should be much more highly prioritized than it has been. I m pleased to see that some of the steps that the Obama administration has taken more recently have moved in that direction. Let me explain why. First of all, even if you cannot see vital U.S. interests in stability in the Middle East, even if your views are contrary to those held by every president and every administration starting with Franklin Roosevelt, and even if you hold the position that the only reason we should care about any terrorist group anywhere is because of its potential as an external threat to the U.S. homeland then you nevertheless should still care about the Islamic State and see it as a threat. By the way, this should have been your view even before the attacks inspired by the Islamic State in San Bernardino. I want to make an important distinction here. It is wrong to say that all terrorist groups around the world threaten the United States homeland directly. It is wrong to say that all Muslim-oriented terrorist groups threaten it, or even all Sunni terrorist groups. But the Salafi jihadist terrorist groups al-qaeda, the Islamic State, and others with their ideology will inevitably, once they get territory that provides them a sanctuary from which they can act with impunity, they will always eventually turn to external attacks. This is a policy debate that has gone through multiple administrations in the United States: the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration. Every single time, the people who argued otherwise were proved to be wrong. And there are reasons why. It has to do with internal ideological incentives and incentives to validate their claim to leadership in front of a global audience. It has to do with what they see as their religious requirements to take the fight to the nonbelievers and with what they see as the future that is laid out for them in prophecy. It also has to do with jockeying for power, for leadership, in the minds of those they want to impress and attract. There is nothing more impressive than an external attack against those forces that many people feel have been keeping them down for decades and decades. Carrying out such an attack raises your stature. We saw this in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we saw it in Yemen, and of course now in Syria and Iraq. We will soon see it in Libya. But it shouldn t just be the external attacks that drive our interest in this. Beyond all of our other interests, which have been there for decades in this part of the world, we have a wider interest. At this point, there are no really good potential outcomes for this part of the world. We re only choosing between options that all lead to differing degrees of bad outcomes for the foreseeable future. But I would argue that the worst of all outcomes for U.S. interests is that the master narrative that defines what happens in this region is a regionally comprehensive sectarian war between Sunnis and Shia. About five years ago, the likelihood of that was extremely low. The likelihood is not extremely low anymore. It s not necessarily above 50 percent, but it is a material probability. It is something that we need to be very much concerned about. There are people in significant positions in major Sunni states who not only use this language but actually see this as a likely or a positive outcome. There are people in major Shia communities and in Iran who see it in the same way. And most critically, this is the only scenario in which the Islamic State fully succeeds at its goals. This has been its strategy from the beginning. If we allow it to happen, we give the Islamic State its best opportunity to succeed in its vision of a reconstructed caliphate that governs a significant proportion of the Sunni world. 2

3 Symposium: The ISIS Threat to U.S. National Security I don t think we re there now. What we can see now is more appropriately explained as a classic competition for regional power and influence between two states, Saudi Arabia and Iran, including proxy wars in multiple locations. Looking at it through that lens, rather than through a sectarian one, seems to me to more accurately explain the majority of what we see happening in the region right now. But every month that goes by, we slip a little closer to the nightmare scenario, and we really are in the Middle East version of the Thirty Years War. When those types of wars begin, you don t know where they end. The real danger of all of this is that it s fundamentally unpredictable. A hundred years ago, people in a room perhaps very much like this one on Capitol Hill might have been talking about what the likely outcome was going to be of what we now call World War I. Absolutely nobody at the time was predicting a Communist takeover of Russia. History becomes deeply unpredictable when wars go on at that scale and scope and duration. Last fall, the organization for which I work, the Center for American Progress, put out a report on what the state of the fight against the Islamic State was and what we could be doing about it. I am very pleased to see that, since then, the administration has adopted a lot of the points that we made. It has expanded the air campaign, in terms of size but also, more important, in terms of scope, and what kinds of targets we re going after. The expansion from high-value targets and massed personnel to strategically important targets including the infrastructure of the organization is an incredibly important decision that was made. The recent public announcement that a large store of cash was destroyed, and the recent piece in the news today that the Islamic State is telling its fighters that their salaries are going to go down by half because of such events this all has a strong impact. That s the kind of thing we were talking about in our report. We ve also expanded the