Ends and means after the caliphate

On September 10 the Brookings Institution hosted a panel discussion entitled “The Counter-ISIS Coalition: Diplomacy and Security in Action.” The panel featured two former special presidential envoys to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL: General John Allen, current President of Brookings, and Brett McGurk, a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Lise Grande, who served as Deputy Special Representative of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq during the height of the campaign against ISIS, joined the panel through a video link from Amman. The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser moderated.

Allen emphasized that ISIS remains a threat through its residual forces in Syria, the presence of its affiliates in countries like Nigeria, Libya, and the Philippines, and its online influence. McGurk also pointed to the danger of the next generation of jihadi fighters coming from Syria’s al-Hol camp, where 73,000 ISIS women and children are held. Neither the Syrian Democratic Forces who administer the camp nor the US have sufficient resources to manage the threat.

America’s objectives in Syria have broadened under the Trump administration to include countering the remaining ISIS threat, promoting regime change, and removing Iranian forces from the country. Simultaneously, America has reduced the number US troops to around 1000. McGurk stressed that this widening gap between America’s goals in Syria and the resources it has in the country will make it hard to respond to the next crisis. The Turkish-US joint patrols of the safe zone in northern Syria that began last weekend will further draw these limited resources away from managing critical threats like al-Hol.

Both McGurk and Allen attributed the coalition’s successes to three factors: strong American leadership, commitment from an unusually large number of allies, and working by, with, and through local partners that America had previously developed in Iraq. Both argued that in the event of a crisis it would be harder to create a coalition now due to some allies’ loss of trust in American leadership. McGurk also speculated that John Bolton’s departure from the White House will not change these conditions, stating that the Trump administration lacked a functional communication process between the President and the national security adviser prior to Bolton’s tenure.

Grande noted that while UN stabilization usually begins by trying to fixing entire systems, in Iraq they took a bottom-up approach to repairing electricity, water, and sanitation grids. During the stabilization of Ramadi, UN workers coordinated with Iraqi forces to enter cities as soon as they were liberated and set up mobile electricity grids consisting of generators on trucks. They hired local engineers to connect each house to the generators as families returned to them. While past stabilization programs have taken 2 years to reconnect electricity grids, in Ramadi families had power within 2 hours of returning home. Grande described this as both the largest and most successful stabilization effort in the UN’s history, which she said was possible due to the strength of the Iraqi government’s commitment, an Iraqi private sector with great engineering capabilities, and support from the coalition and the United States.

Grande also credits the success the UN had in stabilizing these cities to the premium Iraqi forces placed on protecting civilians and keeping them in their homes when possible. Each morning during the liberation of Mosul, the UN sent the number of empty beds available in their camps to the Iraqi commanders, who structured their battle plan to ensure only that number of civilians were evacuated from their homes. The Iraqi security forces escorted these families across the front lines, checked them for weapons, and delivered them to aid workers, who got them into temporary housing by nightfall.

Grande contrasted this to the average of four weeks it takes civilians to get humanitarian assistance in most active conflict zones. The Iraqi security forces were also able to protect 90% of the residents of East Mosul in their homes, limiting the number of evacuees needing immediate assistance. She concluded that the commitment of the Iraqi government to protecting civilians, support from the Iraqi private sector, and the strength of America’s coalition leadership were critical to the UN’s success in stabilizing newly liberated cities. Without those conditions the UN will not be able to recreate this success in stabilizing future conflict zones.