This book is an absolute must read for anyone wanting to know what the mess in Iraq and Syria is all about. Published in 2016, it gives a birds eye view and an insight into the reasons for the unholy mess that led to the creation of the ISIS.
The author David Kilcullen had the benefit of a ringside view of events as they unfolded as he served as an intelligence officer with the Bush administration in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa and Southeast Asia and further with the Obama administration, in many of the same places as an adviser and consultant to the U.S. Government.
As a Lt Col in Australian Army in September 2004, the Americans had put in a formal request for the author who penned the 'Disaggregation theory' - a theory put forth by Kilcullen to combat the global threat of Al Quaeda- to join the team writing strategic assessments for the Pentagon.
Australia initially offered a general instead, while the Americans politely reiterated their request for the guy who had written the Disaggregation paper.
The strategy of Disaggregation sought to dismantle, or break up, the transnational links that allowed Al Quaeda's Jihad to function as a global entity- a theory which has now been laid to rest post the rise of ISIS.
2014 - called the Blood year by Kilcullen saw numerous events which can now be viewed as having changed the global landscape irretrievably.
In the summer of 2014, in less than 100 days after ISIS launched its blitzkrieg in Iraq, Libya’s government collapsed, civil war engulfed Yemen, a sometime small-town Iraqi preacher named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself caliph, the latest Israel–Palestine peace initiative failed in a welter of violence that left more than 2,200 people (mostly Palestinian civilians) dead, and the United States and its allies, including the United Kingdom and Australia, sent troops and planes back to Iraq.
Russia reignited Cold War tensions by formally annexing Crimea, armed and sponsored Ukrainian rebels. Iran continued its push to become a nuclear threshold power, supported Assad in Syria, and yet became a de facto ally of the United States in Iraq.
The 'Global war on terror' says Kilcullen started unravelling the day George Bush took his decidedly unreasonable decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Invasion of Iraq went more or less as planned; but it was the post conflict period that was not well thought out by Bush and Co.
Rumsfeld kept the force that invaded Iraq just over 200,000—sufficient to defeat Iraq’s regular military, but criminally inadequate to contain the chaos after the fall of Saddam, or counter the escalating insurgency once the lid came off his regime. After Saddam fell, Rumsfeld oversaw the disastrous de-Ba’athification edict and the disbanding of the Iraqi Army, two critical early missteps that put 400,000 fighting men—along with middle-class Iraqis out on the street with no future, homicidally intense grievances and all their weapons.
Kilcullen has likened President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq to Hitler’s invasion of Russia. In invading Iraq with the job still unfinished in Afghanistan, President Bush made precisely the same strategic error as Hitler did in invading the Soviet.
In December 2001, with the Battle of Tora Bora still raging on the Afghan–Pakistani border, US began transferring assets from Afghanistan, rebalancing for a future invasion of Iraq. The job was far from finished in Afghanistan: Bin Laden’s location was still unknown, and the effort to stand up a stable government to guard the country against a Taliban return had barely begun.
The Iraqi military was seen as so weak, the invasion was expected to be a pushover, and the lightning march to Baghdad in March–April 2003, along with the spectacular rout of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, seemed to confirm this. Then things fell apart.
From March 2004 onward there was not one insurgency in Iraq, but at least six. On the Shia side were communitarian militias, Iranian proxies, and the Sadrists of the Mahdi Army. On the Sunni side were jihadists like Zarqawi of Al Quaeda of Iraq (AQI), secular Sunni nationalists, who rejected the transformation of Iraq into what they saw as an Iranian satellite, and former regime elements.
Truly tragic was the sectarian violence that spiked post Saddams disposal.
Shi’a groups operated mainly defensively, protecting their communities against jihadists and Sunni nationalists, but this didn’t stop them kidnapping, torturing and killing Sunni civilians when they could.
Whereas for Sunni groups by provoking the Shi’a, they hoped to bring such heavy retaliatory violence down on the Sunni community that they would be backed into a corner, where groups like AQI would be all that stood between Sunnis and the Shi’a death squads, giving people no choice but to support such groups whatever they thought of its ideology.
So AQI went out of their way to provoke the most horrific violence against their own people. For example, fighters of AQI would kidnap young boys, torture them to death and dump the bodies—eyes gouged out, ears, little limbs and genitals hacked off, cigarette and blowtorch burns all over them or the tops of their heads sliced open and electric drills thrust into their brains—back on the street in front of their houses. This is a straight-up description given by the author of what the AQI did to the twelve-year-old brother of a translator who worked with him in Baghdad.
The goal was to trigger outrage and in retaliation some would get killed and the cycle of violence became self-sustaining.
Their goal was to provoke a sectarian conflict that would force Sunnis to close ranks in an AQI-led proto-state—which, by October 2006, they were already calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq.