number of special operations personnel on the ground both in Iraq and in Syria, which is incredibly important. It s also important to note that there was a prominent public announcement about sending 50 U.S. special operations personnel into Syria. But all this announcement said was that we re going to send the same kinds of personnel we already have, working with the same partner we re already working with. The only new fact in the announcement was that they were going to be doing this work across an imaginary line on a map, drawn by colonial powers decades ago, a line that no actor on the ground or operating in the region recognizes as having any de facto legitimacy except for the United States. So, in effect, we stopped being the only actor in the region that held self-imposed constraints on its policy to reflect this imaginary line. The administration s changes in policy also expanded the global battlefield against the Islamic State. Again, recently the newspapers reported that our forces in Afghanistan now have the authority to target the Islamic State there as well. And, of course, there s been a very strong effort on the diplomatic front led by Secretary of State Kerry to try to address the underlying causes of the Syrian civil war and to focus other nations attention and operations against the Islamic State. And there s been a new focus on challenging the underlying narrative of the Islamic State. This is absolutely critical and something that, not only the United States, but all the players who should be focusing their efforts against the Islamic State, need to do a much better job on. Back in the 90s, when I was working on the National Security Council staff on U.S. policy to combat the threat from al-qaeda, we concluded that al-qaeda s center of gravity at the time the core element that allows an organization to accomplish its strategic goals was its money. The epicenter of the money problem at the time was in Saudi Arabia. Eventually, after they were attacked by al-qaeda, the Saudi government recognized this and over the years has addressed the problem quite successfully. Since this change in policy, Saudi Arabia has been one of our great allies in going after al-qaeda s money supply and a great intelligence partner of the United States as well. 3

4 Middle East Policy, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Spring 2016 Today the growing threat is from the Islamic State, and its center of gravity is its ideological and religious narrative. Its ideology makes it deeply attractive to a small percentage but large number of people across the globe. The narrative is the core driver of the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq. The narrative is advanced as long as their target audience sees them as winning in the fight against its enemies. The narrative was laid out openly and quite clearly when Baghdadi spoke from the pulpit and declared the caliphate. And it s a narrative that resonates most often with those who have been taught from childhood by teachers espousing the Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam long espoused by Saudi Arabia. So it s much more difficult to imagine Saudi Arabia turning against the Islamic State s center of gravity in the same way that it previously turned against al-qaeda s center of gravity. What s the likely outcome, given all of this? Even if we are able to avoid a comprehensive, region-wide sectarian war, the likely forecast for our efforts to combat the threat from the Islamic State is for a long slog. This is going to be years, perhaps decades, of work. We should not in any way expect this to be over soon. That s just not how these wars tend to work. An Israeli analyst said to me years ago, just as the Arab Spring had begun, What we re seeing is finally, at long last, the end of World War I in this region. I think that there s a lot of truth to that. It portends the long effort in front of us to really understand and deal with all the tremors that will come out of this earthquake. Let s talk very briefly about just the lessons we should learn from this. First, regarding the methods by which we fight the Islamic State, al-qaeda and similar types of terrorist adversaries, the administration is fundamentally correct to focus on indirect rather than direct action as its primary line of military operations. Direct action is vitally important; air campaigns, targeted strikes against high-value individuals, and precision raids must be done. You have to be able to finish off important personnel and nodes of networks, unilaterally and as part of a wider campaign. But direct action, in my experience, is almost never the decisive line of operation in a counterterrorism campaign. Much more likely to be decisive is indirect action, working by, with and through others people on the ground, who live in this area. If they take on the fight, then we have a far greater possibility of winning over a long period of time and eventually achieving our counterterrorism goals. If we are doing the fighting, we re much less likely to do so. And by the way, we ve had tremendous success, even within the last 20 years, in achieving our counterterrorism goals through this approach. Colombia is a huge success with this approach. The Philippines are a huge success with this approach. Somalia has even been a qualified success thus far, despite all its problems. If you look back to the predictions made in 2006 about what we were going to see out of al-shabaab, virtually none of them came true. That s because of very good work by the African Union, supported by the United States, to fight that counterterrorism campaign, complemented by a relatively small number of U.S. direct actions. If indirect action is the preferred line of operations, what are the implications for U.S. policy? First, indirect action requires a timeframe that is much longer than we are used to dealing with in the United States. Again, these are generational efforts. Secondly, when you re thinking about indirect action, it is critical to go in earlier and lighter than it is to go in later and bigger. You have to start very early, and you have to go in very, very small. Any decision that you make to avoid those kinds of early decisions ends up increasing the likelihood of the worst possible scenario, where you have to go in big and late. Unfortunately, that s in many respects what we re doing now in Iraq and in Syria. If you re doing indirect action, you need to understand the human terrain you re working with. That s a military term; people in the State Department just call it understanding the country understanding diplomacy, understanding the tribes, understanding not just the government but all the 4

