Taliban insurgents turn themselves in to Afghan National Security Forces, 2010. Image: ResoluteSupportMedia (CC BY 2.0). Behind the scenes, a remarkable new alliance is being sought in Afghanistan. At ground level the country’s long war is as disparate and complex as ever, but this emerging realignment may well give it a different flavour. 

On the surface, these five events seem to have little enough in common:

* The Trump administration is encouraging United States and Afghan troops to concentrate on safeguarding the main towns and cities, even if that means that the Taliban seize more of the rural areas where three-quarters of Afghans live 
* A US government agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, reports that the Taliban currently controls 59 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts, and actively contests a further 119. Many of the latter could well fall under its authority
* A three-day ceasefire organised by the Afghan government under the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, produced some positive results. Several local Taliban leaders reportedly met local officials. At the same time, a preliminary meeting was held in Qatar between Taliban officials and Alice Wells, the US’s most senior diplomat for south Asia
* US and Afghan government forces continued to take the fight to the Taliban in some areas  (see Gabriel Dominguez, “Afghan and allied forces up pressure on militant groups”, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 1 August 2018). This comes in the wake of Trump’s reluctant commitment of 5,000 more troops to Afghanistan, after a period when the trend was the other way
* Islamic State in Khorasan province (ISK, or ISKP) – as the local affiliate of ISIS is now commonly termed – is growing ever more bold in Afghanistan. A suicide-bombing in Kabul, claimed by ISK, killed twelve people and narrowly missed the vice-president, while the group has mounted numerous other attacks. These incidents fuel a wider perception that the US will come to focus more on the overall ISIS threat than the particular Taliban one. 
Afghanistan’s current war is approaching its eighteenth year. If these recent events are seen in the context of that whole period, then Washington’s emerging focus may become clearer.

The road from 9/11
The Taliban do now hold sway over large swathes of rural Afghanistan, but ISK too is gaining traction. It’s little wonder that the US, in light of its fresh experience in Iraq and Syria, views this ISIS affiliate as the major threat. The logic of that judgment leads to Washington’s support for Ashraf Ghani’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban. If the US does now see the Taliban in a new light, it’s hard to overstate what a stunning reversal that represents. A brief digest of US involvement in Afghanistan in the post-9/11 years illustrates the point.

By November 2001, only ten weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, the situation in Afghanistan had been transformed by the termination of the Taliban regime and the dispersal of al-Qaida. But this was not military victory or defeat in a conventional sense. Rather, the Taliban forces and their al-Qaida guerrilla comrades had merely ceased fighting, and chosen to redeploy into Afghan towns and villages or across the border into Pakistan – with many of their arms intact.

By January 2002, the George W Bush administration had effectively handed over post-war Afghanistan to the Europeans, while it moved on to confront the newly designated “axis of evil” of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea – with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq first in line.

At that time, some experienced United Nations officials and knowledgeable Afghans strongly recommended the immediate injection of a stabilisation force to fill the security vacuum: 30,000-plus troops was a figure often quoted. In its absence, went the argument, growing disorder would lead to ever greater ungoverned spaces, perfect conditions for diverse militias to put down roots and ensure a much longer war..

But neither the Europeans nor the Americans would provide this much needed support. Instead, a Nato-backed International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was set up – only 5,000-strong at the start – which could do little more than provide security in Kabul and a few other Afghan urban centres. Most regions and districts in the country were not part of a coherent plan to deliver security, a neglect which helped facilitate the return of the Taliban. Within three years, ISAF was facing rapid, fluid and costly guerrilla combat for which it was unprepared.

From 2006, the number of foreign soldiers in Afghanistan was increasing steadily; it reached around 100,000 by the time of the 2008 presidential election in the United States which brought Barack Obama to power. Yet the Taliban remained entrenched and effective, inflicting losses on twenty-nine of the national contingents operating under the coalition banner. The even more damaging conflict in Iraq led Obama to focus his campaign on the theme of withdrawing US forces from that country, but after much internal debate, and mindful of the Afghan connection to 9/11, he vowed to see the mission in Afghanistan through to the end.

