The Unravelling Middle East

Frederick Kagan is the Christopher DeMuth Chair and director at the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor of military history at the US Military Academy at West Point. He served in Afghanistan with General Stanley McChrystal’s (ret) strategic assessment team. He is also the author of a number of books and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard. On Thursday 28 November 2013, Frederick Kagan joined Dr Kim Kagan, founder and president of the Institute for The Study of War to discuss the deteriorating situation in the Middle East. The paper which follows is taken from an edited transcript of Dr Kagan’s address.

THE UNRAVELLING MIDDLE EAST

FREDERICK KAGAN

This is no small topic, the unravelling of the Middle East. But let’s make a start. For Australians, your most important allies are having a nervous breakdown. And this has brought on a variety of extremely bad decisions which has put the US at risk and also all of those who are allied with it. Australia is certainly among our most important and our most valued allies. Kim and I, obviously, spend a lot of time in Afghanistan working with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Americans would say that ISAF stands for “I Saw Americans Fighting”. But we know it also stands for “I Saw Australians Fighting”. And it’s amazing how few countries actually fit into that definition of the acronym, either in alphabetical quality or in actual fact.

So, you have a problem. We, of course, have a bigger problem. The problem is that we have mismanaged affairs in the Middle East and generally over the last five years. Some would say longer and I wouldn’t argue with that.

So, I’ll speak to you briefly about the problem that we track very closely at the American Enterprise Institute – which is Al Qaida and the growing threat it poses globally and how that’s changed. Then Kim will speak to some of the even larger issues that are partially related to that. We weren’t intending to talk about the “brilliant” piece of diplomacy that has just been consummated between the P5+1 and the Islamic Republic of Iran. If you want to talk about that in questions, we’d be more than happy to.

I wish I could give you a good news and bad news on Al Qaida. But there is only bad news and worse news on Al Qaida. Globally, we are facing an Al Qaida threat, today, that is significantly more extensive, and disposing of significantly more resources and combat power, than it ever has before. We are losing the struggle with Al Qaida in my view. My analyst follows this most closely. We’re losing on every front except for one. The only front we’re not losing on, at the moment, is Afghanistan.

If we maintain a presence in Afghanistan, over time we may be able to hold onto the gains there; if not then we’ll be losing there too. We have seen the consequences of the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq manifest in the re-emergence of an Al Qaida interlock franchise that is as lethal, and probably better organised, than it ever was before. It has spread into Syria where it has spawned two separate Al Qaida franchises competing with one another. This makes Syria the first country in the world to have two distinct Al Qaida franchises engaged in combat – and Kim will talk more about the consequences and implications of that.

You may hear the Obama administration – although they do this less and less as it’s becoming more transparently nonsense – hold up Yemen as an example of successful counter-terrorism where we worked with the Yemeni military. The US has made a few drone strikes and driven out one of the largest and most lethal Al Qaida organisations – Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula – from the two provinces it had been controlling about 18 months ago.

The trouble is that we declared victory and stopped doing very much. Since then, the Yemeni military has begun to fall apart. My analyst, who has been tracking it, has counted up to 35 brigade level mutinies within the Yemeni military over an 18 month period. She has stopped counting. One brigade was dissolved in place – the soldiers simply took their weapons and walked home. This is never a very good sign for a military partner that you’re relying on to fight the enemy, particularly when the soldiers walked home in a rather Al Qaida heavy area.

Another case that people like to point to is Somalia, where we had, primarily from Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia – almost 20,000 troops – fighting in Somalia against the Al Qaida affiliate there, Al Shabaab. And they certainly have deprived Al Shabaab of control over Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, and of a lot of the South. The problem again is that it’s beginning to erode. We’re seeing Al Shabaab, in addition to the spectacular attack in Kenya at the Westgate Mall that they conducted. They are regaining ground in Somalia where they had been driven out of, which is not surprising.

When your counter terrorism strategy relies on the prolonged engagement of the militaries of three of the poorest countries in the world, with virtually no external support, the likelihood of that been successful in the long term is rather low. Indeed, especially as two of those countries don’t get along very well – that being Ethiopia and Kenya. It also particularly doesn’t help that the International Criminal Court is working to put on trial the President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, for war crimes. I have no opinion about whether he is guilty or not, but I do think that having the ICC go after him significantly reduces the likelihood that he will remain focused on fighting Shabaab in Somalia. Meanwhile, the Ethiopians and Somalis back different clans and gangs in Somalia and these are starting to get out for control. It is not a very promising situation.

The attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall did not come as a huge surprise to us. We certainly didn’t predict the date, time and magnitude but we were tracking that Al Shabaab has a transnational objective with the intent of attacking targets regionally. It has been recruiting heavily amongst English speakers and there is a significant Somalian community in America’s mid-west. Over several years, Al Shabaab has been putting out recruiting videos in English with rap songs and such things. As you no doubt know, some reports suggested there were Americans and British involved in the Westgate mall attack.