5 Symposium: The ISIS Threat to U.S. National Security different actors. This is a painful lesson that we learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are woefully short on that kind of expertise in the United States, but it s required if we re going to work through indirect action. It means that, when we build our partners, we should focus on small elite units rather than building in scale. There are not many examples in fact, I can t think of any where the United States itself has independently built a foreign army successfully in scale. We ve tried it a number of times and spent a lot of money doing it, but we can only help build a foreign military in scale when the host country itself is already committed to building in scale. We can spend a lot of money to help another military that is already built, and is of modest capability, to get better. But going from virtually nothing to a very large and capable modern army is extremely hard to do and near-impossible for a foreign army to do for them. We have, however, had a lot of success in building small elite units that can work with us directly on counterterrorism operations. Some of these are military, some are law enforcement, some are intelligence. That, we can do well, and that s where we need to focus our efforts. When I say building them, I m talking about the full spectrum of equipping, training, advising, assisting and accompanying them. Quite often we have done this the wrong way, by starting with the easiest but lowest valueadded element, merely equipping, and incrementally working up to the most advanced one, accompanying in current operations. In general, just throwing equipment out the door is a giant waste of U.S. taxpayers resources. But it becomes very useful if it is combined with the full spectrum of support that we can give. Instead of starting with the lowest value-added element and working our way up, we should start with the full spectrum of support and work down if absolutely necessary, given host country requirements. That s how you build elite foreign forces into capable counterterrorism efforts. But that requires policy shifts. Once we ve built those elite units, the question is, what kind of support do we provide to them? In general, we should be approaching this the same way we would approach questions about what kind of support we are providing our own forces in the field. We would never put forces in the field without providing them with command and control, communications, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, lift and logistics support, CASEVAC and MEDEVAC and even fire support when necessary. Quite often, we are reluctant to provide any of these kinds of support. This is all in the context, by the way, of what some people refer to as our combat forces not being involved. None of this involves the U.S. military going on target and taking people down. This is all indirect action in which we are supporting others. But there are different gradations, and they are critically important. The last thing I want to focus on is that working through indirect action requires the United States to expand the object of our policy beyond the narrow focus of the interests of the United States to the interests of our partners. If we re going to be working by, with and through our partners, it has to actually be a partnership. It can t be the United States telling someone else what to do. It has to be a joint decision about what it is we re going to do together. Sometimes that can be very difficult. My favorite example is in Colombia back in the 90s. On Capitol Hill, you heard all the time: the only thing we re interested in there is counternarcotics. The old joke in Colombia was this: They re walking through the jungle, someone fires on them, and they run behind a tree and get out their bullhorn and ask: Excuse me, can you please tell me if you are a terrorist, a narco or an insurgent? I have three different clips paid for with three different lines of authority from the U.S. Congress, and I have to know which one I put in my gun before I can return fire. It was a joke, but it had some truth to it back then; we were focused on only one stovepipe for what we could do. It was only with Plan Colombia, when we adopted a holistic plan for all 5

