Should the US send ground troops to fight ISIS? Two views

YES

Max Boot

  Feb. 26, 2015

Our current approach isn’t working

During an address to the nation that he delivered from the White House in September, President Obama vowed to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS. The only thing that has been degraded and destroyed in the intervening months, however, is the credibility of the U.S.

U.S.-led air strikes have killed more than 6,000 ISIS fighters. But those losses have been more than made good by the stream of 1,000 foreign fighters who are estimated to join ISIS every month. ISIS’s snuff films, like one showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive, may trigger widespread repugnance, but they also have a sick appeal to a dismayingly large number of young Muslim men who thrill at the chance to establish a new caliphate.

ISIS is not going to run out of cannon fodder anytime soon, and the U.S. approach, limited to air strikes, has shown scant ability to dislodge ISIS from its strongholds, especially in Syria, where ISIS has expanded its zone of control over the past six months. For air strikes to work, they need to be launched in coordination with an effective ground force, but that has been mostly lacking.

 

The only real exceptions are the Kurdish peshmerga fighters and the Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias. But neither the Kurds nor the Shi’ites will be able to clear and hold Sunni areas stretching from Fallujah to Mosul. Indeed, the more that bloodthirsty Iranian-backed militias gain prominence in the anti-ISIS cause, the more Sunnis will ra

Back in 2007–08, when al-Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s precursor, was pushed out of the Sunni-dominated northwest of Iraq, it was by Sunni tribal fighters working in conjunction with American troops. To inflict serious setbacks on ISIS today will require resurrecting that successful coalition rather than flatly refusing, as Obama has done, to put any “boots on the ground.”

 

It is in America’s interest to send as few troops as possible into harm’s way and to get our allies to do as much of the fighting as possible. But sending only 3,000 troops and essentially prohibiting them from leaving base, as Obama has done, is a recipe for ineffectiveness. If we’re going to have any impact on the fight against ISIS, we need to take off our self-imposed shackles.

It’s hard to know now what commitment may be necessary, which is why it’s vital not to pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force that would prohibit “enduring offensive ground combat operations.” It is folly to tell ISIS in advance that it has nothing to fear from the best ground troops on the planet.

 

Credible estimates of how many troops we should send range from 10,000 to 25,000. Just as important as the troop numbers are the rules of engagement under which they operate. It is imperative that U.S. advisers and joint tactical air controllers be able to operate on the front lines with the local troops they support. This was the formula that made possible the rapid overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001.

In addition to sending advisers along with support personnel to protect and sustain them, we should be sending joint Special Operations task forces–composed of Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force and other Tier 1 operators–to target ISIS as they once did so successfully with al-Qaeda in Iraq. While aircraft can drop bombs and kill people, only commandos can capture and interrogate high-level terrorists, gathering intelligence that has the potential to wipe out an entire enemy network.

 

With a slightly larger commitment of American forces, we might be able to galvanize more local opposition to ISIS in Syria and Iraq. But we need to be careful not to make the U.S. the enabler of Shi’ite death squads working at the behest of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the country’s far-reaching, elite Quds Force. The entire Iraqi army may be so badly compromised by militia infiltration that it is better to focus American efforts on persuading the Sunni tribes of Syria and Iraq to join forces against ISIS. Baghdad–and Soleimani–might not approve, but the U.S. must ignore those concerns. Without the support of the Sunni tribes, the West will face an impossible task in the war against ISIS.

NO

Karl Vick @karl_vick

Feb. 26, 2015

Don’t Take the Bait: The U.S. Should Not Send Troops to Fight ISIS

The group was, after all, spawned by the occupation of Iraq

In December 2001, when the war on terrorism was only weeks old, victory appeared at hand with the fall of Kandahar, the southern Afghanistan city Osama bin Laden had called home. Now that the question is how best to confront a fresh horror, it’s worth noting that the city was taken not by U.S. troops but by the same tag team that liberated the rest of the country: scruffy Afghan militias advancing in pickup trucks behind U.S. air strikes. As Christmas approached, there couldn’t have been more than 50 Americans in town, most of them Special Forces so at home in local clothes that they were easier to spot by the bumper stickers on their pickups: I ♥ NY. The rest of us were reporters haunting public venues like the central market, where one morning I noticed a man standing apart. He wore a black turban and a knowing look, both markers of the Taliban, and had a question. “Why didn’t you come on the ground?” he said. “It would have been lovely if you came on the ground.”

I knew what he meant, but not nearly as viscerally as I did two years later, in Iraq, where we came on the ground. Why we came at all is a bit of a mystery, but it was pretty clear pretty early that our physical presence created its own reality, armored up yet vulnerable both to labels–“occupier” at best, but also

“crusader”–and constant ambush. “If you’re trying to win hearts and minds,” a Marine major told me in Najaf, “maybe sending 100,000 19-year-olds with machine guns isn’t the best way to go about it.”

Not massing U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 9/11 was a masterstroke, even if it came about mainly because the Pentagon lacked a ready war plan for the country that had sheltered bin Laden. It’s not just that Afghanistan has a way of swallowing armies. (Ask the British; ask the Russians.) There is an essential elegance to using what the military calls standoff weapons in a fight made infinitely more difficult by your actual presence. Which is why it’s fortunate that Americans have shown little appetite for a large-scale ground war against ISIS.

The group was, after all, spawned by the occupation of Iraq. Many of its leaders are veterans of the U.S. military prisons that turned out to double as universities for jihad. But their aim is no longer to expel the invader. Just the opposite. Now they want to lure us in. The fundamentalist narrative embraced by ISIS calls for a return of U.S. forces to Iraq, modern legionnaires fulfilling the role of “Rome” in the end-time narrative the group believes it has set in motion. It’s a millennialist vision as complicated as the Book of Revelation, but the U.S. role is pretty simple: show up. For anyone seeking a logic behind the gruesome decapitations of American journalists and aid workers, there it is–provoke a reaction.

The bloodletting does summon the associations of terrorism, barbarity and peril that have beset Americans for more than a decade now. But associations are almost all they are. To date, ISIS has demonstrated no particular ambition to attack the West at home. (That remains the raison d’être of al-Qaeda, whose Syria affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra harbors the elite al-Qaeda bombmakers dubbed the Khorasan group.) ISIS eyes another prize. Having declared a caliphate on the river valleys and desert land it has conquered in Syria and Iraq, it aims to turn the clock back to the 7th century. It functions both as a government and as a sectarian killing machine, slaughtering Shi’ites and many others in the name of purification.

To retain its sense of inevitability, however, ISIS must expand–something it’s been unable to do in Iraq since U.S. air strikes began in August. Recent growth, such as it is, has all been virtual, via pledges of fealty from existing jihadi groups in Sinai, Libya and other ungoverned dots on the map. The mother ship itself is hemmed in. Shi’ites and Kurds man the bulwarks to the east. To the west lie Syrian state forces that ISIS–nominally a rebel group–has mostly left alone.

What to do? The U.S. clearly has a national interest in preserving Iraq. (We broke it; we bought it.) But sending Americans back into Anbar and Saladin provinces would provide ISIS with pure oxygen and fresh waves of volunteers, while feeding the narrative that the U.S. is in a war against Islam. We have the planes, but this looks like a fight for guys in pickups who want to take their own country back.

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