An attack into Kenya was not terribly surprising, but the success and nature of the attack was very distressing. The attack was conducted entirely with small arms. Hand weapons. There wasn’t a suicide bomber, or a car bomb, there wasn’t any sort of complicated technology, just a bunch of guys and a woman who apparently ran with them with AK-47s – going into a mall and shooting it up.

What I find very distressing about it is that the Westgate Mall attack was a tactic unlike any of the others that we’ve seen in the Middle East. It is also easily exportable to the United States or Australia or anywhere else where there is already a supply of assault weapons. Only training is actually required for the kind of squad level manoeuvring of such an attack, and that training can be accomplished very easily in a lot of different places. In fact, Al Qaida already disposes of thousands of people who have that level of skill, manifested on a number of different battle fields.

The Westgate Mall could become a standard technique for conducting terror attacks. It does have a footprint; and it would be possible, in principle, to detect preparations for that kind of thing in some respect more easily than finding an individual pursuing a pressure cooker bomber of the variety we had in Boston. All true, if we weren’t in the process of dismantling our surveillance capabilities. In this context, let me take a moment to apologise on behalf of the people of the United States of America for Edward Snowden. He’s done more damage in recent times between you and your nearest neighbour, Indonesia.

Snowden has made a tremendous contribution to the enemies of all of our peoples in two ways. He has told them, through the top secret documents he stole, exactly what we’ve been doing and how we’ve been monitoring them and so forth, allowing them to change their practices, etc. But Snowden has also twisted public opinion against the practice of defensive monitoring of communications in a way that will curtail that practice.

I’d be very happy to talk with you about the extraordinarily complicated trade-offs between privacy and civil liberties and security. I don’t think it’s simple at all. But I do think it’s something that we should be talking about. The net result of the current stampede will be to disarm our defensive capabilities against an Al Qaida organisation that is gaining significantly in its own offensive capabilities, against us.

And, of course, that leads us further into Africa where we are finding Al Qaida franchises that have been there for a long time and which are gaining significantly in strength and import. Here I’m referring to Al Qaida and the Islamic Maghreb which was operating in Mali, and has made connections to Boko Haram which is the major Islamist opposition group in Nigeria. The group was born in Algeria and appears now to also be operating in Tunisia and Libya and to be cooperating with Shabaab and Al Qaida’s central leaderships.

Five years ago, Al Qaida and the Islamic Maghreb was a kidnap for ransom enterprise, fundamentally. They would pick up Western tourists and charge ransom which would mostly be paid. They would usually release the tourists and they would call it a day. It was not a threat that anyone was tracking in a major way. Now it has demonstrated an ability to take over a significant portion of a small, isolated African country and challenge the French who scattered it but weren’t able to defeat it. It is now spread throughout the entire Sahara and Sahill area.

There are Al Qaida franchises, doing very well, that range from the Atlantic coast of Africa all the way through into the heart of the Middle East. They’re operating in Egypt and they’re operating especially in the Sinai. You’ll also see radicalisation within metropolitan Egypt and that’s a concern – as well as into Syria. In Lebanon, we’re seeing significant Al Qaida activity. In Iraq, we continue to have Al Qaida affiliated groups of a significant scale, and they threaten Pakistan. There are some Al Qaida leaders in Iran, although I don’t think that they’re up to very much. And the only reason I’m not coming further east is because I ran out of analysts before I got here.

It’s of great concern to me. I don’t know what the Al Qaida networks into this part of the world are, except to say that I know they’re working aggressively to expand throughout the Muslim world. And we have not, collectively, found a successful approach to deal with this threat. Whatever we have been doing is not working. The unfortunate thing is that our current US administration seems much more inclined to say: it’s all good, there’s nothing to worry about, it’s fine, we’ve got the core Al Qaida group, as they say, under control. As if that were the threat. This is not the case.

That’s not going to work. That’s an ostrich strategy and it’s going to bite us and it’s going to bite our lives as well. And it is very important for all of us, as a transatlantic and transpacific alliance, to think the problem through. The answer could come from anywhere. Obviously, the United States will have to play an important role, but there is first a role to be played for anyone who wants to understand the nature of this problem, and devise an intelligent, global strategy for dealing with it – or regional strategies for dealing with it – that can be adopted by the next American President.

One thing that I’m quite certain of – and that gives me some hope.  We will not see a constitutional amendment in the United States any time soon extending the term limits for President Obama. He will therefore be retiring from office in January 2017. Then we shall have an opportunity to make a change in strategy. That’s what we have to be prepared for. On that uplifting note – which is the best I can do for optimism – let me turn it over to Kim to depress you some more.