Hardly a day goes by without news of the progress being made in the war on ISIS in Iraq and Syria. In recent months, American-backed forces have secured much of the Syrian-Turkish border, recaptured Ramadi, and stemmed the flow of fighters and supplies to the terror group’s capital cities of Raqqa and Mosul.
But momentum is not the same as winning, and the U.S. has fallen into a number of traps in Iraq and Syria — the most deadly of which has been set by al Qaeda.
Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, is more dangerous than ISIS — and while the two groups share the common goal of establishing a global caliphate, they are using different means to achieve it.
ISIS may be better at generating headlines, but its headline-grabbing seizures of key Iraqi and Syrian cities — not to mention its ruthless attacks on Western targets — have made it the focus of American military efforts in those countries.
Al Qaeda, meanwhile, has been quietly playing the long game. America’s focus elsewhere has played directly into the group’s hands, allowing the group to exploit its time out of the spotlight and set up a return to the global stage once ISIS is defeated.
While ISIS is ruthlessly presiding over the territory it controls, Jabhat al-Nusra is cultivating local relationships, building capabilities it intends to use against the U.S. in the future.
MORE: Swedish teen rescued from ISIS speaks
Jabhat al-Nusra is capable and effective, providing support to the opposition’s fight against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in ways that offset the regime’s disproportionate battlefield advantages.
Jabhat al-Nusra is leveraging its battlefield contributions to create relationships with civil society, civilian populations and other Syrian opposition groups. It then manipulates those relationships in order to achieve dominance. And it directly targets U.S.-backed groups, and defeats them when it can, in order to ensure that moderate forces do not find footing in a new Syria.
Jabhat al-Nusra will use the legitimacy gained by fighting alongside the opposition to transform Syrian society until it accepts al Qaeda. The group is creating structures of governance, like courts and social services, and using them to transform the religious views of Syrian opposition groups and populations.
The group already governs parts of Syria with a form of religious law akin to that used by ISIS; women in both ISIS-held Raqqa and opposition-held Idlib are forced to wear the burqa. Meanwhile, through military and religious training camps for children, it is indoctrinating a new generation of fighters to wage a future war against the West.
Jabhat al-Nusra is also more adaptive than ISIS. It intentionally does not control terrain; this makes it difficult to target, as it cannot be attacked directly without destroying the more moderate Syrian opposition groups with whom it is embedded. And it has safe-guarded itself against tribal uprisings by prioritizing local support.
Not only is the U.S. failing to recognize Jabhat al-Nusra as a threat, our policies in Syria are inadvertently driving support and recruitment for it.
American acquiescence to Russia’s air campaign in Syria allows Russia to harm viable opposition groups that are facing simultaneous pressure from Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. The U.S. is meanwhile supporting a diplomatic process that Russia is clearly manipulating in the regime’s favor. Russia is using the negotiations over a cessation of hostilities to drive the U.S. to accept the designation of mainstream Syrian opposition groups as “terrorists” so that Assad can continue to target them.
The U.S. still has potential allies against both Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. But the Russian targeting of the opposition will drive these groups into al Qaeda’s hands, not because they wish to do so but because they have nowhere else to turn for help.
OPINION: Russia is using Syria to run circles around the U.S.
U.S. policymakers must act immediately to preserve the opposition groups that will be critical to securing a future Syria that is not an Islamic Emirate for al Qaeda. In order to do that, we must abandon our fixation on ISIS and recognize Jabhat al-Nusra as the bigger threat.
Category: National security
Afghanistan war: Just what was the point?
It is worse in Afghanistan now than I ever could have imagined. And I was a pessimist.
Fatigue was always going to be the decider. Western fatigue with the horrors their troops saw, and with the violence inflicted daily on Afghans themselves. The fatigue of the financial cost, where a power station that was barely ever switched on cost Uncle Sam a third of a billion dollars.
And the other fatigue — the one felt by the Taliban — mostly distinguished by its absence; they felt only the tirelessness of their cause.
Sometimes the occasional jolt reminds the world that the war is still ongoing. The conflict, begun initially to oust the Taliban that sheltered al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., has cost the lives of more than 3,500 Coalition service members and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians.
This week, Afghan troops, after months of fury at poor supplies and low morale, fell back from two vital positions in the volatile Helmand province. It leaves Lashkar Gah and Sangin as the major strongholds the government still holds, and a sense of foreboding that the opium-rich southern region will eventually entirely belong to the Taliban.
The war also moved back into focus three weeks ago with the death of Wasil Ahmad. Wasil learned firearms and commanded a unit of anti-Taliban fighters briefly, before Taliban gunmen on a motorbike mowed him down as he bought food for his mother and siblings. Wasil was just 11 years old.
