Who defends everything, defends nothing

The big international news of the day is the investigation into the crash of Germanwings flight 4U 9525 into the French Alps this Tuesday past. Current evidence from the voice recorder and the profile of the flight supports the idea that the co-pilot locked the pilot out and then deliberately plowed the plane into the mountainside.  It is a reflection of our times that there is a fair bit said about the co-pilot’s religion or lack of it, and we all know what religion it is they’re tiptoeing around.

We may never know why this guy murdered everyone on board, but that’s life sometimes.  We have a whole bunch of murderous buggers whose intent is clearly announced to us, and there should not be a lot of debate about what we need to do about that.  Certainly debate about “how”, but nobody who can be bothered to know what is going on can honestly suggest that there is any other (useful) solution to these Da’esh etc. Salafists than a bullet in the head apiece.

And yet what have we in Canada’s House of Commons? (Legislative branch of Canada’s govt’t in case you didn’t know) There we see members of the opposition parties splitting hairs about whether Canada has “UN authorization” to bomb Da’esh targets over the now-notional Iraq/Syria border.

The Prime Minister has mocked them pretty effectively (says I; and they say Harper doesn’t have a sense of humour) but the mendacious and clueless tripe being spewed by Mulcair (who’s smart enough to know better) and Trudeau (who, well, doesn’t appear to be) won’t cut much ice with the general public.  Most people see enough of what’s happening over there to know that something has to be done about it.

The idea that this seems to be moving toward is a (cursory) examination of why we would intervene here as opposed to any number of other places.  One comment I saw was about how it must be oil since people are constantly being slaughtered in Africa and we don’t get involved there.  Yes, we get some oil from the general region, but we will not roll in there and pump the place dry due to our military action.  If everything was “about oil” we wouldn’t have an embargo against Iran, and in any event we could get by without ME oil.  If we did, however, the same people bleating here would be braying that we’re extracting our “dirty” oil sands (and building pipelines for it) to replace the light, cleaner stuff our east coast refineries get from Saudi and Algeria. 

As for Africa, there is plenty of stuff we’d like from Africa, far rarer than oil.  Economic motivations are insufficient for Canada to commit armed force; that much we just won’t do.  Millions of people are slaughtered in Africa (by other Africans), but they aren’t proclaiming a world-wide empire and declaring war on us (Boko Haram’s declaration for IS aside) so no, we don’t have pressing interest in their insoluble problems.

One reason, sufficient in itself I’d say, is that we simply can’t help out everywhere, but that doesn’t mean we should sit idly by and do nothing.  Rwanda should be enough evidence to the chattering classes that having the UN’s approval for being somewhere is not equivalent with doing what needs to be done; the opposite is more likely as far as I’m concerned.

We could do much more for the Kurds et al than we are, and our troops would think it worth doing.  This won’t happen, but a Battlegroup such as we had in Kandahar would make a massive difference in stabilizing that area.  We’d lose some people, but soldiers are paid for those sorts of risks, and in this case it’s not a lost cause (as opposed to Afghanistan), at least as long as you circumscribe the mission appropriately.  More of our boots (and tracks) on the ground would make short work of any IS forces who tried to come at us (or got in our way) while the nastiest city fighting could be left to the indigenous troops; it’s their fight at the end of the day.  This provides worthwhile and much appreciated support while not putting our troops and equipment through a meat grinder like Mosul or Tikrit.

We could probably do other things too.  We could help the French (more than we already have) in the Sahel, we could sort out South Sudan (maybe) or, my own pet project; a change of regime in Zimbabwe.  Bad things are happening to one degree or another in all of these places and many more, but intervention in any of them is neither easily practical nor sufficiently critical to our National Interest (remember that, anyone?) to justify us being there. 