To be fair to Bush, the violence appalled him and he tried to make amends. In November 2006 President Bush pushed Vice President Cheney aside and took direct charge of the war himself, appointing General Petraeus to command in Iraq. He then launched the Surge—a wholehearted attempt to apply Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, along with more troops and a larger civilian effort on the ground to achieve greater political leverage and force an end to the conflict. This escalation of involvement was intended to protect the population, break AQI’s hold of fear over the Sunni community, stop the cycle of sectarian violence, force the Iraqi government to be more inclusive and less sectarian, and reduce civilian casualties.
By the time Obama took over in 2009 things had changed: AQI had been virtually destroyed, violence was down dramatically. For instance in July 2007 (the first full month all Surge forces were in place) 2,693 civilians died; by January 2009 the figure was down to 372, an 86 per cent reduction.
This created the essential breathing space for Iraq’s self-serving politicians to resolve their differences, but they didn’t use that space to do so. Ultimately it was the presence of international troops, money and advisers that compelled Baghdad to act more inclusively.
President Obama was far less engaged than his predecessor had been—the phone calls to Maliki , the Iraqi PM and videoconferences with the force commander and ambassador ceased abruptly.
Obama, like most new American presidents, was putting domestic issues ahead of foreign policy.
He was the opposite of President Bush, which of course was quite appropriate, since that’s exactly what he’d been elected to be. But President Obama’s aloofness let loose Prime Minister Maliki adrift, freeing him to pursue his personal agenda.
In fact one may even see Maliki to be largely responsible for the mess that is Iraq today.
Instead of working to unify and create and inclusive government, Maliki played his sectarian card to the hilt driving more and more Sunni's to the arms of the ISIS.
Maliki wasted no time after U.S. forces left in 2011: within days Maliki issued an arrest warrant against his Sunni vice president, and targeted other Sunni ministers, provoking protests by Sunnis that soon spiraled out of control.
Maliki was bafflingly short sighted in his approach. He was targeting moderate Sunni politicians: those who had rejected the insurgency, chosen to participate in the political process and were peacefully pursuing their interests through Iraq’s institutions. Likewise, he was harassing precisely those tribal leaders who’d turned against AQI and were merely seeking to protect their communities, rather than (like the Ba’athists) to reverse the outcome of 2003 or (like the jihadists) to drown the world in blood.
Maliki’s actions convinced many Sunnis of something AQI -which later metamorphosed into ISIS- had been unable to persuade them of in 2006: that peaceful politics would never work, that armed struggle was the only route to survival.
One more angle that led to the creation of ISIS was the role of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
When an uprising began against his brutal regime in Syria, Assad began to portray the resistance as composed entirely of jihadists, and himself as the lesser of two evils. Assad released jihadist prisoners from regime prisons at the start of the conflict and did little to target ISI, letting it gain control of contested areas and carve out a safe haven in Raqqa province.
For its part, ISI avoided confronting the regime, and a de facto truce emerged between the two, which lasted until late 2013.
In Syria too Obama failed to act when the violence went out of control and where President Bush was reckless, President Obama seemed feckless.
In January 2014, ISIS surged across the border from syria and launched an offensive that drove the government out of Fallujah, and Tikrit. ISIS was acting more like a conventional army than a guerrilla organization: instead of operating in small, clandestine cells, in plain clothes, by night, with civilian vehicles and light weapons, ISIS was running columns comprising dozens of technicals, trucks, artillery pieces, and captured armored vehicles.
It was moving openly, in large groups, by day, in uniform, fielding heavy weapons (mortars, rockets and heavy machine guns). Its tactics combined urban terrorism and clandestine reconnaissance with mobile columns, snipers, roadside bombs, suicide attackers and terrorist cells, showing a level of sophistication well beyond that of AQI in 2006–07. And as it captured territory, it was acquiring tanks, heavy armored vehicles, artillery and vast amounts of funding, and picking up recruits. ISIS was thinking and fighting like a state: it had emerged from the shadows.
Today the Islamic State has become a brand, an after-the-fact justification, a psychological crutch that let so called Jihadis across the world to valorize their personal problems, self-dramatize as a martyr, and dignify their crimes and psychiatric struggles with a veneer of political purpose.
By giving such lone disillusioned losers a program of action and a rallying point, ISIS—as a brand, an idea, or a methodology—was having a global impact wholly separate from its organizational structure or agenda.
For the author, the rise of ISIS signalled a fully disaggregated terrorist movement, with an ideology insidiously attractive to alienated and damaged people likely to act on it, combined with omnipresent social media and communications tools that hadn’t even existed on 9/11, and enable such people to spread terrorist violence unconstrained by time, space, money or organizational infrastructure. Add in a do-it-yourself tactical toolkit of improvised weapons and random targets, and we are looking at an atomized, pervasive threat even harder to counter than the global insurgency it had replaced.