Before the Coalition came
Known as the “graveyard of empires,” Afghanistan has a reputation for humiliating would-be conquerors. Both the Soviets, in the 1980s, and the British, during the 19th century, were forced to beat bloody retreats from Afghanistan, deprived of what looked, on paper, to be easy victories.
Time has changed the definition of what people nowadays call an “empire,” but not this perception. The U.S. military liked to feel wise as they repeated the maxim that they had the “fancy watch, but the Taliban had the time.” In truth, the American watch ran out of batteries, leaving the Taliban owning both the aphorism and the clock.
The rise of the Taliban before 9/11 owed much to the country’s ethnic divides. In the civil war that followed the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, Pashtun forces swept in from the south, towards the capital Kabul, and pushed the Tajiks back to the north.
The U.S. special forces harnessed the losing side in that civil war, and other purchasable warlords, to oust the Taliban from Kabul. There they installed the smooth and charismatic Hamid Karzai as president, who battled through the country’s myriad complexities to bring it together. Bin Laden was on the run; so was the Taliban, some of them hiding in Pakistan. For a little while.
Time passed. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. The Taliban found its feet again. The U.S. began to get mired in Iraq. The insurgency picked up. The Afghan government started losing ground. By 2008, it was a full-on emergency and the U.S. realized — even from the liberal anti-war perch of President Barack Obama — that this was the “just war” that it must fight.
And then, the war ramped up
For about three years, there was intense focus. First came the surge. Up to 100,000 U.S. troops (as part of a NATO force) at one point, pressing into the darkest Taliban valleys. Holding ground — spending millions every month to maintain a presence in tiny dusty villages in faraway places like Kandahar to show the insurgency the U.S. had the resolve.
But it was never going to last. In fact, that was always an advertised part of the plan: the U.S. and NATO would hold the land for a few years — until they thought the Afghan troops were ready — and then they would pull out. The Taliban had to hope the Afghans wouldn’t be ready, and just wait. It seems they did.
Secondly, came the budgets: $110 billion spent in the largest reconstruction effort in U.S. history. Some new roads that made life in some towns viable again, but also buildings that always stood empty, and an injection of cash into Kabul so unrealistic, unprecedented and absurd that the cost of living became almost reckless.
At one point the World Bank suggested more than 90% of Afghanistan’s total budget was aid-dependent. (I got a very quick call from the U.S. Embassy telling me this wasn’t true — no alternative figure was offered). Housing for Afghans became more expensive — some rents have now dropped by almost half. From behind the concrete blast walls where foreigners mainly lived, a (small) can of black market Heineken at one point cost $10. America had no shortage of cash, just a shortage of viable ways to spend it, resulting in some daft projects and a brief pocket of total imbalance in the Afghan economy.
Thirdly came the leadership. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates fired the military commander of the NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan ISAF, David McKiernan, in 2009 and replaced him with Stanley McChrystal, a special forces veteran.
McChrystal’s bleak assessment of the war was damning enough to suggest the Green Beret knew the scope of the challenge. He had a plan — and it was leaked quickly enough to back the White House into a corner that involved a large commitment of resources. It involved talking to Afghans, and winning them over. Troops would get out and meet people. For a moment, it seemed to work.
Then the bizarre happened. Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano in Iceland erupted in 2010, scattering ash into the atmosphere and grounding aircraft. McChrystal and his team were among those delayed, along with a Rolling Stone reporter. They spoke their minds, found themselves in print, and McChrystal was fired. From that point, the war felt like it changed. Forever.
David Petraeus swept in that year as McChrystal’s successor — a career general, mindful that the clock was ticking on the surge. The campaign focused on the message and that clock. Petraeus was succeeded by another Iraq veteran, John Allen, whose role was about cleaning up. The surge had almost worked, but been interrupted, caught short, and now America was leaving.
Between January and May 2012, every day seemed to bring a new calamity to the U.S. military presence. From Qurans burned apparently in error; to the corpses of Taliban fighters urinated on by Marines who filmed themselves as they did it; to a massacre by an American soldier in a Kandahar village. Even the most footsure NATO spokesman seemed to lose faith.
So what was achieved?
Well, at one point, al Qaeda was said to be in its mere hundreds in Afghanistan — hiding away in the eastern hills. Bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan. A few thousand Afghans became absurdly rich on the U.S. presence. Far many more thousands (there is no real, reliable figure) died or were injured.
Women saw a brief moment when Western aid programs and ideals let them think about lives outside of the home, where they could flourish. (They still can think about that, but now risk more than ever brutal reprisals from conservatives). The West flooded the country with money and weapons to the point that it is now a land of warlords on steroids.
