The Islamic State’s recent setbacks in Iraq and Syria may portend the group’s eventual collapse, but the chaos left behind will present a challenge of a different sort, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
A major deficiency in America’s history of involvement with armed conflict overseas has been inattention to whatever would follow defeat of the bête noire of the moment. The outstanding example is, of course, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the promoters of that war being irresponsibly negligent in not seriously considering that the aftermath of deposing the Iraqi regime would be anything other than a stable and democratic polity.
A similar deficiency occurred when the United States followed a European lead in deposing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. When disorder and continued conflict ensue, the wider consequences are invariably bad for U.S. interests and international security. This includes in particular providing fertile ground for extremism and terrorism, as the invasion of Iraq did in giving birth to the group we now know as ISIS.
President Barack Obama in his weekly address on Sept. 13, 2014, vowing to degrade and ultimately defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. (White House Photo)
Much of what applies to the overthrow of regimes applies as well to the defeat of ISIS itself, a non-state actor that has taken control of a chunk of territory and has been trying to function like a state. There are, to be sure, significant differences between true state regimes and ISIS, an ephemeral phenomenon that is especially barbaric and wholly illegitimate and unrecognized.
It would be hard to make a good case for a strategy that centers on leaving ISIS in place indefinitely, while a strong case certainly could be made that we would have been better off today if we hadn’t gone after a regime such as the one in Iraq. But there are similar issues of what comes afterward.
Those issues are going to have to be confronted soon. ISIS is on the run. In Iraq it has lost nearly half of the territory it had gained in its offensive in 2014, and government forces are in the early stage of a campaign to retake Iraq’s second city,…