6 Middle East Policy, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Spring 2016 the problems narcotics, terrorism and insurgency that we got the framework for where we are today, with negotiations that hopefully will result in the end of the longest terrorist war in the western hemisphere. It s that kind of policy leap, to look at things holistically, that is absolutely required when we re doing indirect action. MARK N. KATZ, Professor of Government and Politics, George Mason University; Author, Leaving without Losing: The War on Terror after Iraq and Afghanistan I am going to talk about the Russia factor in all of this, the ISIS threat to U.S. national security, and our policy choices. I agree strongly with the previous speaker about everyone s opposing ISIS, but it s not being anyone s top priority. I think that also holds true for Russia. Ironically, almost a century ago we had a similar situation in 1917, 18, 19, when virtually everyone opposed the Bolsheviks in Russia. Unfortunately, with some 22-odd Russian opposition groups, and numerous external powers involved in the Russian civil war, no one seemed to focus on the Bolsheviks. It was not the top priority. We all know what happened after that: one by one, the Bolsheviks were able to get rid of all of their enemies. I very much fear that we may be in a similar situation now; I certainly hope not. In Vladimir Putin s speech to the UN General Assembly this past September, he called for all those opposed to ISIS to work together to defeat it in Syria. He identified the Assad regime as a key partner in this struggle and called upon other governments to work with it and Russia against the common threat. Many have pointed out since then that Moscow seems more interested in protecting the Assad regime than in defeating ISIS in Syria. Reports that most Russian attacks in Syria have been against non-isis opposition forces, and not ISIS itself, have bolstered this perception. Moscow, of course, claims that virtually all the Assad regime s opponents are terrorists and dismisses any criticism of its actions. Putin is clearly pursuing policies that compete with those of America and the West, in Syria as well as elsewhere. There does seem, though, to be a genuine effort on Putin s part to persuade Washington that Russia and the West actually do have common aims in Syria. Putin himself has been somewhat critical of Assad on occasion. He argues, though, that the Assad regime s ruling Syria is better for everyone than if ISIS or other jihadists come to rule it instead. This being the case, Russia and the West should work together to ensure that a less-bad option prevails in Syria. Where Moscow and Washington differ, of course, is on whether there is still a less-bad option than the Assad regime. Moscow insists that there is not, as there is no realistic alternative to the Assad regime other than the terrorists. Further, despite their public differences, Moscow may have persuaded itself, at least on occasion, that the Obama administration tacitly supports Russia s backing of Assad. I d just like to mention three instances. First, since the very beginning of the uprising in Syria in 2011, the Obama administration has exhibited an unwillingness to get very strongly involved there, and has cited the lack of UN Security Council approval for such intervention as one of the reasons. The Russian experience with the United States is that, if and when the United States decides to intervene anywhere, it doesn t wait for UN Security Council approval. It just goes ahead and intervenes. Thus, if the United States has not acted in Syria, it s because Washington doesn t want to and is hiding behind the Security Council. A second instance that may have helped persuade the Russians was the Obama administration s acceptance of Putin s proposal for resolving the chemical weapons crisis in After President Obama had threatened military retaliation if Assad crossed the red line of using chemical weapons against his own people but then called for congressional approval, Putin announced his plan: the United States and Russia should work together to take away Syria s chemical weapons 6

7 Symposium: The ISIS Threat to U.S. National Security thus leaving Assad with the ability to attack his people with conventional weapons. Essentially, the fact that the United States went along with this was seen by the Russians as another indication that Washington was willing to work with the Assad regime, that it was the lesser of two evils. Third, there was recently an article in the London Review of Books by Seymour Hersh suggesting that some of the Joint Defense Staff at the Pentagon actually accept Moscow s argument that Assad is less bad than ISIS and so sent intelligence, including via Russia, to help the Assad regime. Hersh claimed that this was unauthorized, but if it actually happened, Putin would not believe for a moment that it was unauthorized. He would believe that it was fully sanctioned by the White House. I m not saying that it did happen, but if it did, it explains a lot about how the Russians might view what actual American attitudes are as opposed to what their stated attitudes are. The real question is, if in fact the Obama administration actually seems to be showing signs of seeing the Assad regime as the lesser of two evils, why does it still call for Assad to step down? Moscow is confused about this. There may be different explanations. One possibility, you may be shocked to hear, is that American foreign policy may be incoherent. That s actually a possibility; I don t know. Another, from the Russian point of view, is that Washington thinks it can topple Assad, defeat or contain ISIS, and install a pro-western government in Syria. Instead of cooperating with Russia, it can just have it all in Syria eventually. Another possibility, from the Russian point of view, is that Washington understands that Assad is the least-bad option, but it wants Moscow to bear all the human, material and reputational costs of supporting him, while Washington avoids them but reaps the benefits of Russian actions. Yes, Russians do actually think this way. Obviously Russia and America, as well as some of America s other allies, actually do have a common interest in opposing ISIS. But Moscow and Washington have genuine differences about how to combat it. Putin is truly convinced that the Assad regime, if not Assad himself, is needed to combat ISIS; he believes there is nobody else in Syria that can do this effectively. The Obama administration seems convinced