If that ultimate aim was ambiguous, so was the hybrid approach Obama eventually pursued. This borrowed from John McCain, his opponent in the presidential race, the idea of a 30,000-troop “surge”, but instead of this being seen as part of a strategy to defeat the Taliban (as McCain consistently wanted), Obama’s aim was to weaken the Taliban and bolster the rule of the Kabul government to the extent that US troops could be safely withdrawn.

That plan faced constant setbacks on the ground, but despite the lack of progress the US forces were (as in Iraq) slowly extracted under Obama’s administration. Its hope was that the Afghan national army (ANA) – which the US had poured great resources into building, training, and equipping – would hold on. But the military initiative remained with the Taliban, and as Obama departed the scene and Trump arrived the calculation in Washington shifted once more: opting for that modest increase in American troop numbers but also towards slow acceptance of the need to negotiate with the Taliban.

The morphing war
The US’s hope now is that a deal can be done that achieves two valued outcomes: the negotiated entry of the Taliban into parts of Afghanistan’s governance, alongside the conversion of the post-deal Taliban into a body able and willing to assist in the control – and quite possibly the eventual defeat – of ISK.

This would still require a remarkable turnaround. But stepping back from Afghanistan to view the wider picture, the notion makes strategic sense. For a new manifestation of ISIS is taking shape after its setbacks in Iraq and Syria. The group is on the way to mounting a guerrilla-style insurgency in these two countries; is expanding into north Africa and the Sahel; is making connections with Islamist paramilitaries in the southern Philippines and Indonesia; and not least, has a growing impact in Afghanistan itself in the shape of ISK.

Thus western states, despite what they might say in public, are ready to accept that the way to prevent an uncontainable Afghan insurgency is to form a necessary – if strictly unofficial – alliance with the Taliban. The major transnational threat of the US and its allies is the emerging ISIS, and Taliban involvement is considered essential if ISK is to be stopped (see Antonio Giustozzi, The Islamic State in Khorasan Afghanistan, Pakistan and the New Central Asian Jihad [C Hurst, 2018]).

The seventeen-year “war on terror” has made for strange alliances. Just as Iranian militias became quietly linked to the US-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq, so the US-led anti-ISIS alliance in Afghanistan is set informally to embrace the Taliban. This may cause discomfort in polite western circles, but its political reality is as stark as can be.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy’s international security adviser, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His latest book is Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threat from the Margins (IB Tauris, 2016), which follows Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.ne

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 30, 2018, claims he can “prove” Iran’s secret development of nuclear weapons. JINI/Press Association. All rights reserved.

Second, Trump’s declared opposition to the nuclear agreement with Iran was leading three of its other signatories –  France, Germany and the UK – to launch a strong diplomatic effort to dissuade him from repudiating it. For Israel, the deal’s survival promised to be a worrying setback.
Third, the Assad regime’s advancing control of Syrian territory was part of an emerging tripartite threat to Israel’s regional power. A heavily armed, well entrenched and confident Hizbollah militia was based just across Israel’s northern border in Lebanon, with relatively easy supply-lines from Iran. And a permanent Quds force military presence in Syria was likely to include enlarged missile production and assembly facilities.

Today, the picture already looks different. Binyamin Netanyahu now leads a government that is little short of triumphalist. In the end, Trump ignored his supposed European allies and on 8 May gave official approval to the United States’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. The White House made it clear that if Iran starts up its nuclear programme it will face a military response. Moreover, the new US embassy was inaugurated in Jerusalem on 14 May, while the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have met the Palestinian protests in Gaza with lethally effective force.

Some indication of Israel’s restored confidence is its justification for that use of force, which has killed dozens of people and wounded over 2,000, the majority of the latter hospitalised with gunshot wounds. Israeli government spokespersons appearing in the western media argue that the protesters were either unthinking dupes of Hamas or themselves of malign intent. This implies that the IDF is facing thousands of murderous terrorists determined to breach the border and attack innocent Israeli villagers, and who thus deserve to be shot.

Such rhetoric may be counterproductive, not least as several western media outlets are reporting from within Gaza and are able to offer a more balanced view. The Israeli government knows this, yet with the firm support of the US administration feels no need to refine its message. With Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and especially John Bolton advising Trump, what is there to fear? 

