Kaplan:
ISIS’ success, and the key to defeating it, lies in “out-administering” whoever came before.
The terrorist attacks in Paris, beyond their obvious horror, recalled to me the
words of the late Bernard Fall, a French-American historian and war
correspondent in Vietnam. In 1965, Fall wrote: “When a country is being
subverted it is not being outfought; it is being out-administered. Subversion
is literally administration with a minus sign in front.” ISIS has subverted
western Iraq and eastern Syria because it is out-administering the Baghdad and
Damascus regimes there. That is, ISIS has erected a competent bureaucratic
authority covering everything from schools to waste removal which, combined as
it is with repression, is secure and stable. And with that territorial
security, ISIS has apparently created a central dispatch point for planning
terrorist attacks abroad. Eventually, the end of ISIS can only come about when
some other force out-administers it.
ISIS is
the upshot of anarchy, in other words: a situation which obtains when a
populated territory is without administration, so that warrior bands prevent
anyone from feeling secure. The toppling of a secular Baathist regime in Iraq
in 2003 and a revolt against another secular Baathist regime in Syria in 2011
reduced those countries to dust and chaos. Baathist totalitarianism, followed
by such chaos, meant that only a movement equally extreme in its own right
could take root and flourish in the vacuum. Thus, whatever strategy we follow
against ISIS must have as its endgame a plan to out-administer it, or else
anarchy will simply return and ISIS along with it.
Should
we put boots on the ground?
Of
course, this would create an alternative administration to ISIS. But that means
nation-building and there is no public appetite in the United States, France,
or elsewhere in the West for that. I would distrust the public mood at the
current moment, since rage deceives itself regarding its long-term willingness to
sacrifice. A realistic war plan must be cognizant of what the public mood will
be after many more news cycles; it will be very different from this one. The
Bush administration’s critical mistake was to plan an anti-terror strategy—from
interrogating enemy combatants to invading countries—based essentially on the
public mood in the first days and weeks after 9/11.
Should
there be an international coalition?
Surely
that will exist, as it did for the invasion of Afghanistan, but not like for
the invasion of Iraq. And that will help. An international coalition does buy
you time: if many consequential countries are involved, the home front in each
of them will tend to be more patient and understanding when setbacks inevitably
occur. Still, the idea that an army of largely Christian soldiers from America
and Europe is going to permanently pacify toughened outlaw cities, brimming
with Islamic religiosity, is inherently problematic.
Should
we cooperate with the Assad regime and Iran?
Assad’s
tyranny is why the Syrian civil war is going on in the first place. As for
Iran, its occupation, direct or indirect, over eastern Syria and western Iraq
would create a more powerful regional hegemon, hostile to the West. Augmenting
Iranian power would be a high price to pay for subduing ISIS. On the other
hand, Iranian-backed Shia groups are not presently committing terrorist acts in
the West, even as Assad represents, with Russian help, the most powerful and
secular force in Syria at the moment. Given that foreign policy is a hierarchy
of needs, perhaps utilizing Assad and the mullahs (and the Russians, too)
against ISIS is demonstrably in the West's interests. The point is to
out-administer ISIS in eastern Syria and western Iraq through some kind of
occupation force that will not use its newly established sovereignty to plan
terror attacks on the West.
Why can’t
the Iraqi government administer these places?
If the
Iraqi government had the capacity for adequate administration, it would not
have lost places like Fallujah and Ramadi in the first place. Remember, ISIS
emerged in all its horror when it out-administered the Baghdad regime in Mosul.
What
about the Kurds?
They
are a partial solution. But owing to the mountainous geography of the ethnic
Kurdish homeland, Kurdistan does not sufficiently overlap with the sprawling
ISIS terrain in the desert.
What
about utilizing certain elements of all of the above? That is, what could
likely emerge is an international coalition with very modest numbers of boots
on the ground; continued military support for the Kurds; and back-channel
political deal with Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran and Moscow. The point is, all of
this will be hard, truly hard.
There
is also the Rumsfeld-Cheney approach—what the two men actually wanted to do in
Iraq, as opposed to what they ended up doing: topple Saddam and leave quickly,
period. The corollary to that might now be: bomb, bomb, bomb ISIS territory,
with a dramatic upsurge of drone strikes and intelligence operations to make a
place such as Raqqa unlivable even for ISIS itself. But you shouldn’t occupy
any territory in this game plan. That way, you don’t have to out-administer
anyone. I just don’t see how such a strategy ends, though, since somebody will
eventually have to fill the void. Thus, like their Iraq plan, it offers no
solution.
Ultimately,
a new order must emerge in the Levant from the anarchy unleashed by the
collapse of Baathist regimes, in which all intermediary layers of civil
society, between the dictator on top and the tribe and extended family at the
bottom, were eviscerated. The West has decreed that such a new order cannot
constitute the warriors of ISIS. So who and what will out-administer it?