So, where’s the line for intervention?  What are the criteria?  This is an art, not a science, so it’s not easy to quantify these things; what’s worth fighting for, more importantly what worth dying for, is extremely subjective.  In the case of Kurdistan, there are people there who a) want our help, b) need our help, and even more importantly c) will appreciate it.  I’ve said all of this before, but it’s worth saying again.  It occurs to me to put it into a rough equation for determining where we should help out (where L=locals):

 
[(LWant + LNeed + LAttitude + Probabillity of Mission Success) x National Interest] > [Risk + Expense] = Intervention  

 An algorithm/flow chart would do this better, but you get the idea.  Weighting of factors is fraught, but if I were to apply this to our post-2002 involvement in Afghanistan, it would not have passed, mainly due to the PoMS and NI factors being essentially nil.  If anyone with more math than me wants to refine this, go for it.  It won't change anything, but I think it visualizes the thought/risk analysis process pretty well.  I'd be interested to see a representation of the thought process of people who know what I know yet still think we shouldn't be helping in Iraq/Syria, especially in light of the assembled coalition.  Doubt I could make sense of it though. 

I love it when a strategy comes together...

Bashar al-Assad, President of rump Syria, thinks that the Americans don't know what they're doing in the region. That's not explicitly what he said, but that's what this amounts to:

Asked whether coalition airstrikes are helping him, Assad said that the bombardments -- the Obama administration's preferred military tactic in the fight against the Islamic State -- aren't enough. "Troops on the ground that know the land and can react are essential," Assad told journalist Régis Le Sommier. "That is why there haven't been any tangible results in the two months of strikes led by the coalition. It isn't true that the strikes are helpful. They would of course have helped had they been serious and efficient."

Despite the wishful thinking of some in the West when he came on the scene to replace his father, Hafez al-Assad of "Hama rules" fame, Bashar (Opthamologist by training) is a chip off the old despotic block. I suspect that's more nurture than nature, but he has in any event survived in an environment which would have exposed and destroyed him for any weakness. In fact, the entire region is like that.

The Baath regime in Syria as in Iraq is bad news, but it was (pretty much) equal-opportunity bad news. Christians, Alawis and other non-Sunni minority groups survived as well as anyone could in Syria until things came apart in 2011. Being an enemy of the State was what would get you tortured and killed, and as brutal as that is it's something you could avoid, i.e. you weren't born into it.

Enter Da'esh/IS/ISIL/Al Queda/etc. The decendants of the Moslem Brotherhood old Hafez decimated in Hama, they are rabidly intolerant Sunni militias, so intolerant that most Sunnis don't want to live under them either. The non-Sunnis who remain have been forced to side with Assad in sheer self-preservation. In that case the "enemy of their enemy" is their only hope.

Does that mean that we should work with him? Well, that depends. In an ideal world where we all love each other and some rare zombie virus makes people turn nasty, no. In the real world where things are a lot greyer than that you don't work with a murderous sadistc regime unless of course they are less distasteful than the alternatives.The question: is Assad sufficiently less off-putting than Da'esh/Al-Queda/Nusra to be worth propping up?

I won't pretend that this is a simple decision, but I'll zoom out enough to try to put it in perspective. Until 2003, Iraq and Syria were "stable". Not Parliamentary-Rule-of-Law stable, but most people could go about their daily lives with little chance of violence which counts as stability in most parts of the world. Once the Americans broke Iraq (that is neither ideological nor debatable at this point) the whole region began to creak. The eventual result was the so-called "Arab Spring" which succeeded only in the place it began, in Tunisia. Egypt got the government it thought it wanted in the Muslim Brotherhood, but quickly realized that having the military run things was not so bad after all. Syria tried to reform but that only exposed how brittle the power structure was and of course it shattered.

Shit gets tribal pretty quickly in situations like that (civil war) and the surviving enclaves are the Alawis (Assad's "tribe") and the Kurds. The Syrian Kurds' only chance of survival is to amalgamate with the Iraqi Kurds and I have said before this is where I think we should put our efforts. Erdrogan and the Turkish government; in his/their effots to re-create the Ottoman empire has/have placed themselves in opposition to NATO's interests and should be booted out of the alliance. I mention this because the Turks are the single biggest impediment to carving out a stable safe-haven for people fleeing Da'esh.