The coming war
All is not what it seems, though, a point highlighted by the fallout from Israel’s severe military assault against a Quds missile-strike towards the Golan heights. The sequence began with the firing of a barrage of twenty 1970s-vintage unguided BM-27short-range rockets towards Israeli positions on the Golan. It is not clear how many landed, but there were no Israeli casualties (see “Target Tehran“, 10 May 2018)

Against this small-scale attack, on the same night the IDF launched its biggest air operation in Syria for decades, hitting dozens of targets associated with the Quds force. Israel’s defence minister Avigdor Lieberman said that the IDF had hit “almost all of the Iranian infrastructure in Syria, and they should remember that when it rains here, there will be a downpour there. I hope we have completed this episode” (see Yaakov Lappin & Jeremy Binnie, “Israel responds to rocket fire by striking Iranian targets in Syria”, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 11 May 2018). 

There is, however, something too easy in the view that the Quds force staged an abortive attack which was eclipsed by immediate, massive – and triumphant – IDF retaliation. Quds is, after all, experienced and battle-hardened, not least by two years of aiding Iraq’s government in the fight against ISIS in Mosul and elsewhere. In doing so it has been loosely allied with a much wider coalition, including the United States and its western allies with their massive use of air-power. The force has also been on the receiving end of scores of smaller Israeli airstrikes in Syria. All this gives its commanders confidence in their own abiities and insight into western capabilities.

The IRGC as a whole is intensely engaged in worst-case planning for an expected war with Israel and the United States. The increased Quds force deployments in Syria over the last couple of years, and the construction of permanent bases, make a second front available when that war comes. There would be no purpose in undertaking a limited and crude rocket-attack towards well-protected Israeli forces on the Golan heights, except as a deliberate provocation designed to assess Israeli capabilities against a range of targets (see “Israel vs Iran, a looming war“, 26 April 2018).

Much physical damage will certainly have been done, but it’s almost certain that most key equipment will have been moved and personnel evacuated in advance. The Iranians will now be doing site-by-site assessments of the Israeli attacks: working out how different weapons worked, whether “bunker-buster” and thermobaric (fuel-air explosive) weapons were used, whether the IDF had any problems with Syrian air defences, and what can be learned from the rapid nature of the Israeli response. That the response came within hours of the Iranian firing indicates that it was largely pre-planned.

In short, the Iranian commanders will now have a far better understanding of Israeli airforce capabilities. That represents an invaluable source of intelligence, capable of being used to assess their future deployments in Syria and indeed in Iran itself. Even more useful will be intelligence sharing with Hizbollah’s forces across southern Lebanon. To take one example, there are unconfirmed reports that the IDF did indeed use earth-penetrating (bunker-buster) bombs, having since 2010 received 500 from the United States. Since the last war with Israel in 2006, Hizbollah has progressively used underground storage for many of its missiles, so any data on the IDF’s actual capabilities in this regard will be priceless.

At first sight the recent exchange of fire was a clear victory for the IDF against an incompetent enemy. At second sight it was much more than that. The Iranians will now be much better prepared for what might be to come.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy’s international security adviser, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His latest book is Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threat from the Margins (IB Tauris, 2016), which follows Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/
 

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lead Israeli construction of a wall on the Lebanese border and the growing arsenal of Iran-backed Hezbollah have contributed to the spike in tensions. Metula, Israel in February, 2018. Nir Alon/Press Association. All rights reserved.The joint cruise-missile attack on Syria by forces of the United States, France and the United Kingdom on the night of 13-14 April was a largely symbolic gesture. It warns Bashar al-Assad’s regime against further use of chemical weapons, but does little else. Such at least is the conclusion of a new Oxford Research Group analysis of the operation and its context.     

From the perspective of Damascus, the use of chemical weapons has a narrow and localised role as a form of terror to force the evacuation of districts. More widely, the Syrian regime’s overwhelming weapons of choice remain air and artillery attacks, which will no doubt be used extensively in forthcoming actions against the holdout rebel-held areas in Idlib province along part of Syria’s border with Turkey (see “After the Syria raid: what next?”, 17 April 2018)

The regime’s main backers, Russia and Iran, draw from the US-led raid the lesson that they have little to fear of further western interventions and have free rein to continue their support for Assad. In Iran’s case, this support has less to do with Syria’s leadership itself and much more to do with Israel, where by contrast there is consternation in government circles over the modest nature of the western assault. The ORG briefing says:

“Unless the Assad regime miscalculates in its military operations against the remaining rebel centres in Idlib Province, the most probable consequence of the Western raid on Syria will be increased Israeli involvement in the conflict. Given the rising influence of anti-Iranian hawks within the Trump administration, that escalation will not necessarily be confined to Syria.”

