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    Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State
    Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State
    Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State
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    Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State

    By David Kilcullen

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    Last year was a “blood year” in the Middle East – massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and foreign fighters – many from Europe, Australia and Africa – flowing into Syria at a rate ten times that during the height of the Iraq War. What went wrong?

    In Blood Year, David Kilcullen calls on twenty-five years’ experience to answer that question. This is a vivid, urgent account of the War on Terror by someone who helped shape its strategy, as well as witnessing its evolution on the ground. Kilcullen looks to strategy and history to make sense of the crisis. What are the roots and causes of the global jihad movement? What is ISIS? What threats does it pose to Australia? What does its rise say about the effectiveness of the War on Terror since 9/11, and what does a coherent strategy look like after a disastrous year?

    “As things stand in mid-2015, Western countries . . . face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region. It isn’t just ISIS – al-Qaeda has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria and Yemen. We’re dealing with not one, but two global terrorist organisations, each with its own regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home and a massive flow of foreign fighters.” —David Kilcullen, Blood Year

    Winner of the 2015 Walkley Award for best long feature writing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateMay 20, 2015
    ISBN9781925203264
    Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State
    Author

    David Kilcullen

    David Kilcullen is a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales and a professor of practice in global security at Arizona State University. A former soldier and diplomat, he served as a counterinsurgency advisor during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr Kilcullen is also the author of the highly acclaimed The Accidental Guerrilla, Out of the Mountains, and Blood Year.

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    Reviews for Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      A detailed, informed and at times brutally honest review of the last few years of war with Islamic State but also of the last decade of counter terrorism since 9/11. The author writes with authority on the subject and demonstrates his ability not to over burden the reader with needless detail. Instead, he gets right to the point and reveals the exact state of play and the evolution of current circumstances. A very intelligent assessment and a must read for those who want to know the truth of current affairs, instead of the media or political spin that so often clouds the facts.
    • 5/5
      An incredible, timely book. Kilcullen was a major participant in the formation of strategies used in our wars in the Middle East/Africa. He readily acknowledges the mistakes that "we" made; by concentrating on the theory of "disaggregation" (mainly going after the leaders of Al Qaeda, it was assumed that it would break up the group into smaller entities, which local the local government could deal with, but in reality it just dispersed the group to other areas and allowed them to start up new groups, including ISIS). That our practices, such as "extraordinary rendition", undermined our standing as the "good guys", drove a wedge between us and the locals, and made it very hard to pressure other regimes into encouraging human rights (do as we say, not as we do). By shifting our focus from terrorism to Iraq, we alienated allies; and after our reasons for the invasion were proven falsehoods, it made it hard for others to trust our "intelligence". How (Rumsfeld) insistence on using the minimum force in Iraq was a disaster, our disarming of the Iraqi army and the Ba'athists created a large, potentially useful group into enemies (who ended up forming future terrorist organizations). Kilcullen goes so far as to likening "Bush's decision to invade Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Russia". By taking our eye off the Taliban and placing it on Iraq, it allowed them to form anew. How our actions worried Iran that "they were next", and pushed Iran into defending themselves through striving for nuclear weapons, and keeping Iraq and Afghanistan unstable (to keep us busy and not give us time/material to extend into Iran). How our actions and threats, unfollowed and disregarded when pushed (the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a "game changer", and then we did nothing) encouraged regimes like Syria to conclude they had nothing to fear from us. How ISIS had evolved their strategies again an again, while we are stuck fighting them with old strategies and failed to adapt. How our timidity in the fight has opened the door to Russia to step-in and take over. How Obama's strategy of "retrenchment" (choosing to "leave" the war instead of ending it) has failed. How we cannot just choose to disengage and avoid the fight because we are tired (isolationist theory), because society today is so interconnected with travel, trade and interaction with the world. Kilcullen's answer is that the solution is not simple, we have to admit that we messed up (the invasion of Iraq, our addiction to killing terrorist leaders to solve the problem, our withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, opportunism in Libya, and passivity in dealing with Syria), and that until our strategy changes, these disasters will continue. There is just so, so much information in this book, it will make your head spin. And wonder what in the world we should do, is there even a solution to the problem. Even so, the book is fascinating, extremely well written and documented, and flows very well. I highly encourage you to give it a try.
    • 2/5
      I think this is Kilcullen at his worst. To give you a reference I think "Out of the mountains" is his best by far. And to clarify Kilcullen at his worst is still a good read, but the well developed main idea constructed step by step by a multitude of interesting, and entertaining, examples is missing here. In all the books feels like a collection of independent articles that for the most part include already well known information.

