The Unravelling Middle East

Dr Kim Kagan is the founder and president of the Institute for The Study of War. She has taught military history at the US Military Academy at West Point, and at Yale and Georgetown Universities. Kim Kagan is the author of The Eye of Command (University of Michigan Press, 2006), The Surge: A Military History (Encounter Books, 2009), and is editor of The Imperial Moment (Harvard University Press, 2010). On Thursday 28 November 2013, Kim Kagan joined Dr Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) & former professor of military history at West Point Military Academy 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

KIM KAGAN

Thank you very much Fred for leaving everything so positive. Now, obviously one of the reasons we’re seeing such a growth in Al Qaeda as a brand and as an organisation is the transition that is going on in the Middle East as a result, in part, of the Arab Spring. As a result of the redrawing of borders and the failure of government, both before and in the wake of the Arab spring, to satisfy the popular demand for social and political reforms, a degree of civil disorder and unrest conducive to the growth of Al Qaeda has been in play.

Al Qaeda as an organisation has focussed itself in areas where there is inherent civil war and vacuums of state authority in order to reconstruct the kind of order that it sees as being essential to the ruling of the world from its perspective. We have seen this in places such as Afghanistan, and Iraq. But, more and more, the driving force in the re-radicalisation and expansion of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups is coming from Syria. The protracted conflict there presents the kinds of conditions that Al Qaeda would look for if it were looking for an ideal place to flourish.

We have a civil war in Syria that is growing in magnitude, we have a state in the Assad regime that is not able to project itself through its borders and we have a revolt from a peaceful protest movement that has metamorphasised and transformed itself into a set of armies that have not received the kind of foreign support that would allow them to cohere into a singular and unified force.

What we see in Syria, through the protraction of this conflict, is the way in which Al Qaeda has positioned its incredible organisation and its reach alongside the availability of resources in the Middle East, in order to take advantage of a situation in which it was a marginal player for the first twelve months of the conflict. This is important, not only because it speaks to how Al Qaeda is gaining ground in Syria or Iraq, but because Syria is a place where we shall see international radicalisation of a variety we saw previously in Afghanistan in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s. We have a breeding ground within Syria for Al Qaeda that will last a generation at least. It is the fight of the moment. We also have a profound sectarian war under way within the Middle East that is new, different and atypical.

We can talk in questions and discussion about how unusual this sectarian war is. What I’d like to do is talk to you about how I see it and, coming to fruition over the past nine months, what I think it means not only for the Middle East but for the wider arc of conflict that stretches from Africa through Pakistan and into Asia. Of course, one of the reasons the Syrian conflict is protracting is that the Assad regime has state support from Iran which has a profound interest in maintaining that regime. Iran needs Syria to have the kind of reach in the Middle East for it to have a degree of security in the year or years it is going to go nuclear. That reach ensures a degree of retributive capability against Israel and a degree of coherence in its wider environment in order for Iran not to feel isolated.

What we have seen, therefore, unsurprisingly is an extraordinary amount of state support coming from Iran to Syria and the Assad regime. We have watched a drip and slow moving flow of that first non lethal then lethal assistance to Assad which resulted in the protraction of the campaign.

The Assad regime never had enough forces to put down the rebellion against it. As we’ve watched the conflict develop, Assad still does not have the resources required to suppress the rebel groups. The regime has had to operate piecemeal and was quite run down by the rebels through the Spring of 2013 when it was dependant on aerial resupply in its outer northern outpost. It could not move on the ground and had to seek more than funding and weapons. Assad needed reinforcement bodies from Iran and Hezbollah in order to continue to fight. In February-March 2013 we saw Hezbollah mobilising in support of the Assad regime and providing large numbers of forces, up to about 5000 estimated, to fight in Syria with the regime and to provide a cadre of infantrymen to operate alongside the regime in the attack against the main rebel positions on Al Saqraja near the border with Lebanon.