Before the western action, there was welcome if deliberately low-key support in Jerusalem for President Trump’s decision to reshuffle his foreign affairs and security teams. There have been three notable appointments. The hawkish anti-Iran and anti-Russia figure of John Bolton became national-security adviser, replacing the more thoughtful HR McMaster. The religious conservative Mike Pompeo survived a nomination process to exchange his role as director of the CIA for one as secretary of state, after the resignation of Rex Tillerson from that job. Gina Haspel, Pompeo’s own proposed replacement, has a dubious record on the “robust interrogation” of Islamist suspects.

The main role of a national-security advisor is to present to the head of state a considered view of security issues and appropriate responses. McMaster, as a retired general, was thought by many observers to be likely to emphasise military options, a view reflected in several of these columns (see for example, “The Trump wars era”, 30 November 2017). In practice he was more cautious than was anticipated, whereas Bolton’s long track record is consistent and forceful. It follows that the one-off joint military operation fell short of a frontal challenge to Assad, and as such represents a success for the Pentagon.

The hawks’ moment

This in turn constitutes a great concern for Binyamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel. Here, the context is that the civil war in Syria has considerably strengthened Hizbollah, allowing it to expand beyond its base in southern Lebanon through Syria itself. The war has also enhanced the influence of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), especially the special-force component known as the Quds force.  

Iran is regarded as the greatest single threat to Israel, whose right wing sees Iran as an existential threat which simply has to be confronted. In its view, that Iran now has strong influence and an increasing military presence so near to Israel’s border is simply unacceptable. A further issue is Iran’s sway over the Shi’a government in Baghdad, which reportedly now includes close Iranian input in the redevelopment of Iraq’s own military-industrial complex. Israel sees this as further proof that Iran is spreading its military influence across the region (see “Syria’s wars: a new dynamic”, 15 February 2018).

Syria, however, is the more immediate worry. In recent weeks, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) sources have been registering a steady increase in direct Iranian military engagement there. Iran may even be able to link up with militias that control territory uncomfortably close to the Israeli ceasefire lines on the Golan heights (see Nicholas Blanford & Jonathan Spyer, “Bordering on Chaos”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, February 2018). This deepens the existing bond between Iran and Hizbollah, and further allows the transfer of weapons across Syria in transit to southern Lebanon.

The latter trend has frequently been met with IDF airstrikes. Indeed the level of Israeli military operations in Syria is almost entirely unrecognised outside the region. A recent estimate is that, since the civil war began in 2011, Israel has conducted around a hundred strikes across the border.

Two new reports signal the accelerating military pace. In one, the IDF claims that the Iranian military now have a substantial presence at five different air bases scattered across Syria. Moreover, Iran now possesses a drone known as the Simorgh, based on the US’s RQ-170 “stealth” reconnaissance drone that crashed in Iran in December 2011 and has since been re-engineered and put into production by Iranian technicians (see “An asymmetrical drone war”, 19 August 2010).

Another report, in a US military journal, says that one of these drones, shot down in March when flying over Israel, was actually armed with an explosive charge rather than just functioning as a reconaissance drone. There isn’t yet any independent corroboration of this, but from an IDF perspective it would mean that Iranian government forces – rather than their Hizbollah surrogate in Syria alone – are prepared to attack the state of Israel in its own territory.

A single drone with a small explosive charge overflying Israel can be seen as highly provocative yet to an extent gestural – a response to Israel’s own raids into Syria. But Israel’s calculation goes much further. IDF sources point to the establishment of Iranian ballistic-missile bases in Syria for the storage of short- and medium-range missiles.

On the political front, Israel’s government is wary of the intensive European efforts to dissuade Trump from his intended repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal by 12 May. The state visit to Washington of Emmanuel Macron, quickly to be followed by Angela Merkel’s one-day working trip, is at least partly about saving the agreement. Israel continues to want a much tougher line against Tehran (see Khaled Hroub, “Middle East nightmare, made in Washington”, 20 April 2018).

