{"id":892,"date":"2015-11-16T14:51:58","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T19:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/?p=892"},"modified":"2015-11-16T14:51:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T19:51:58","slug":"what-does-defeating-isis-actually-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/what-does-defeating-isis-actually-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"What Does Defeating ISIS Actually Mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the wake of the horrific attacks in Paris this weekend, there has been a renewal of calls to defeat ISIS.\u00a0 Take, for example, this New York Times op-ed<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The only adequate measure, after the killing of at least 129 people in Paris, is military, and the only objective commensurate with the ongoing threat is the crushing of ISIS and the elimination of its stronghold in Syria and Iraq.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One big problem with these kinds of calls to action is that it’s never entirely clear what it would mean to “defeat” ISIS.\u00a0 This is not a trivial question.<\/p>\n

Most peoples’ ideas of war are based on historical conflicts like World War 2.\u00a0 It’s relatively clear how you win a conflict like that: you roll back the Nazi front and force Germany to surrender.\u00a0 For inter-state conflicts resulting in one state invading the territory of another, this is a good and workable model.<\/p>\n

The problem is that it’s not a model that can be applied to a conflict with non-state groups.\u00a0 ISIS isn’t the government of a state, it’s not really an army, and it can’t surrender (even if leadership surrendered, it’s doubtful that all of their followers would concede with them).\u00a0 So the inter-state model of conflict resolution doesn’t hold.<\/p>\n

So if ISIS can’t be defeated in the way a nation-state could be, that leads to the question of what, exactly defeating them would mean.\u00a0 Let’s look at a few possibilities.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

1. Roll back ISIS territorial control.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is a fairly clearly defined goal and it’s likely relatively achievable, too.\u00a0 Though it’s very likely more difficult than it sounds, and virtually impossible without a major ground force.\u00a0 Rolling ISIS back is the goal of the air campaign of which Canada is a part, and it’s had pretty mixed results.\u00a0 It’s also worth remembering that even with a large ground force, the U.S. still struggled to control parts of Afghanistan and Iraq, so even this seemingly modest goal is in all likelihood harder than it sounds.<\/p>\n

But since this is already what the U.S. and its allies are attempting to do, and critics who want ISIS “crushed” or “defeated” tend to be asking for more force, I have to conclude that rolling back ISIS’s territorial gains is not sufficient for those critics.<\/p>\n

2. Reduce the probability of an attack in a NATO country to zero.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost certainly impossible.\u00a0 The rate of attacks is already quite low.\u00a0 In Canada you’re drastically more likely to be killed by a car while you cross the street than you are to be murdered by a terrorist.\u00a0 I don’t know how we’d even determine that the possibility of an attack had been entirely eliminated.\u00a0 Attacks are already so infrequent I don’t know what the measuring stick would be, but at any rate there’s no way to completely<\/em> stop any possible terror attack.\u00a0 Going back to World War 2 for a second, consider this: even though we pretty decisively defeated the Nazis, there are still neo-Nazis who commit terrorist attacks 70 years later.\u00a0 There’s no such thing as absolute safety.<\/p>\n

3. Kill all of ISIS’s senior leadership.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now we start to get into murky territory, and it’ll only get more ambiguous from here on out.\u00a0 Who are counted as ISIS’s senior leadership?\u00a0 If they’re killed, but the next in line just keep moving up, doesn’t that suggest a significantly broader campaign?\u00a0 Indeed, this is precisely the situation the U.S.’s special operations forces in places like Yemen and Afghanistan have been running into.\u00a0 You say you’re going kill the “leaders”, but then after you’ve killed the leaders you decide there are more leaders than the ones you said you were after, and the list keeps expanding, and somehow you discover that the more people you kill, the bigger<\/em> your list of targets becomes.<\/p>\n

4. Kill everyone in ISIS.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is an hopelessly vague idea, and is almost certainly impossible.\u00a0 Who are we defining as ISIS?\u00a0 Obviously not just senior leadership, or we’d be back at #3.\u00a0 Is it anyone who’s been involved in the planning or execution of an attack that’s already occurred?\u00a0 We might be able to accomplish that, though it’s worth noting that even that seemingly modest goal could prove quite difficult.\u00a0 One of the men alleged to have been involved in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen still remains at large<\/a>.\u00a0 Another two<\/a> were killed more than a decade after the fact.<\/p>\n

What if the campaign to kill the people we’ve currently identified as ISIS leads to civilian casualties that increases ISIS recruitment?\u00a0 That almost certainly will happen, given the precedent<\/a> in America’s other recent wars.\u00a0 So does killing everyone in ISIS mean creating new terrorists for us to kill?<\/p>\n

What about people who have never been active in any ISIS campaign in any direct sense, but have provided them with housing or food or transport or other support?\u00a0 One of the most important things that the excellent book No Good Men Among The Living<\/a> gets across about the conflict with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan is how frequently people have changed sides over the past several decades.\u00a0 People have often switched their allegiance to the Soviets, the Taliban, the U.S., al Qaeda, and back and forth.\u00a0 They switch sides not because they’re bad people, but because they want simple things like a decent living and security for their family, and they’ll go wherever they think they can find those things.\u00a0 So in places like Syria, are we including all of those people in ISIS too?\u00a0 Must we kill all of them?\u00a0 And isn’t that just going to create more enemies that we then have to kill, creating more enemies that we then have to kill, creating . . .<\/p>\n

So this all leads back to my original question: what exactly would it mean to defeat ISIS and how would we know we were successful?\u00a0 It seems to me as though people who want to “defeat” ISIS don’t really know what they mean or how we would go about doing it, they just think it sounds like the kind of thing you ought to say.\u00a0 Which is probably not a good way to decide whether or not to go to war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of the horrific attacks in Paris this weekend, there has been a renewal of calls to defeat ISIS.\u00a0 Take, for example, this New York Times op-ed: The only adequate measure, after the killing of at least 129 people in Paris, is military, and the only objective commensurate with the ongoing threat is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":894,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions\/894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}