December 27, 2014
So is the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that the United States
launched in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks succeeding or failing? This would seem
to be a compelling question for the United States and the world — but it
receives surprisingly little attention. After 13 years of the GWOT, events this
year emphasize the big new development of militant and terror groups who now
carry out dramatic and gruesome attacks that kill or kidnap hundreds of victims
at a time; this is combined with the fact that some of these groups — such as
ISIS, Jabhat El-Nusra, Boko Haram and others — have taken control of
territories in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Mali, Yemen and elsewhere.
The attack that killed over 130 schoolchildren
in Pakistan earlier this week shows that this kind of danger lurks across a
very wide region of the world. Some of these takfiri militant groups control
territory, allowing them to train, mobilize, propagandize, and launch
operations across many continents, should they wish to do so.
The fight against them is now led primarily by
the United States military and its aerial attacks and associated ground
operations in northern Iraq and Syria primarily, alongside drone-launched
missile strikes to assassinate presumed terrorists in other countries. In the
past five months of aerial attacks, the balance sheet of success in containing,
rolling back and defeating ISIS has been mixed. ISIS has been pushed back from
some lands in northern Iraq that it grabbed in the late summer, but it
continues to gain control of small bits of land in other parts of Iraq and
Syria, and very small numbers of adherents in neighboring countries.
Earlier this week, some 8000 Kurdish forces
combined with continuous American airstrikes to successfully liberate lands
controlled by ISIS in Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria. This largest such
joint air-land operation of its kind indicated that if local ground troops from
Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran or other countries combine with devastating American,
Arab and other air power, ISIS and other such threats could be quickly rolled
back.
That is not happening very quickly or in very
many places, however, while these militant groups continue to expand their
operations. The most troubling aspect of this dynamic is that the underlying
condition that has allowed these violent groups to materialize and spread in
recent decades — corrupt, violent, unjust, elitist and inept governance systems
in most Arab countries — remains almost totally untouched and unchanged. The
forces that give birth to an ISIS or an Al-Qaeda will continue to generate the
sentiments of anger, alienation, humiliation and desperation among millions of
Arab citizens, which ultimately midwifed such extremist movements in
increasingly violent forms over the last half century.
The more the GWOT continues, the greater seems
to be the expansion and impact of the very terror groups it seeks to defeat,
with ISIS and Jabhat El-Nusra being the most recent examples. During the last
few months that I have spent in the United States, I have wondered, with
growing perplexity, why there is so little discussion here of why the GWOT
seems only to have sparked the continued birth and expansion of international
militant and terror groups across the Arab-African-Asian region.
The only conclusion I can draw comprises two
elements: These groups may be a menace to their local populations, but they do
not seem to directly threaten the United States or truly strategic American
interests; and, Washington seems to feel that it can handle the existing threat
through its current approach of providing air power and technical assistance to
local forces on the ground.
The important lesson would seem to be that
populations and government in the Arab-Asian-African region had better start
taking the threats from these militant groups much more seriously, because the
American-led international parties that now fight ISIS and Al-Qaeda seem
perfectly willing to keep attacking from the air, and containing or disrupting
these groups, without providing the ground troops needed to remove the threat
completely.
The really puzzling question that poses itself
at the end of this frightening year is simply, why have local Arab countries
themselves been so hesitant or unable to confront and fight ISIS and other such
takfiri groups? The answer would seem to be equally simple: The same government
systems and power structures that allowed ISIS and Al-Qaeda to come into being
cannot easily muster the legitimacy and technical capabilities needed to defeat
them, or to prevent other such violent groups from rising from their ashes.
With the United States and other foreign powers
apparently willing for now just to shoot from the air and essentially freeze
conditions on the ground, this augurs badly for some Arab countries that can
expect semi-permanent, constant warfare, huge refugee flows, and some national
disintegration for years to come.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in
the Daily Star. He was
founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for
Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On
Twitter: @ramikhouri.
Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global