western coalition strategy against Isis, as Edgar Wilson Nye observed about Wagner’s music, “is better than it sounds”. On the other hand, it doesn’t sound very good at the best of times, and the strategy will be much noisier in the coming days as French, American and British forces step up their bombing sorties against Isis positions in response to the atrocities in Paris.
Politicians’ anger in the face of the Paris attacks is totally understandable. So too is dignified public resolve to carry on and deny the terrorists a psychological victory. People always behave well immediately after such incidents, although the real test of resolve, liberality and social cohesion comes six months or a year later.
For now, the biggest ever terrorist attack in Europe has put the spotlight back on the anti-Isis strategy of western governments; particularly on the bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.
That campaign is better than it looks because it is having some military effect. It is facilitating a series of advances on the ground among Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, small groups of national opposition fighters and (in effect) Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces who have pushed Isis back to just over half the territory they occupied at the high watermark of their advances last year.
Isis put a great effort into capturing Kobani on the Turkish border, and failed. It lost Mosul Dam, Tikrit, Baji and Sinjar; and while its home base at Raqqa in Syria is being regularly attacked, the long-awaited offensive against its base at Mosul in Iraq is about to begin. Its command structure is under evident pressure and US drone strikes from Libya to Afghanistan are killing Isis commanders such as Ali Awni al-Harzi and Abu Nabil, and its communicators such as Mohammed Emwazi.
The bombing campaign has also helped destroy the flow of illegal oil on which Isis has been building its proto-state. It still makes about $1m a day from this oil, which renders it a rich terror organisation but a very poor state; one that claims jurisdiction over 8 million people. Coalition strategy has also armed the anti-Isis forces, somewhat patchily, but sufficiently enough to keep them in the field. A bombing strategy that took a long time to make a difference on the ground is now paying off as Isis is forced on to the defensive – which is precisely why it has now added to its traditional military campaign the element of outright international terror against European soft targets.
What has evidently failed in western military strategy is the training programme to build up an effective force among the “moderate opposition” to President Assad. The immediate problem has been that these groups were not so moderate, and not an effective opposition – they have been losing. Western programmes are fine when they train evolving forces, while not in the midst of an immediate war, and over a long period of time; they have tried and failed to rapidly train effective armies in Iraq, in Afghanistan and now on Jordanian territory to fight in Syria. Western military intervention in all these operations was intended to buy time for local forces to be trained to preserve order and security. In none of these three cases has it so far worked.
Most critically, the west has also failed up to build a cohesive political strategy to end the sectarian war that is tearing the region apart and is now spreading terror to the streets of Europe. This too is something for which military operations can only buy time.
Maybe the Paris attacks will act as a political tipping point. Maybe they will bring most Europeans closer to US policy to “degrade and destroy” Isis; maybe Russia will now make Isis its top target following the attack on the Metrojet airliner last month; maybe there will be some consensus over how the Assad regime might figure in a reworked Syrian state.
All these are possible, particularly as the Isis leadership – tactically clever but strategically foolish – is prepared to make war on everyone, everywhere, in their bid to create a new caliphate. And certainly, it is unlikely that Paris will be their last attack – so more outrage and defiant resolve will be seen in western countries over the coming months.
But even if this proves to be a tipping point, where does it leave the political and military strategy for western governments? In effect, they could choose a dangerous strategy to escape from the crisis, or a risk-averse strategy that will likely pull them further into it. The former accepts that there are two constellations of forces that could dominate the eventual ground campaign and take back territory from Isis.
One constellation is made up of Assad’s forces, Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces and Russian forces, possibly including Russian ground troops. Though an unsavoury prospect, the political outcome will be determined by those who eventually do the ground fighting: in this case it would be Shia-dominated.
The risk-averse alternative of continuing to support Kurdish forces cannot produce a coherent political strategy, since the Kurds will only fight for territory they want for a new, independent Kurdistan – which prevents the creation of a strategy for the country as a whole.The alternative constellation is some combination of Turkish, Saudi and Gulf state troops, entirely Sunni, who are not yet in any position to take it on. If western powers took significant risks and became directly involved, they might be able to make this work.
The only other alternative is that the Paris attacks might create a climate where western ground forces go back into the region, yet again. We are not there yet, but the stakes are getting ever higher, and the costs of risk-averse strategies ever greater.
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