it is the brutality of the Assad regime that has helped give rise to ISIS. So long as this remains the case, and so long as each side believes its approach is superior, and that the logic of the situation will eventually force the other side to see things its way, Russian- American cooperation in combatting ISIS in Syria is unlikely to proceed very far. I want to say a few things also about Russian motives for acting in Syria. I suggested that there may be some degree of incoherence in American policy towards Syria. But there s a degree of incoherence in Russian policy as well; the Russians are, in fact, pursuing multiple aims and have multiple motives. For Putin in particular, Syria is actually a domestic Russian political issue. It has real importance for Vladimir Putin, who has staked a lot on support for an ally. It s better for Putin to be seen supporting Assad to the bitter end than knuckling under to America, withdrawing support for Assad, and seeing him fall. I think Putin sees the Arab Spring and the downfall of a number of authoritarian leaders as setting a bad precedent. In fact, early on in the Arab Spring, Russian statements were asserting that it was really a plot aimed at Russia at changing its regime, at least in the Muslim regions of Russia. It was a continuation of the color revolutions, which had absolutely no local causes but were engineered by the United States, at least as far as Vladimir Putin is concerned. This also has an impact, curiously enough, on Putin s relations with the authoritarian rulers of Central Asia. If they doubt Putin s support as shown by what he may or may not do in Syria unlike Assad, they have another choice. They can turn to China for support. So I think Putin sees supporting Assad as very important in terms of Russia s position in Central Asia, something they Russians definitely mean to keep. And, by the way, whatever they say about each other, Russia and China are in a competitive relationship. 7

8 Middle East Policy, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Spring 2016 It s also important to understand that, in terms of the Russian view of the Middle East as a whole, Putin has tended to look at Saudi Arabia in the same way that the United States has tended to look at Iran, at least in the past. That is, as being the source of a lot of problems. The Russian view of Saudi Arabia is that it is not a conservative monarchy, but an Islamic revolutionary regime. Even back in the 90s, you can find Russian official statements blaming jihadists supported by Saudi Arabia for the conflict in Chechnya. And after 9/11, Putin ceaselessly talked about how 15 of the 19 bombers were from Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is what they consider to be the source of evil. There was a little thaw in Saudi-Russian relations from about 2003 to 2011, but then the Arab Spring came along. Saudi Arabia was involved in opposing both Gadhafi in Libya and Assad in Syria, so this older view of Saudi Arabia came back at the same time that Moscow is trying to sell weapons and do business with Saudi Arabia. From our point of view, this is mind-boggling. When we don t like a country, like Iran, we simply stop doing business with it. When the Russians don t like someone, though, they usually continue to try doing business. Part of Moscow s aim is to persuade the United States of the true nature of Saudi Arabia, while at the same time trying to work with Riyadh as well. We saw this last year with the new monarch in Saudi Arabia, and especially his son, Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. When Prince Mohammad went to meet with Putin in June, by all accounts they really did hit it off. The prince promised $10 billion worth of investment, Saudi arms purchases, et cetera. They were also going to work together in Syria at the same time that Putin was working with the commander of the Iranian Quds Force, apparently, about the upcoming Russian intervention in Syria. When the prince met with Putin again this past October, obviously, the mood was a bit different. According to one very informed account, the prince was complaining: Why are you working with the Iranians against us in Syria? Putin s response was, if you really want to contain the Iranians, you ve got to work with Moscow. That s what s going to do it. What they re also doing, then, is trying to work with Iran in Syria and with Assad, while at the same time engaging the major Sunni powers as well. The intervention that Russia launched this past fall was very dramatic. One thing we can be certain of is that, while they have succeeded in keeping the Assad regime alive and possibly even regaining a certain amount of territory, Russian air intervention alone is not going to enable the Assad regime to defeat its various opponents. That s something they can t do. Putin has indicated that he doesn t want to send ground forces, although Russian officials occasionally talk about volunteers going. But even if they do this, it s clear they re not going to win militarily. Moscow has launched a diplomatic campaign aimed at resolving the Syrian conflict. But, since the Russians are supporting the Assad regime very strongly, it s not clear just how serious this diplomatic effort actually is. Despite the drama of what Putin did and his seeming success, as in Ukraine which seemed quite successful at first over time, it doesn t seem all that successful. I think we re seeing the same thing in Syria. There has been one needless cost that they have suffered, and that is the deterioration of Russian relations with Turkey. To me, this was really amazing; good relations with Turkey had been one of Putin s great successes. They had been doing $30 billion of business a year recently. I think one year it was even $40 billion. Putin was encouraging Erdogan in his anti-western stance; they seemed to be standing together against the West. But if Putin had really valued maintaining good relations with Turkey, he wouldn t have been flying his aircraft so near that border but of course he did. Whether or not it was a good idea for Turkey to shoot down the Russian aircraft, you can argue. Putin didn t have to play it up the way he did; he could have played down the incident. But he decided that Turkey was the new enemy, and now he s cut off much of the bilateral trade and 8