The Iranians also have Kurdish issues, but they are a bit more pragmatic and are actively supporting their militias fighting Da'esh. Should we co-operate with them? How I work it out is that worst-case scenario, Iran spreads its' (Shia) "Islamic Republic" to parts of Iraq; that is still less miserable than Daesh/Al Queda. This would defacto split off Iraqi Kurdistan to join up with Rojava. In case you wonder why I think we should support that, go read this.

Are the Kurds perfect? Not by a long shot, but as far as I can tell they are better than all regional alternatives. My information is not based on personal experience, but by all accounts their internal tribal issues don't turn into oppressing other people which is all that I can ask of a group. The real litmus test is "would I take a trip there [Iraqi Kudistan]?". The answer in this case is "yes" because even as in infidel Westerner I would be as safe there anywhere other than home. Their proposed constitution looks pretty Socialist (not surprising, Kurdish Workers' Party and all) but Disestablishmentarianism is the law of the land making it unique in the region since Turkey has purged Ataturk.

Coming back to Assad, the Social Contract of the Rojava Cantons (linked above) recognises the "territorial integrity of Syria" which brings it in line with the rump Baath state. This is potential common ground, but there is no way the Cantons would let Assad back in control. What I don't know is what the Iranians would think about cutting loose their link to Hezbollah, inevitable if the current power structure is dissolved.

That could be grounds for some old-school "sphere of influence" talks between the US, Saudis and Iranians. The tradeoff could be recognition of defacto Iranian expansion into Iraq, sans "Sunni Triangle" in exchange for cutting the Levant loose. The Saudis would have cause to dislike this, but it wouldn't change much on the groud so it might not be a deal breaker. Hezbollah has bled a great deal for the Assad regime (really for Iran) so it's unlikely Iran would cut ties, but they would gain more Shia in Iraq than they'd lose in Lebanon so who knows?

The region (and many others) has a preference for backing "the Strong Horse". Assad's Syria was that in the immediate area for many years; it is so no longer, but it can still do a lot of damage. The Alawis are a fairly despised minority in the ME, but so are the Kurds, Christians, Yazidis, etc. I see common cause there, but there are a lot of Great and Regional Power interests to overcome before the underdogs can band together. Get rid of Assad and the Baath Party and we could work with non IS Syria against Da'esh and in spite of Erdrogan. I deduce Iran as the lynchpin of this, with Russia having some say, maybe just as an extraction plan for the Baath ruling elite.

There's your angle Obama; you still have a chance to actually earn that Nobel Peace Prize. Fat chance the USA does anything this coherently thought-out with an understanding of the region and history, but the regional players understand these things. Somebody will do something but it probably won't be us.

A lot of drops will fill a bucket

At time of writing the Canadian government has voted to undertake the combat missions against Da'esh which we were at least partially doing already. Where this goes I don't know, but past practice from Afghanistan coupled with our current fiscal restraint suggests that this will remain at the level of low-rate airstrikes against painfully "safe" targets and some undisclosed Special Ops activity. Better than nothing, but unlikely to make a difference in the grand scheme.

Still, it's important to do something and we are at least doing that. What I draw more encouragement from is stories like this:

Dillon Hillier was working construction in Alberta when ISIS gunmen began their brutal push into Kurdish territory. A veteran of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, he decided he couldn’t just watch it happen.

Last weekend, the 26-year-old infantryman left Calgary and flew to northeastern Iraq to help Kurdish fighters fend off the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham. “I just felt it was the right thing to do since they’re facing some pretty tough times,” he said in an interview.

Unlike the radicalized youths who have flocked to Syria and Iraq, Mr. Hillier is a military veteran and he is siding with ISIS’s most formidable enemy, the Peshmerga. Mr. Hillier said he expected to be joined over the coming weeks by volunteers from Canada, the United States and Sweden.

To help Canadians eager to fight ISIS, an Ottawa military veteran recently formed the 1st North American Expeditionary Force. Ian Bradbury said former Canadian Forces members had launched the non-profit group to provide financial and logistical support to friends who felt compelled to volunteer.