For Israel, the current cycle is thus proving decidedly uncomfortable on several fronts. Tensions with Hizbollah and Iran are rising, while hopes that the White House new arrivals John Bolton and Mike Pompeo would sway Trump further against Iran are in the balance. Trump is notoriously unpredictable. But at least for now, the main consequence of the US-UK-France raid on Syria really is an increased risk of wider war: less “mission accomplished” than yet more blowback.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy’s international security adviser, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His latest book is Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threat from the Margins (IB Tauris, 2016), which follows Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers

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Donald Trump speaks during the joint session of Congress to deliver his State of the Union Address in the Capitol on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2018. CQ-Roll Call/PA Images. All rights reserved.

George W Bush’s post-9/11 address launched sixteen years of war. Donald Trump’s sequel promises many more.     
 
George W Bush gave his first state-of-the-union address on 29 January 2002, just four months after the 9/11 attacks. Sixteen years and one day later, on 30 January 2018, Donald Trump delivered his own opening performance of the ritual. Where their rhetoric on international security is concerned, the overlap between the two presidential speeches is remarkable.

Just as Bush pro-claimed the “new American century”, so Donald Trump is “making America great again”. It is as if these tumultuous years have brought no change.

Just as Bush proclaimed the “new American century”, so Donald Trump is “making America great again”. It is as if these tumultuous years have brought no change. For both leaders, the United States is destined to just go on winning. Bush’s dream soon faced a hard landing in the world beyond Washington. Will Trump’s slogan meet the same fate? A closer look at the two speeches might offer a clue. 

The consequences of Bush’s address are all around. In the agenda it outlined, and the tragic outcomes it foretold, it may yet be seen as one of the most notable speeches of the 21st century. At the time his supporters were already hailing it as such. After all, it was akin to a victory celebration: in the previous weeks, the Taliban had been driven from Kabul and al-Qaida dispersed from its Afghan bastion. But the president, in between more than seventy bursts of applause from a rapturous Congress, made clear that his administration was already setting its sights on regime termination in Iraq and other rogue states:
“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.  They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

This threat demanded early action:

“We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as perils draw closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

The implication of Bush’s stance – the need for pre-emptive and if necessary unilateral action – was made more explicit in his graduation address to West Point army cadets in June 2002. The ease with which adversaries could now attack advanced civilised states was a key theme:

“Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger the American people and our nation. The attacks of September the 11th required a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and deluded men. All of the chaos and suffering they caused came at much less than the cost of a single tank. The dangers have not passed. This government and the American people are on watch, we are ready, because we know the terrorists have more money and more men and more plans.”

So in facing the threat, defending the homeland was simply not enough:

“[The] war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”
Furthermore, rogue states should be treated in the same way as terrorists:

“All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price. We will not leave the safety of America and the peace of the planet at the mercy of a few mad terrorists and tyrants. We will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world.” 

The world now knows how that played out. What followed Bush’s peroration was no one’s victory. His prospectus crafted not a new American century leading to a more peaceful world, but a wasteland: sixteen years of war, hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, millions of refugees fleeing their homes and livelihoods, states such as Afghanistan, Iraq and especially Libya wrecked, and expanding insurgency and insecurity across a vast swathe of territory.
 

A president on repeat

How far the impact of Donald Trump’s state-of-the-union address matches that of George W Bush’s, and how far it differs, will be seen in coming months and years. Its own style was, perhaps to be expected, bombastic and celebratory, with a heavy focus on the brilliance of his apparently groundbreaking domestic agenda. Its international component was less forceful than Bush’s post-9/11 arousal. But Trump’s view of the world as a nest of enemies carried echoes of his predecessor. This became explicit in his uncompromising approach to Iran and North Korea (un-toppled members of Bush’s axis of evil) and in his treatment of al-Qaida, ISIS and other Islamist groups:

“Last year, I also pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the Earth. One year later, I am proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated very close to 100 percent of the territory just recently held by these killers in Iraq and in Syria and in other locations, as well. But there is much more work to be done. We will continue our fight until ISIS is defeated.”

