It has been just over a month since President Obama, in a primetime speech on the eve of September 11th, declared that the United States would work to “degrade and destroy” the extremist group known as ISIS or ISIL. Since then, the US military has conducted, in concert with our allies, well over 300 airstrikes on ISIS infrastructure, vehicles, and militants. Despite the serious amount of ordnance being dropped on ISIS, there has been a limited effect on the battlefield lines. ISIS continues to threaten the security of Baghdad, while their operations in Syria have only expanded, most notably in the Kobane front. Additionally, they continue to make gains in Anbar province. After the excellent piece in the New York Times earlier this week on the leftover chemical weapons from the Saddam Hussein regime, there are now concerns that ISIS has seized old Iraqi chemical shells containing sarin and mustard gas. As before, there continues to be worries that foreign fighters will return to their Western countries of origin and commit attacks. With so many fears, legitimate or otherwise, flying around from newspapers, pundits, bloggers, and the like, the following may seem like a relatively semantic argument, but we need to collectively rationalize that ISIS is not a terrorist group. They are an insurgency, and any campaign that treats them like a terrorist group will likely be an ineffective one. Just because the phrase “counterinsurgency” is a dirty word in DC does not mean that we must avoid the reality that ISIS controls wide swaths of territory, governs that territory in brutal fashion, and engages its enemies in relatively organized campaigns. If it looks like an insurgency, acts like an insurgency, and fights like an insurgency, then it’s probably an insurgency.
As I wrote in a post a month ago following Obama’s speech on the new policy, “airstrikes alone might not be enough to destroy ISIS. If Obama wants to degrade ISIS’s standing, airstrikes and local help might be plenty, but it is hard to believe that it would be enough force to fully destroy ISIS”. Although American involvement has likely limited ISIS’s strength, it has had a limited effect on the lines of control in Iraq and Syria. Air power can do massive damage to an enemy, but US history is full of examples in which air strikes were unable to defeat an adversary, most notably in the case of Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam. We know that bombs alone won’t do the job.
This is not to argue that we need to immediately add the proverbial “boots on the ground” and begin moving US troops to the front lines. But there needs to be a realization that this is an insurgency. Just because counterinsurgency doctrine has lost its salience in DC doesn't mean that we need to avoid the word “insurgency” in discussion of ISIS. Is the concern that by calling them as such, we would legitimize their aims and means? We explicitly fought against insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq in previous years, so this can’t be the case. Is this a legal maneuver, as Obama was able to begin the strikes under the 2001 AUMF that only allowed action against al-Qaeda and its affiliates? Maybe it is time that we get a different authorizing law, one that accurately reflects 2014 and not 2001.
As long as we continue to view the problem in terms that don’t fit it, it is unlikely that we will see success. Calling ISIS an insurgency doesn’t mean that the US needs to immediately embark on a long counterinsurgency campaign, but it does at least accurately reflect the reality on the ground.
Thoughts?
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