The Kurds are the only group over there who both have ability to resist Da'esh (and equivalents) and a tolerant and reasonably progressive mindset as a culture. In short, they are worth supporting against the alternatives, and not merely as the lesser of available evils. They also appreciate the help, a rare trait in that part of the world.

Experience has shown that supporting most Arab groups is a waste of time as they're never happy whatever you do or don't do. Largely anecdotal, but we don't need peer-reviewed studies to tell us that if Iraq was a tar baby Syria would be the same.

It's not just the Arabs of course, there are a lot of other groups just as opportunistic (Afghans leap to mind) but we have proven Nation-Building to be a failed model, expensive in blood and treasure. The Kurds have built their own; it's still under construction but they'll do it themselves with some support from us, as it should be. They have a chance to be the beacon of "democracy" tolerance and freedom in the Middle East that Bush II and the NeoCons thought they could fashion post-Saddam Iraq into.

Young men have been trickling in from Western countries to bolster the Kurds, and by extension the displaced Christians, Yazidis and civilized Sunni Muslims of northern (nominal) Iraq. I wonder if anyone has thought of approaching the Saudis to grubstake these guys.  Infidels of course, but along with that they are a pretty safe bet to not boomerang on the House of Saud like the Sunni proxies they usually use. The cost effectiveness of supporting Western volunteers in Kurdistan could be very high. Here's the pitch:

End State: Kurdish autonomous area secured and displaced persons returned to their homes in contiguous areas.

How: Support to Kurdish forces and creation of a support system for volunteer replacements from other countries.

Salient features:

• Hub created in theatre with money from Gulf and Western governments
• Ground organization consisting of recruitment, supply and medical facilities
• Employs mostly locals
• Tickets home are part of the supply arrangements

I envision a small staff to liaise with applicants, pick them up from the airport, issue them with weapons, body armour, ammo, first aid kit and a local cell phone. From there link them up with the Peshmerga for employment and hope that the field hospital you've set up doesn't see them for anything worse than top-up inoculations.

An actual International Brigade is a bad idea, but a dedicated support organization for the individuals, especially the supply and medical resources, will encourage more guys to go. As mentioned in the linked National Post article, ad hoc support groups have been forming in home countries, but things remain sketchy on the receiving end.  With "allies" like this, the Kurds and the people they're sheltering need all the help we can give them.

What would Nixon do?

Obama has come out and said that the USA will go after Daesh (formerly ISIL; this name pisses them off so I'll use it) on either side of the now nominal Iraq/Syria border. That this would ever have been an issue would be mind-boggling if I actually had any faith in those in power displaying any kind of common sense, but alas it was expected.

As the US and allied Arab states launch air strikes on Islamic State (IS) positions in Syria and Iraq, questions arise as to the basis of such military action according to international law.

The legal evaluation differs where operations against IS in Iraq on the one hand and in Syria on the other are concerned.

No questions in my mind. A border is an arbitrary line on a map which only means something if it's enforced. In this context "enforced" means one state controls the actions of parties within their boundaries to the extent that they don't affect parties outside those boundaries. The rump Syrian state doesn't control most of the country at this point, and Daesh roams at will accross the borders Sykes and Picot drew up in the aftermath of the Ottoman empire's collapse in 1918.

Whether you choose to treat Daesh as a rogue state or transnational terrorist group (Iran for example fits both models), if you want to defeat them you have to defeat ALL of them. First rule of fighting any insurgency, or anyone for that matter, is don't leave them a sanctuary. Taking Vietnam as an example, the political constraints against hitting NVA and Viet Cong bases in Cambodia and Laos hobbled the American military. It was only when Nixon took the gloves off in 1970 that these sanctuaries were attacked and disrupted. Even Nixon only gave North Vietnam a taste of what the US could do if it wanted to (even leaving nukes out of the equation), but it was enough to bring the Communists to the bargaining table.

It's an imperfect comparison of course, but the essential lesson of ignoring borders if people are hiding behind them to kill you remains. This brings me back to Nixon.

