A failed strategy against ISIL

David Kilcullen:

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Pentagon and White House spin to the contrary, ISIS terrorism shows no sign of diminishing after a year of Western intervention. On 26 June, an ISIS gunman massacred 38 people in Tunisia. The same day, ISIS bombers struck in Kuwait (killing 27) and Syria (killing 20). Five days later ISIS launched coordinated assaults on 21 Egyptian military posts in the Sinai Desert. Along with its ability to generate unprecedented numbers of foreign recruits—12 times as many as at the height of the Iraq War in 2006–08—Islamic State’s ability to inspire attacks like these illustrates its mastery of social media and electronic propaganda, and the effectiveness of its ‘leaderless resistance’ model of individual and small-team guerrilla-style terrorism.

But ISIS is far more than a terrorist group. Behind the front line of its offensives in Iraq and Syria, it has forged a governmental structure that administers 6 million people (a larger population than Singapore, Lebanon, Norway or New Zealand) and controls a territory covering one third of Iraq and roughly the same proportion of Syria. Its economy includes oil exports, sale of utilities like electricity and water, extortion of businesses and wealthy individuals, kidnapping, and the sale of antiquities. Along with its increasingly regular taxation system, this gives ISIS an annual revenue of more than US$600 million —small for a state, but (with the sole exception of the Colombian FARC’s drug revenues in the late 1990s) unprecedented for a terrorist group.
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There are good reasons to avoid calling ISIS a state: to deny it legitimacy, and enable prosecution of those who travel to join it. But treating it as a state for targeting purposes—destroying its governmental structures, its economy, its military, and its ability to control territory and population—should be at the heart of western strategy. Instead, the approach so far has relied on limited airstrikes (11 strike sorties per day, on average, across Iraq and Syria, since last August) against tactical targets, arming and training the Iraqi military (and a few Syrian rebels) under extraordinarily restrictive rules of engagement, and occasional Special Forces raids. This strategy is failing.

On 18 May, ISIS captured Ramadi—capital of Iraq’s largest, most heavily Sunni province, Anbar—routing western-trained Iraqi troops including the vaunted Golden Division. Only four coalition airstrikes were launched the day Ramadi fell, making no impression on an ISIS force including dozens of armoured vehicles, mortars and artillery, spearheaded by seven suicide trucks followed by a swarm of combat teams on foot and in vehicles. Within days ISIS had consolidated its control of Ramadi, captured the city of Palmyra in Syria, and seized a critical border crossing.
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There is a lack of seriousness in the effort.  There is no shortage of targets and a groups of A-10's could have halted ISIL's mechanized advance toward Ramadi.  But there was no sense of urgency in dealing with them and the opportunity was lost even after they allowed a victory parade through town.  Kilcullen is an expert on counter insurgency operations, but he also recognizes that to defeat ISIL combat persistent tactics will be necessary to destroy their infrastructure.  To date Obama has demonstrate the intelligence or the will for such an operation.