John Allen, the retired marine general charged by Obama to coordinate the campaign against ISIS is a man confident of his facts. Fresh from Turkey, which had just agreed to enter the air campaign against the militants, he told the Aspen Security Forum that ISIS are losing.
Precisely. The larger strategic perspective. Where is it?
No sooner had Allen created this hostage to fortune, than the al Qaeda affiliated group al-Nusra claimed to have created a few of their own - two leaders and six members of Division 30, graduates of a train and equip programme run by the Department of Defence. Al-Nusra called on Division 30 to " return to the right path" urging its fighters to fight the regime of Bashar Assad in defence of their families.
Finding the right path in Syria and Iraq is proving elusive, particularly for a US president who is joined at the hip to the notion that he has pulled out of Bush's "dumb" war. The US may have left Iraq, but Iraq has yet to leave the US.
First, ISIS have endured their first year under bombardment. They have lost territory but "we've seen no meaningful degradation in their numbers," said a US defense official keen to douse Allen's optimism. The official put the group's strength at between 20,000 and 30,000, the same as last August when airstrikes began.
Second, what does victory look like ? An Iraq permanently divided into three, one of those portions in the firm grip of Iran? Assad in charge of a rump coastal Alawite statelet , with the rest of Syria in the hands of local militias? Does Washington even want Damascus to fall?
Without answers to these questions, bombs dropped from the coalition's aircraft are about as precision-guided as the ones the RAF dropped over Germany in the Second World War. Without a clear-sighted analysis of where ISIS came from, and an appreciation of when its fortunes waxed and when they waned , its defeat will never be certain. Crushed in Iraq, it will transfer its attention to Egypt, where a brutal military dictator is busy, with the full support of the US and EU, creating exactly the right conditions for ISIS to grow.
To explain, but not to justify, ISIS has its own logic. Its theologians and leaders are all persuasive, and adept at tailoring the medium to the message and the message to the audience. The seeds of ISIS's extreme sectarian theology germinated in a specific social incubator brought about by the collapse of Sunni leadership, Iran's opportunistic expansionism, and serial American misjudgment.
Two academics, Hasan Abu Hanieh, and Dr Mohammed Abu Rumman have gone some way to describing the incubator that nurtured ISIS. In their small book published by the Friedrich Ebert Shiftung in Germany, lie clues others have missed or downplayed. As the title suggests, The Islamic State Organisation, The Sunni Crisis and the Struggle of Global Jihadism charts the symbiotic relationship between the crisis of Sunni Arab politics and the mushrooming of a tiny Al Qaeda splinter group.
On one level its Hollywood : How a group of no more than 80 followers and their families at a camp in Herat, Afghanistan, established and run by a young Jordanian called Ahmad Fadhil al-Khalayleh who came from the city of Al- Zarqaa' , wound up 15 years later controlling an area the size of Britain. On another, its Chekhov - one misjudgment hides another.
Zarqawi, the Iraq-based jihadist, understood something Bin Laden, the internationalist, did not. Zarqawi got the true nature of identity politics in an Arab world undergoing a transformational regional revolution, where states were crumbling, and whose leaders no longer represented their people.
Zarqawi writes:
"I do believe that Daesh's momentum has been checked strategically, operationally, and, by in large, tactically. But it isn't just a military campaign. There's a counter-finance campaign, there's a counter-messaging campaign, there's a counter-foreign-fighters campaign, and then there's a humanitarian piece... It's very important that you have that larger strategic perspective when you consider whether we've had an effect."
Precisely. The larger strategic perspective. Where is it?
No sooner had Allen created this hostage to fortune, than the al Qaeda affiliated group al-Nusra claimed to have created a few of their own - two leaders and six members of Division 30, graduates of a train and equip programme run by the Department of Defence. Al-Nusra called on Division 30 to " return to the right path" urging its fighters to fight the regime of Bashar Assad in defence of their families.
Finding the right path in Syria and Iraq is proving elusive, particularly for a US president who is joined at the hip to the notion that he has pulled out of Bush's "dumb" war. The US may have left Iraq, but Iraq has yet to leave the US.
First, ISIS have endured their first year under bombardment. They have lost territory but "we've seen no meaningful degradation in their numbers," said a US defense official keen to douse Allen's optimism. The official put the group's strength at between 20,000 and 30,000, the same as last August when airstrikes began.
Second, what does victory look like ? An Iraq permanently divided into three, one of those portions in the firm grip of Iran? Assad in charge of a rump coastal Alawite statelet , with the rest of Syria in the hands of local militias? Does Washington even want Damascus to fall?
Without answers to these questions, bombs dropped from the coalition's aircraft are about as precision-guided as the ones the RAF dropped over Germany in the Second World War. Without a clear-sighted analysis of where ISIS came from, and an appreciation of when its fortunes waxed and when they waned , its defeat will never be certain. Crushed in Iraq, it will transfer its attention to Egypt, where a brutal military dictator is busy, with the full support of the US and EU, creating exactly the right conditions for ISIS to grow.
To explain, but not to justify, ISIS has its own logic. Its theologians and leaders are all persuasive, and adept at tailoring the medium to the message and the message to the audience. The seeds of ISIS's extreme sectarian theology germinated in a specific social incubator brought about by the collapse of Sunni leadership, Iran's opportunistic expansionism, and serial American misjudgment.
Two academics, Hasan Abu Hanieh, and Dr Mohammed Abu Rumman have gone some way to describing the incubator that nurtured ISIS. In their small book published by the Friedrich Ebert Shiftung in Germany, lie clues others have missed or downplayed. As the title suggests, The Islamic State Organisation, The Sunni Crisis and the Struggle of Global Jihadism charts the symbiotic relationship between the crisis of Sunni Arab politics and the mushrooming of a tiny Al Qaeda splinter group.
On one level its Hollywood : How a group of no more than 80 followers and their families at a camp in Herat, Afghanistan, established and run by a young Jordanian called Ahmad Fadhil al-Khalayleh who came from the city of Al- Zarqaa' , wound up 15 years later controlling an area the size of Britain. On another, its Chekhov - one misjudgment hides another.
Zarqawi, the Iraq-based jihadist, understood something Bin Laden, the internationalist, did not. Zarqawi got the true nature of identity politics in an Arab world undergoing a transformational regional revolution, where states were crumbling, and whose leaders no longer represented their people.
Zarqawi writes:
"Our fight with the Americans is a simple matter; the enemy is visible and its back is exposed, ignorant of the land and ignorant of the reality of the Mujahideen, because of the weakness of its intelligence informatio