Looking at it as objectively as I can, I don't think that Nixon was the terrible president he is made out to be. His stepped up attacks on North Vietnam were long overdue, and were designed to get the US out of the war, preferably by winning it. Nixon also thawed things out with China, and as it was said at the time, he was (probably) the only US leader who could do that.

That opinion wasn't the result of Nixon being a nice guy, it was because he had impeccable credentials as an anti-communist, and being ready to smash them if need be is the way you get a reputation like that. It was in fact a conscious "policy" decision, the "madman theory". Putin is running a variant of this right now, and you'll notice that we are reacting to him.

Whether you want to talk about credibility, deterrence, initiative, momentum, the OpFor has most of that and Obama (by extension the USA and the "West") none. That "red lines” fiasco in Syria over chemical weapons (where, again, Putin ate Obama's lunch) was the last straw for any anyone to take Obama seriously, and even his response to this Daesh situation right now is halting, half-assed and indecisive.

Madman theory only really works against parties who have something to lose and is essentially deterrence. Nuking Raqqa (in Syria, self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State) right now would set the tone and establish your "street cred" as truly balls-to-the-wall crazy, but it would cause a lot of other problems. Short of that, I hear that Arab airforces are involved in hiting Daesh now, and have already (Egypt and UAE) been hitting Salafists in Libya. The weak link in all of this is ground troops.

And now this:

Turkey is bracing itself for an unprecedented refugee crisis after as many as 200,000 ethnic Kurds fled across the frontier from Syria in just two days to escape a fresh advance by Islamist extremists.

The influx came after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) captured dozens of Kurdish villages in northern Syria and threatened the border city of Kobane, which was left deserted after most of its inhabitants evacuated in panic.

I've said it before and I'll say it again here: the only answer to this situation is to push back, secure areas of "friendly" populations while arming the able-bodied among them to defend themselves. This is what's sort-of happening in Iraqi Kurdistan, and it's time for Turkey to get off the fence and start throwing their weight around. I understand that there are Kurdish "issues' in Turkey, but Daesh is a bigger problem which will come for Turkey (and Jordan, and Lebanon, etc.) if they are not smashed into the ground. You'll never get them all, but individual wasps only hurt, while a swarm can kill.

I don't know who the USA needs in charge to handle this effectively, but we've got what we've got so fingers crossed that they take some sensible (and sufficiently kinetic) action.

 

Kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will collapse.

(It will be noted that the phrase I have used for the title didn't work out too well for the guy who originally said it, but I have more confidence in my prescriptions here.  We do this time know exactly who and what we're fighting.)

As the USA gears up at a glacial pace to do something about ISIL, Boko Haram has taken inspiration from ISIL's success of late and declared a caliphate of their own in northern Nigeria. This at first glance is alarming, (and certainly it is at the pointy end) but a closer examination of the circumstances of each shows much vulnerability for each group.

The irony of their success is that they have by acquiring property and infrastructure tied themselves down and made them easier to find and kill. Looking at the origin of these two caliphates, the essential ingredients in the constitution (making of, not document) of each is instability, diversity and incompetence.

Instability pretty much speaks for itself, as power of some sort will always fill a vacuum. Diversity was a factor as they both play on differences, mostly in religion to sow discord and divide to conquer. Incompetence is related to instability, but a competent military force can hold things together against insurgents even against a background of political instability, NATO forces in Afghanistan and French forces in Mali as recent examples.

Of possible options to salvage Nigeria, the only plausible one I see right now is a military coup. Ideal would be some sort of replacement of the current corrupt government with something else, but that's called colonialism and it's apparently a bad idea. The Nigerian Army has been starved for resources by a government (not unrealistically) afraid of letting it get too powerful. The irony of an armed takeover of much of a country which weakens its' army to prevent a military coup is not lost on me, but they may not be seeing it in that light right now.