He went on:
“I am asking Congress to ensure that in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaida we continue to have all necessary power to detain terrorists, wherever we chase them down, wherever we find them. And in many cases, for them it will now be Guantanamo Bay. At the same time, as of a few months ago, our warriors in Afghanistan have new rules of engagement. Along with their heroic Afghan partners, our military is no longer undermined by artificial timelines, and we no longer tell our enemies our plans.”

How does these declarations relate to experience on the ground? Libya is one of ISIS’s “other locations”. Here, Cipher Brief reports:

“[ISIS]…maintains a strong presence in Libya and remains a potent regional threat, despite domestic and international efforts to oust the group from its stronghold. After losing their former base of operations along the Libyan coast, ISIS fighters have regrouped and established training centers and operational headquarters in the central and southern parts of the country. Unless Libya can make headway toward forming a unified government, its lawless border areas will continue to provide fertile ground for ISIS and other terrorist groups to foment instability across North Africa.” 

In Afghanistan, the Taliban is reported to control or have substantial influence over a least a third of the country. It remains dominant among a cluster of groups that includes ISIS and the Haqqani network. A recent wave of attacks has killed over 130 people, mostly civilians, while an ISIS attack on an Afghan national army base took the lives of twelve soldiers. Trump’s response is to send in another 4,000 troops, which would take the total to 15,000. The United States also deploys special-forces personnel and armed-drones, while the US airforce has even brought back the A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft.  

A wrong-headed strategy

On the eve of his set-piece, Trump had told reporters: “We’re going to finish what we have to finish. What nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it.” (Helene Cooper, “Attacks Reveal What U.S. Won’t: Victory Remains Elusive in Afghanistan”, New York Times, 31 January 2018).

It was another bold claim. But that’s the point: for it is only the latest in a long sequence of such predictions of imminent victory made by the Pentagon or White House over these sixteen years. Trump is now adding to that list without the remotest hint of new thinking or strategy. It’s as well to remember that five years ago, US forces in Afghanistan peaked at 100,000. They were joined by 30,000 military from other countries, and thousands of private-security contractors as well. The idea that barely a tenth of that number will make any difference, when the Taliban and other movements have such a grip, is just out of this world.

More fundamentally, Trump’s policies will stir up more animosity, resentment and deep anger towards the United States abroad. His speech itself demonstrated this. Detention without trial for years or even decades will continue at Guantánamo and probably elsewhere; military control will escalate, and quite possibly reach new heights of destruction; and in a decision that has huge symbolism in the Islamic and Arab worlds, the US embassy in Israel will move to Jerusalem.

This worldview has not worked since Bush’s address, and it won’t work in the future. Indeed, Trump’s speech highlights in stark form that he and his advisors really have no clue whatsoever of how the United States is perceived, not just in the Middle East and north Africa but across much of the global south.
Trump’s signal in 2018 is that nothing has been learned since 2002. “Making America great again” is from the same stable as the “new American century”: an epic delusion foisted on the American people and the world. Bush inaugurated sixteen years of war. Trump will extend that to thirty and more – unless there is a radical change of thinking.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/
 

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Ceramic poppies from the Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red artwork installed at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, for Remembrance Services in 2015. Peter Byrne/PA Archive/Press Association. It seems to be business as usual in the worldwide “war on terror”. The United States military is currently embroiled in many hotspots where violence, fear, and the ever present reality or threat of high explosive are the order of the day. Those conditions mean, for people at the sharp end, multiple distress. But for suppliers of weapons and military equipment, the good times – which never really went away – are back.

Consider, for a moment, just a few of the international conflicts stretching from Africa to east Asia where the US is a major player. It is increasing the use of armed drones in Syria as the war against ISIS accelerates. It remains active in Iraq’s evolving combat. Its military chiefs are working out how to persuade Trump to expand operations in Afghanistan, even as a resurgent Taliban tell him in an open letter to withdraw all American forces from the country.  

It is also about to conduct a major “wargame” in South Korea, where Trump and his ally, Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe, seek to counter North Korea’s missile ambitions. It is providing heavy military assistance to the Philippines government as a much less comfortable ally, Rodrigo Duterte, takes on a local ISIS-affiliated movement in the southern city of Marawi. It is called on to deploy more resources in eastern Europe in face of Russia’s power, and to address the rise in paramilitary violence in the Sahel.