The Afghan army, briefly, swelled. But it could never hold the ground NATO did. NATO advisors would swear blind that you were wrong, that the ramshackle units you saw could defeat a hungry and angry local insurgency. But it became clear they were misinformed. That an inner malaise — corruption — would undo the Afghan National Security Forces, whose upkeep has cost the U.S. taxpayer well over $60 billion, and whose brave losses continue now at an unprecedented speed.
Two stories stick out of Afghans who are not where the West told them they would be. The first is Gulnaz, the woman who was raped, then jailed for adultery because her attacker was married, then told she would have to marry him. International pressure led to her release into a shelter for women, but three years later I found her living with her attacker, and married to him — the only way Afghanistan’s at times backwards world could find to reconcile the crime against her.
Second is Wahid. He commanded an Afghan army unit, fighting fiercely in Kunduz against the Taliban. They had little support, he alleged, even ammunition, and the dead bodies of their fallen comrades were left to rot in their besieged base. So he fled — dodging bullets in Iran, taking the boat to Greece, and enduring tear gas near Hungary. He is exactly the sort of Afghan the West promised a future to and needed to stay where he was — defending his country. We found him eating a muffin in a café in Munich, Germany.
Where are we now?
The dissent in the ranks of the Taliban has led to ISIS becoming a radical, brutal and attractive alternative to the country’s disenfranchised youth, for whom the old insurgency isn’t moving fast enough.
According to the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR — the U.S. government’s money watchdog there), the Taliban hold more territory now than at any time since 2001. There are about 10,000 U.S. troops left, who can hunt extremists, but not hold territory. And it seems neither can the Afghan army at times. It is losing fast in Helmand. It lost Kunduz temporarily in October. If you suggested either of these losses were remotely possible two years ago, most NATO advisors would accuse you of mild insanity.
In terms of Western goals — things are right back where they started: needing to keep Afghanistan free of extremists and a viable country for its people. Without that the result is thousands of refugees in Europe, and ISIS gets a new safe haven. What is left is a country where the West is discredited as unwilling to stay the course; where most fighters are meaner, better armed, and more chaotic than they were in 2001; and whose name causes opinion-formers in the West to try and change the subject.
It was dubbed the Just War, then the Forever War. Now many want it to be the Forgotten War.
But it is still a war, and the West owns a lot of it.
Government enlists tech giants to fight ISIS
Seeking to bolster its effort to counter ISIS messaging on social media, the Obama administration is assembling something of a high-tech dream team to battle the terrorist group online.
At a meeting conducted at the Justice Department on Wednesday, executives from Apple, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, MTV and Buzzfeed offered their input to top counter intelligence officials, according to an industry source familiar with the meeting.
Nick Rasmussen, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the group the administration is making strides in combating ISIS on social media, where the terrorist army has inspired potential lone wolf assailants to carry out attacks
“We’ve seen more aggressive takedowns across social media platforms, which is a really good thing,” Rasmussen was quoted as saying by the source at the gathering.
Apple’s participation in the meeting is notable, given the high-tech firm’s clash with the administration over the company’s use of encryption to shield customers’ data on its popular smart phones.
Representatives for the White House and the Department of Justice declined to say whether the standoff with Apple arose in Wednesday’s meeting.
An agenda of the session obtained by CNN showed nearly fifty technology firms and community groups participated, along with a cross-section of U.S. government agencies, including the Justice Department, the National Security Council and the State Department. The British Embassy was also included in the manifest.
The agenda showed sessions dedicated to briefing the technology companies on ISIS’s messaging strategy, and developing plans to counteract the terrorist propaganda with “counter-narratives and optimistic messaging.”
The administration has attempted to ramp up its counter-ISIS messaging in recent weeks. Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Los Angeles last week to meet with studio chiefs to “hear their perspectives and ideas of how to counter” ISIS narratives, according to a tweet.
In January, members of the administration traveled to Silicon Valley in an attempt to lobby against the use of popular social media platforms to recruit terrorists. Officials pointed to that session when, in early February, Twitter announced it was shutting down 125,000 ISIS-related accounts.
Egypt’s President links Russian crash, terror
Egypt’s President alluded to terrorism in the downing of a Russian passenger jet over Sinai last year, though he did not say directly that terrorists carried out an attack on it.
“Has the confrontation and terrorism ended? No, not yet. Whoever downed that plane, what did he want?” Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said in a speech at a conference. “Just to hit tourism? No. To hit relations. To hit relations with Russia, hit relations with Italy.”
State-run news site al-Ahram reported that this was the first time the Egyptian President has acknowledged terrorism could be the cause of the crash of Metrojet Flight 9268 on October 31 that killed all 224 people on board.
The Russian government has said that a bomb brought down the plane and has offered a reward of $50 million for information about those responsible.
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