9 Symposium: The ISIS Threat to U.S. National Security pushed Turkey back toward the West. Is this what he really wanted to do? Is this part of a great master plan? I don t think so. What does Russia s involvement mean for the United States? Obviously, it does limit what Washington can do. Certainly, Putin is focused on the Libyan example; the Security Council resolution in 2011, authorizing a no-fly zone, led to intervention. He s determined that this is not going to take place in Syria. But, as Putin knows, it doesn t matter if you don t have a Security Council resolution; the United States somestimes intervenes without one. I think Putin very definitely wants to have a say, to have a role in Syria, to be part of the outcome. The problem, however, is that we don t live in the Cold War anymore, when Soviet-American competition overlaid everything else. Every other conflict in the world had a Soviet-American dimension, and the United States and the USSR were strong enough to restrain their allies to some degree. I think even if we have a Russian-American agreement on Syria, it s not clear that we will actually have a settlement to the Syrian conflict. The main external actors seem to be Iran, on one side, and Saudi Arabia and certain other Gulf states as well as Turkey, on the other. The real task is to find some kind of reconciliation between the Sunni and the Shia powers. Otherwise we will be headed for the 30 Years War that someone referred to or maybe even a Hundred Years War. I think the Russia factor obviously complicates American decision making, but the Obama administration s policy has frustrated the Putin administration. On any given day, Moscow is prepared to think of the Obama administration as weak and not knowing what it is doing. On the other hand, at least twice a week they seem to think that he s an incredibly Machiavellian guy who has tricked Moscow, and that the Russians are the ones who are paying the costs in Syria and not the United States. Putin is obviously a very difficult guy, with highly nationalist, highly combative policies. On the other hand, he also has a pragmatic dimension. He was vehemently opposed to U.S.-led intervention in Iraq but now has very good relations with the Baghdad government. Putin continues to excoriate us for what happened in Libya, but he has amazingly good relations with the internationally recognized Libyan government, as well as with some of the other forces in Libya. They re restoring their contacts. In terms of the Arab Spring, Putin opposed it. When Mohamed Morsi was president of Egypt, though, Putin had very good relations with him. They met, they did business together, Russia provided assistance. So there s this odd pragmatic strain to Russian policy. When they have to, they compromise. They accept the situation. They re not necessarily a permanent enemy that we can never deal with. CHARLES LISTER, Resident Fellow, Middle East Institute; Former Visiting Fellow, Brookings Doha Center; Former Analyst and Head, IHS Jane s Terrorism & Insurgency Centre I very much agree with what our first two speakers have already said today. I will focus on Syria and give a bit more of a live assessment of how things stand, and look back on lessons learned from what s taken place over the last few years. I m going to aim to be somewhat provocative. This is such an important subject that I don t think one should hold back when assessing the situation and what to do in the future. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS is probably feeling under more pressure than it has since the dramatic events in the summer of That is not to say they are losing, necessarily, but they are certainly more stretched than they have been in quite some time. Having said that, the progress towards this point has been painfully slow. It has also provided the organization with the opportunity to expand 9

10 Middle East Policy, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Spring 2016 and acquire the kind of strategic depth and other options that it has done since the summer of 2014 elsewhere around the world. Now we re looking at places like Libya and Egypt and Afghanistan as potential new hot points for ISIS, even if it starts to genuinely lose out in places like Syria and Iraq. I m very glad the first speaker talked about the idea of indirect action, working with allies on the ground, focusing on human terrain. But that lesson hasn t been well enough implemented in the Syrian case. There are many options on the table, but for one reason or another, many of them have been ignored. Very often, the easiest options, but not necessarily the best, have been chosen, and there have been fairly negative consequences to some of those decisions. The first element of this indirect-action approach in Syria and the best known has been the partnership with the Kurds, namely their Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wings, the YPG and the women s YPJ. American partnership with the PYD on the ground in Syria, fighting against ISIS, has been successful. The PYD has demonstrated a fairly remarkable amount of professionalism. Certainly they have taken back ground from ISIS. But I think those results should be placed within the context of the fact that the Kurds have received a fairly substantial amount of support from the United States, including close air