So, the real challenge with either of these situations is not crippling the respective caliphates; that is tactically dangerous for the operators and troops, but we know how to break things. The trap is the nation-building that was tried in Afghanistan and Iraq. Northern Iraq gives us the Kurds, who are this iteration's "Northern Alliance" and if we stay in long enough to remove the existential threat to them we'll have done enough, barring some residual SOF presence to help them with flare-ups.

Nigeria is another matter. They have all of the resources (natural, financial and human) to sort this themselves so I don't see a pressing need to put our guys on the line there. It occurs to me that this is an ideal situation for mercenaries. As stated, the Nigerians have a problem which requires a military solution, but are loathe to give the military the resources necessary, thus threatening the state. Executive Outcomes isn't around anymore, but I'm sure there's someone(s) else to fill that role for the government in Abuja if the latter are willing to pay.

By Christmas the Islamic State will be a thing of the past [update 14 Oct 14: maybe not], but of course the residue will remain troublesome. Boko Haram is more complex for the simple reason that less influential (powerful) parties care enough to get involved, leaving out the attitude of the Nigerian government and Armed Forces to foreigners doing the dirty work in their country. Regardless, three weeks of professional military operations with air support and intel could bring that caliphate crashing down too. It's just a question of "who" and "when".

Kill 'em all

I don't feel that yesterday's post was particularly coherent, a result of distractions and trying to fit it to the catchy title I came up with. This time I'll do what I usually do and write the title to fit the post. OK, cleverness failed me, but this one at least is to the point.

Western leaders are making dire pronouncements about doing something to ISIL/Islamic State, so something will happen, but two questions leap to mind. The first is "what"; the second is "how". There is already concern about mission creep, and the mission hasn't even been defined yet. The follows is my thumbnail sketch of the strategic problem posed by those assholes.

They are smack in the middle of the Middle East, straddling the increasingly irrelevant border between two failed or failing states. Their pernicious medieval nihilism, rated by at least one local resident as "worse than Genghis Khan" (who was at least religiously tolerant) is also drawing in like-minded psychopaths from around the world, like the one (apparently a Brit) who executed James Foley, constantly swelling the ranks.

I have heard the terms "counter-terrorism" and "counter-insurgency" in peoples' attempts to put a name on what needs to be done, but I have a simpler word: War. The self-proclaimed "Islamic State" is setting itself up for failure, a victim of its' own success. By making a functioning state, with its' own economy and services, you give us things that we can attack. So far it's been artillery positions, vehicles and checkpoints, but with an expansion of effort it can be a whole lot more.

In the global view, it's an ideology, really a nihilistic death cult and as an idea you can never eliminate it. Some form of Islamic violence has been around for centuries and it will continue, the issue is to minimize the damage it can do. We need to kill them in heaps and the only way to do that is when they bunch together, like they are now. We also need to limit their resources, so follow the money.

Apparently for some time now ISIL has been selling oil from seized oil fields to the rump Syria controlled by Assad. This represents the first thing I'd take away from them, even before liberating territory. You then pump that oil and sell it to finance your operations, but I can't imagine Obama'd have the stones to do that when even Bush II didn't. Concurrent with that wreck every bit of military hardware and transport you can see to weaken them militarily. Give reliable local auxiliaries (read: the Kurds, possibly Jordan) whatever they need by way of armament and logistic support. The Iraqis have Iran to backstop them, so they can sink or swim.

Osama bin Laden's grand plan was to "bleed to bankruptcy" the USA, and he did a fair job of it, but it wasn't fatal. Knocking the current set of idiots in ISIL back to a manageable local menace will require a large investment, but as opposed to Operation Iraqi Freedom there is a clear and undisputed reason to pitch in for this job. I'd be leaning on the Saudis to underwrite a lot of this and use self-interested local troops to minimize your boots on the ground.

Even in decline, the USA remains the only power capable of driving this bus, mostly due to the airpower requirements. Whoever is coordinating operations, there has to be a coherent plan, and mine already represents the 70% solution. You'll never actually kill them all but they need a serious culling and disrupting, so bring on the A-10s and Apaches, and keep the weapons and ammo flowing to Erbil.