Such wars and rumours of wars require constant supplies, and this is where that perennial of human activity, the arms bazaar, comes in. The informative journal Defense News sums it up neatly with a report on military industries under the headline “A return to prosperity? Defense revenues climb for the first time in 5 years”.

The report lists the top hundred military companies, and in a helpful way. While highlighting businesses that may have many other interests, Defense News in this case focuses solely on their military-related activities. The results are most revealing. Take, for example, the top seven corporations with their country of origin and their defence revenues in 2016:

1. Lockheed Martin, United States: $43,468 billion
2. Boeing, United States: $29,500bn
3. BAE Systems, United Kingdom: $23,621bn
4. Raytheon, United States: $22,394bn
5. Northrop Grumman, United States: $20,200bn
6. General Dynamics, United States: $19,696bn
7. Airbus, Netherlands/France: $12,321bn

Even from such bare details, several important truths can be extracted or inferred. The first is the American dominance of the field, which is even more pronounced in that much of BAE Systems’s revenue comes from the company’s US-based activities. This leads to a second point, that all seven are transnational to varying extents. Airbus, for example, is active across western Europe, which allows it to use its clout with more governments. A third element is that these are very large outfits. Lockheed and Boeing each has annual military revenues larger than the entire GDP of Uganda, whose population is 39 million.

A fourth point is that this sheer wealth enables huge operations. These are often aided by the “revolving door” whereby senior civil servants and military chiefs who are concerned in any way with weapons development and procurement can secure very good post-retirement consultancies or even board memberships.

A fifth factor is that these companies, where their activity in relation to international arms sales is concerned, can rely on a favourable attitude from the states where their production is based. This positive outlook may extend to direct government encouragement and aid. A clear indication is a ruling which found against the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). The group had challenged the legality of the UK government’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia, where weaponry exported to Riyadh were being used in repeated bombing of targets in Yemen that had caused substantial loss of life among civilians.

**

A sixth and yet larger truth emerges, as obvious as the others yet all too frequently ignored. Major military companies actually need wars – or at least, they need very high states of tension and fear, of the kind which will guarantee increased sales potential.  

The ideal in such situations, whatever the company’s apparent national status, is to sell to both sides. Just before Nato’s air-war against the Gaddafi regime in 2011, for example, French and Italian arms companies were working for the Libyan government to upgrade its aircraft and armoured vehicles. Within days these were being destroyed by Nato forces, bringing a potential double benefit: supplying Nato states with more bombs and missiles to replace those used, and replenishing the Libyan hardware after the war.

In this case, only the first part worked out well, for Libya came apart at the seams and its arms market has not so far been open to the big company deals of the good old days. But there are compensations: the condition of Libya, with its radical Islamist groups, migration pressures and other insecurities all make for an atmosphere of tension and fear. This is felt sharply across the Mediterranean, which improves the chances of higher military budgets in European states looking to protect themselves from the fruits of their own policies (see “Libya: victory, tragedy, legacy“, 3 November 2011).

Shakespeare’s line in Henry V, “now thrive the armourers”, relates to the battle of Agincourt in 1415. But it is ever topical, and in more ways than one: for armourers also thrive by flinging accusations of lack of patriotism against people who question their operations, connections, and practical consequences. The biggest difference today is scale. These huge conglomerates are protected by their colossal turnovers, formidable power, and absolute belief in the legitimacy of what they do.

It will take a great deal to change this culture. A single example makes the point. Two of the three largest military corporations, Lockheed and BAE Systems, sponsor Britain’s annual Red Poppy Appeal run by the British Legion (see “Red poppies and the arms trade“, 12 November 2014). Thus an organisation dedicated to helping the casualties of war and their families actually gets financial support from companies making money out of producing and selling weapons. Such stark contradictions need to be aired, as a step on the road to being able to say “now thrive the peacemakers”. 

Courtesy: Open Democracy

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File photo: Ayman al-Zawahri and Osama bin Laden, 1998. Mazhar Ali Khan/AP/Press Association Images.

The combined Russian-Syrian bombardment of eastern Aleppo continues to be intense and often indiscriminate. In this the operation resembles the destruction of Grozny in the two Chechen wars of the 1990s. Strong opposition in western states includes a demand that relevant actions be designated as war crimes.In practice, such calls will not resonate much in the Middle East, for two reasons. The United States-led air-war against ISIS has caused 1,500-plus civilian casualties, a fact little acknowledged, while western support for the Saudi-led assault in Yemen – using weaponry sold by Britain – further erodes the credibility of British parliamentarians who criticise Russia.