support. The argument could be made that many other opposition forces in Syria could be just as capable, if not more so, of taking back territory from ISIS if they had that kind of support from the U.S. military. I have given the example before that in the very first weeks of 2014, the mainstream opposition in northern Syria took back four-and-a-half provinces from ISIS in six weeks. The Kurds, with U.S. air support, have taken back roughly two-thirds of a combined province and over two provinces in more than a year. So we are looking at progress, but I think it s been painfully slow. We could be doing a lot better with more partners. The PYD is a complicated movement. It is affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Worker s Party (PKK). Many of its senior commanders don t have public faces they don t have Twitter accounts, they don t conduct media interviews but they identify themselves not as the PYD, but as the PKK. The PYD and its armed wings have begun introducing a new educational curriculum in northeastern Syria that abides by the PKK s socialist kind of ideology, which many Arab tribes are extremely unhappy with. Kurdish is now being taught to children in many parts of the northeast, and Arab tribesmen living there are being encouraged to allow their children to learn Kurdish. All of this is ruffling feathers under the surface and taking us in a very bad direction, although it may take some time to show. This speaks to the fact that the broader conventional opposition in Syria is deeply hostile to the PYD. The fact that the U.S. government has partnered so closely with it has generated, rightly or wrongly, a perception that Western policy is disconnected from the realities on the ground. And perhaps Western policy is not supportive of the idea of a unitary Syrian state in the future, due to allegations of what the PYD may or may not want for their own future in Syria because of their links to the PKK. The PYD also has serious geographical limitations, and they realize it. They have openly said they cannot go beyond a certain point in the fight against ISIS; they ll be stepping into Arab territory, and that s not going to get them anywhere. So the U.S. partnership and the use of the PYD as its principal partner in fighting against ISIS in Syria is approaching its limit right now. In that sense, the establishment of what has been called the Syrian Democratic Forces essentially a broad coalition heavily dominated still by the PYD but which has incorporated Syrian Christians and some other local tribal forces predominately represented by northeastern Sunni tribes is a move in the right direction, but it s not nearly enough to convince the broader opposition that the PYD is a legitimate actor within the Syrian context. However, it s also not necessarily enough, at least in my assessment, to actually take those additional steps into Arab territory and take back territory from ISIS. 10

11 Symposium: The ISIS Threat to U.S. National Security In terms of fighting ISIS, when we re talking about centers of gravity, there are two: their momentum and their financing. To counter ISIS, we re not only looking to blow up cash or target oil fields. That s not going to degrade or destroy ISIS. The best way of attacking their financing is to take back the territory. Another obsession in the media over the last 18 months has been that oil is the dominant source of ISIS s income. But most serious studies of this subject have come to the conclusion that the control of territory taxation as well as extortion from people and businesses and a variety of other economic sectors is the primary source of income for ISIS. The only way of defeating them is to take back territory. For that very reason, indirect action and working with a broader scope of local allies is really the only way forward. And I don t think we re there yet. Moving beyond the PYD, probably the next-best example of an attempt at indirect action in Syria is the train-and-equip program. I think most people will admit this was a fairly dismal failure; there have even been acting and existing administration officials who have recently come out and basically admitted it themselves. The train-and-equip mission essentially aimed to partner with local forces in Syria who the U.S. military hoped would essentially drop their fight against the regime in favor of fighting against ISIS, with American support. The reason for the failure is that the very objective is totally disconnected from realities on the ground. As a result, recruitment for the train-and-equip program was miniscule. And many of the people recruited either weren t socially rooted into the dynamics on the ground, or were not the kinds of reliable personalities that the broader opposition were willing to trust when they were redeployed into Syria. I think it s very well-known what happened when the first two batches of train-and-equip-troops went in. This was an unfortunate example of minimalist or overly risk-averse thinking about how to team up with local forces on the ground, and who to team up with. Of course, there s been a variety of, unfortunately, amusing and ironic stories about how the first batch, for example, was sent back into Syria during the first week of Ramadan. The commander of this first batch immediately put in a request for a bunch of his fighters to be sent back to their families for two weeks of leave. And it was granted. So as soon as they went into the country, they all went home. Many of them traveled almost 100 miles inside Syria into deeply hostile territory, sometimes into regime-held areas, to go and be with their families for two weeks. Then, by the time they went up north, all of the enemies of U.S. policy, namely al-qaeda, had figured everything out. They knew where the bases were and who the local connections were, and as soon as