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Response to Paris Carnage: Taking Common Sense Steps
Highlights
The recent terrorist attacks in Paris, which claimed 129 lives, leaving countless more injured and maimed, are likely to set the wheels of war turning once again. Soon afterwards French President François Hollande characterized the attacks claimed by the Islamic State as “an act of war”. He vowed to a wounded French nation that, “We will lead the fight, and our response will be merciless.”
The recent terrorist attacks in Paris, which claimed 129 lives, leaving countless more injured and maimed, are likely to set the wheels of war turning once again. Soon afterwards French President François Hollande characterized the attacks claimed by the Islamic State as “an act of war”. He vowed to a wounded French nation that, “We will lead the fight, and our response will be merciless.”
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French warplanes are already attacking IS stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, and so are Russian warplanes. Moscow’s bombing campaign is in response to another IS attack that brought down a Russian passenger jet over Egypt last month, killing all 224 people on board.
The aerial assault is a harbinger of what is to come. There is talk that France will demand NATO action, invoking Article 5, which states an “armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” James Stavridis, former NATO supreme allied commander, even recently argued that the fundamental purpose of a NATO mission should be to defeat IS in Syria and destroy the infrastructure it has created there. David Kilcullen, who served as the senior counterinsurgency advisor to US General David Petraeus during Iraq war, too, stressed the need for “a serious air campaign”.
These all make me ask: Have we learned nothing in the last fourteen years of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? By its inherent nature, air power cannot hold territory. Thus, allowing the IS to weather what they call storm, hiding behind civilian populations in its strongholds like Aleppo, Mosul and Ramadi.
Only look as far as Iraq and Afghan wars to see the shortcomings of aerial campaign. Early in Afghan war, US Special Operations Force managed to locate exposed and ill-prepared indigenous Afghan Taliban targets and destroy them with stand-off precision aerial strikes. But as the time went on, indigenous Afghan Taliban were replaced with better trained foreign and Al-Qaeda fighters who could survive American air attacks by making use of camouflage discipline and dummy fighting positions to distract attention from their real positions, making air strikes less effective and ground combat more frequent. Things are not that offbeat in the Operation Iraqi Freedom. Air strikes were perhaps helpful in enabling the US-led coalition forces to annihilate Iraqi urban defenders at a very low cost.
But they were far from being sufficient to bring victory to the coalition forces. What contributed to the campaign’s quick conclusion and the coalition’s victory was Iraqis’ ineptitude to fight an urban warfare and to reduce their exposure. Hence, stand-off aerial campaigns against IS will drop millions in ordnances on shattered cities, resulting in nothing but massive civilian casualties.
However, let’s say NATO brings the full military might of its 28-nation alliance to bear upon the IS. Ground troops will engage in a close combat, wading into a maelstrom of local realities and far-reaching geopolitical consequences. And, IS strongholds may be liberated after a long and bloody warfare. But what then? Will NATO remain behind for another decade of counterinsurgency and reconstruction there ¬– losing billions of dollars again?
We should understand building peace is not so easy as waging a war. That is not to say that we must do nothing. We must fight such heinous terrorist attacks against humanity. Simultaneously we have got to deal with root causes that give rise to religious militancy in our modern multi-racial societies. And, these include ongoing Syrian crisis, protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict, marginalization of Sunnite people in Iraq, America’s double standard role in the Middle East and importantly the West’s selective humanity. Failure to address these will no doubt keep terrorism enduring.
Tanbir Uddin Arman
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