But Hezbollah’s mobilisation, which was meant to be short and task oriented at removing rebel pockets in an area critical to the regime, has actually protracted into what is now a nine month mobilisation of Hezbollah inside Syria. This build up is backed by an Iranian volunteer mobilisation. We have seen the placards and the recruiting stations in photographs from Iran, advertising in Farsi “Here is where you sign up to participate in the Syrian conflict”. Extraordinarily, we’ve seen senior Iranian officers in command and control positions inside Syria, including one who was assassinated there in about February or March last year.

There is now a slow growth and rise of Hezbollah, very much complimenting the Iranian overarching strategy in Syria. This in itself, followed by the defeat of the rebels at al-Qusayr in June 2013, provided a narrative and a cause for mobilisation both within the Shia and Sunni world in a way that has been more international and cross border and farther reaching than I would have expected.

It has obviously been important for Shia communities, for example those within Iraq, to be fighting for the holy place, sand shrines inside Damascus. Places such as the Sayyida Zeinab Mosque where numerous Shia militant groups have been fighting since 2012. But, in the mobilisation of Hezbollah, the joining of forces that so antagonised clerical elements in places such as Egypt and locations such as Kuwait, there has been a call for sectarian mobilisation on behalf of the Sunni. And with this there has also been a call for sectarian and Al Qaeda mobilisation.

Mobilisation of Sunni groups and Sunni fighters went not only from local neighbouring states to Syria, but has engaged neighbouring populations as far away as Pakistan. In fact, the Pakistani Taliban offered volunteers to some of the radical groups fighting in Syria for the Syrian conflict. We see Chetans fighting and we’ve seen mobilisations inside Syria. And this sectarian narrative and sectarian mobilisation has also spread to Pakistan in a way that is very destabilising.

For one thing, it is an active campaign, Sunni on Shia, in some of the cities of Pakistan, in Karachi among others. It provides a platform and dialogue in radicalisation. Radicalising publications talk about the need to mobilise against Iran, against Hezbollah and against the Shia in a way that is, again, a little bit atypical for Pakistan but echoes the language, the propaganda, the radicalisation of the publications that are emanating from places like Egypt and Kuwait in support of the Syrian conflict. It came at the time Hezbollah was mobilising. It can be its own independent trend but it correlates quite strongly with the kind of radicalisation and sectarian mobilisation that we began to see around April-June 2013.

This sectarian conflict is ongoing. It is not unique to the Arab world although obviously that is its focal point, or its centre of gravity, right now. And it is adding to the continued violent friction that we see everywhere, from Africa to Egypt to Sinai, to Syria to Lebanon to Iraq and spread from there to Pakistan. This kind of sectarian conflict is something Al Qaeda has not always engaged in but which gives it additional legs in places that do not meet the criteria of bad governments or lack of state control or civil war, where it needs mobilisation and radicalisation capability on a different basis. The Al Qaeda leadership accepts the idea of a sectarian call to arms as a driving motive for its recruitment, for its prioritisation and for its attempts at state building.

All this will spread more quickly or, perhaps, more profoundly than we think to places where Hezbollah has tentacles. One of the most interesting projects which one of my analysts undertook was the study of the protests that arose after the unfortunate film that was released critiquing Mohammad. That spread throughout the world following September 11, 2012.

What was so fascinating about these protects was that anyone who protested wanted to be seen. It’s a new era. If you protest, you want to be out there in public; it’s not a protest if you don’t have a photograph, if you don’t have a video, if you don’t have some media presence. We saw a number of protests organised and orchestrated by Hezbollah affiliates – real action Hezbollah propaganda, including pictures, photographs of the Iranian supreme leader, lovely photographs, well organised and well printed placards in places as diverse as Nigeria and Thailand. Such places obviously have Hezbollah organisations with roots and can spread where those communities felt it necessary and important to announce themselves at a moment of anti-Western protests.

As we look at this sectarian phenomenon which is being driven in part by Al Qaeda, in part by radical clerics and in part by Iran as a state based actor, we need to recognise that Iran has tentacles that reach far and wide, from Latin American through the Pacific. The potential friction from that sectarian conflict can transcend the borders of the Middle East and lead to a degree of unrest and unravelling beyond the borders of the states that are in churn and in collapse. I don’t know that I’ve left you on any more optimistic note than Fred has, but that’s the region as I see it.