Just as the supposed main Islamist threat from ISIS diminishes, al-Qaida’s modified ideology is flourishing.

Meanwhile, the United States-led coalition still remains focused on ISIS, and largely ignores the future of Bashar al-Assad's regime. Plans for the seizure of Mosul, the last major ISIS-controlled stronghold in Iraq, are rolling. But even if the city is taken in the coming months it is far from clear that ISIS will be repressed in Iraq, let alone Syria (see "Mosul, the next target", 29 September 2016 ). This is because of two collateral problems.

The first is ISIS's capacity for technical innovation. Its reported construction of defensive underground structures under Mosul could present major problems for the attackers, as could its use of armed drones and other ingenious forms of defence. Its deployment of reconnaissance drones is familiar, but armed versions are now appearing on the battlefield. The killing of two Kurdish soldiers by an unexploded drone they were examining is a case in point. 

The second problem derives from the sheer complexity of the coalition being created to take control of Mosul. At the moment the various forces involved (Iraqi government, Kurds, Iraqi Shi’a militias, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, some Sunni militias, western contingents) have a common interest in seeing ISIS defeated in the city. After that, though, there is every chance that pre-existing antagonisms will emerge. Turkey's determination to be involved, both in the assault and afterwards – to Baghdad's intense opposition – may prove especially disruptive.

Let's assume that Mosul does fall, and that ISIS is repressed in Iraq and forced to retreat in Syria and Libya. Would the difficulties posed by extreme Islamist paramilitary movements then decline? Almost certainly not, if only because of an entirely different development: the surprise re-emergence of al-Qaida as a major force. 

A new approach

When Osama bin Laden was killed in May 2011, to be succeeded by his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, there was a period of several years when al-Qaida seemed in abeyance. It retained the allegiance only of scattered and mostly weak groups, while itself regularly losing mid-level leaders to US drone and special-force operations, not least in north-west Pakistan. Then, from 2014, what was left of al-Qaida was overshadowed and eventually eclipsed by the rise of IS.

More recently, and to the surprise of many western security analysts who thought that al-Qaida was finished, it has staged a comeback – less in Iraq or Afghanistan than in Syria, Yemen and other theatres of conflict. 

There seem to be four reasons for this, the last being probably the most significant:

* Major western states have placed most emphasis on defeating ISIS, especially but not only in Iraq and Syria, using far less military force in operations against al-Qaida’s regional associates
* The sheer brutality of many of the actions of ISIS in Iraq and Syria has driven some paramilitary supporters away from ISIS and towards other militias, which are more likely to be linked to al-Qaida. The latter can present a more moderate face, though it is still resolutely determined on an Islamist transformation
* Some of the more secular anti-regime militias in Syria, responding to the destructive air-war waged jointly by the Russians and the Assad regime, have joined up with competent and determined groups, some of them too with al-Qaida connections
* Al-Qaida’s organisational approach has undergone a subtle but quite fundamental change. The movement, under bin Laden, had an all-or-nothing element – committed to a particular view of revolution which paid no deference to cultural variations in the communities in which it was operating. It appears now that the supposedly ineffectual al-Zawahiri has quietly imposed a shift towards paying more attention to the aspirations of peoples in those areas where it is garnering support. In the process the movement is willing to adapt its message and thereby increase its support.

The experienced analyst Bruce Hoffman puts it this way: “In all of al Qaeda’s main theatres, very unfortunately and tragically, it is gaining credibility and gaining respect, and amassing additional power at a time when we thought we could just write off al Qaeda as having strategically collapsed, if not decisively defeated.”  In short, just as the supposed main Islamist threat from ISIS diminishes, al-Qaida’s modified ideology is flourishing.

Once again, superficial western progress in its war on terror is masking yet more challenges, not least an enduring failure to understand how al-Qaida and other “revolts from the margins” gain support. This is part of a more general yet mistaken belief that they are susceptible to conventional military power. Even after 15 years the lesson has not been learned.

This Article was first published on Open Democracy
 

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