they teamed up two weeks later, they were attacked. So there s a real shortcoming in strategic thinking. Despite the fact that we recognize this as the right way forward, we haven t gone about it in the right way. The third-best example here is what I call the CIA s vet and equip program, which has been going on for a long time. It started very small and has since become larger over the last two-and-ahalf years, led by the CIA, often working with regional countries, which is an inherent advantage. It does help root you in the political dynamics and establish a better relationship of trust with other opposition forces. This effort has established support relationships with at least 40 separate armed groups in northern and southern Syria. Only two of them have been attacked and defeated by hostile al-qaeda forces. But 38-plus continue to fight to this day, often in areas dominated by hostile al-qaeda forces. They have retained a heavy footprint within local dynamics. Of course, this is fighting against the regime and not ISIS, but it has shown, I think, that it is possible to establish relationships with local allies, to support them with regional allies, and buttress them into a position of influence within their local area that the train-and-equip program never even got close to. It s also a nationally focused program. It hasn t focused just on the north or just on the south or just on Damascus. It is nationwide. For obvious reasons, not a great deal of information is re- 11

12 Middle East Policy, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Spring 2016 leased from the source, but this program deserves more praise than it has necessarily received. Of course, one big criticism of this program has been that some of these forces have at times cooperated with al-qaeda s affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-nusra. It s very easy for us, thousands of miles away, to say, therefore you re a terrorist. But, speaking as someone who s spent a lot of time with these groups and has gotten to know their realities, I can say they re fighting for their lives every single minute of the day. They still have family in Syria who are being bombed, who are being attacked, who are being shelled by the regime, who are being attacked by Hezbollah, and who are now facing Russian airstrikes. Unfortunately, one actor out of dozens, if not hundreds, on the ground, is an al-qaeda affiliate. My personal experience in knowing these groups is that their cooperation with them has absolutely no connection to their ideological leanings at all. It s simply a reflection of their desperation. I think what s to be lauded is that the CIA program hasn t seen this as a reason to cut off certain organizations. The establishment of personal relationships between vetters and the guys on the ground has meant that the trust is genuine, that because they cooperate with someone we don t like, it doesn t mean they are one and the same. I think ISIS is feeling the pressure, but there is a very long way to go. In Syria, ISIS has demonstrated very recently the capacity to launch large-scale offensives. They ve captured a huge amount of weaponry in eastern Deir ez-zor province on the Iraqi border, which will almost certainly keep them fighting for a long time to come. They ve previously captured huge weapons stores from the Iraqi government, from opposition forces in Syria or from the Syrian regime and then several weeks later launched a major offensive somewhere else. It s fairly likely that we ll see, in the weeks to come in northern Aleppo, a real choke point for the opposition. It also happens to be a very complex battle theater right now, with Russian airstrikes, regime airstrikes, the occasional American airstrikes, opposition forces, Kurds, ISIS, et cetera. And I expect ISIS to look to exploit that. Where to go from here? I spoke about attacking ISIS financing by taking back territory. That involves a far broader teaming up with local allies on the ground and a much less risk-averse assessment of who they are. One of two ways forward now is to blunt their momentum. This is very much linked to the fight against ISIS financing, neutralizing their capacity to fight on multiple fronts at once, which has been their biggest strength over the last two years or so. This means bringing the fight to ISIS on multiple fronts. It doesn t mean focusing all your resources on Ramadi and then thinking about Mosul and Raqqa and elsewhere later. It means fighting on all of those fronts. ISIS has demonstrated an ability to redeploy forces rapidly from front to front in order to defend or attack. It s only been able to exploit that capability because we have an Iraq-first strategy. Later we started to develop somewhat of a Syria strategy, but they re not in sync. There hasn t been an anti-isis fight on multiple fronts coordinated in the way that I would suggest that we need to develop now. On a broader point, our allies don t have to look exactly like us or talk like us. I hate to say it, but I hear from Syrians all the time: You went to such-and-such a group because they wear Oakley sunglasses or they wear baseball caps. You went to them because they talk about democracy, democracy, democracy. But guess what? They don t actually mean it. There are many people in Syria who, I know for a fact, could be excellent American allies but don t speak or look like us. This is not always based on religion; very often it s cultural or traditional. I will briefly talk about the effects of the Russian intervention, which have been fairly transformative. In four months of Russian airstrikes in Syria, at least a quarter of a million people have been displaced from their homes. IDP camps in northern Syria are overflowing this winter. If we think the refugee flows into Europe were bad in 2015, wait until we see what happens in 12