    Book preview

    Quarterly Essay 58 Blood Year - David Kilcullen

    Contributors

    Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

    – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

    DEBACLE

    United Arab Emirates, November 2014

    My driver pulls up to a resort in the Empty Quarter. It’s after dawn. We’ve been driving for hours across the desert from Abu Dhabi and are near the Saudi border now; past this point the sand stretches hundreds of empty miles. The place is all minarets and battlements – Classical Arabia, as imagined by a designer with grand tastes and an unlimited budget. We cross a causeway between dunes and enter a courtyard past BMWs, a Mercedes and two camouflaged jeeps.

    Over the last mile we’ve been penetrating a series of tightening security layers. Helicopters hover beyond the crest, sniffer teams trawl the complex for bombs and bugs, and dogs bark from the checkpoint, half a mile out, where police search cars and bags. All but one entrance to the resort is sealed; there are no other guests. Inside are more dogs, a buzz of radios and a counter-assault team: burly guys with dark glasses and skin-tone earpieces, holsters visible below grey suits, machine-pistols discreetly within reach. Sentries step out of doorways to check credentials. Overhead a silver aerostat, a surveillance blimp positioned to detect the visual or heat signature of anyone approaching across the desert, glints in the sun. The sponsor is taking no chances.

    I’m freezing from the air-conditioned car and could do without all this drama. I stretch, climb out and check my watch: still on Sydney time. I’ve been travelling twenty-four hours, fifteen of those on the red-eye from Australia, and I’m in desperate need of a double espresso, some sunlight and a piss.

    However odd the setting, this is deadly serious: a conference, long-scheduled, that has turned into a crisis meeting in this year of massacres and beheadings, fallen cities and collapsing states – the unravelling, in weeks, of an entire decade of Western strategy. Former prime ministers and presidents, current foreign ministers, generals, ambassadors and intelligence chiefs are here, with White House staffers, presidential envoys, leaders from the Middle East and Africa, Americans, Brits and Aussies, Iranians, Russians, Chinese and Indians. Two well-known journalists have agreed not to attribute what people say.

    Besides the two dozen VIPs, there are a few scruffy field guys like me, here to present research or brief the plenary sessions, though of course at gatherings like this the real business gets done by the grown-ups, at side meetings we never see. The sessions have names like Syria and Iraq: In Search of a Strategy, North Africa in Crisis and Islamist Terrorism and the Region. Maybe it’s my jetlag, but people look dazed, as if in the grip of a hangover. If so, it’s a geopolitical one: the rise of ISIS, the failure of the Arab Spring, the fracturing of Iraq and the spillover of violence from Syria have suddenly, dangerously destabilised the Middle East and North Africa.

    In the northern summer of 2014, over roughly one hundred days, ISIS launched its blitzkrieg in Iraq, Libya’s government collapsed, civil war engulfed Yemen, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself Caliph, the latest Israel–Palestine peace initiative failed in a welter of violence, and the United States and its allies (including the United Kingdom and Australia) sent aircraft and troops back to Iraq. Russia, a key sponsor of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, reignited Cold War tensions by annexing Crimea, sent submarines and aircraft to intimidate its neighbours in their own sea and airspace, and supported Ukrainian rebels who shot down an airliner with huge loss of life. Iran continued its push for nuclear weapons, supported Assad in Syria and yet became a de facto ally of the United States in Iraq, as each sought, for different reasons, to bolster the Baghdad government.

    As this disastrous year closed, with the fourth winter of war settling over Syria, nine million Syrians languished in miserable, freezing mountain camps, with little prospect of going home. Half of Syria’s people depended on aid to survive, and more than 200,000 had died. Across the increasingly irrelevant border with Iraq, thousands of people had been displaced, sold into sexual slavery, decapitated, shot in the street or crucified for minor infractions of sharia law – as idiosyncratically interpreted by whatever local ISIS thug happened to make it his business. Panic pervaded Baghdad, and Erbil (capital of Kurdistan) was a frontline city, within the sound of the guns and occasionally within reach of them.

    Foreign fighters – from the Middle East, Europe, Australia, all over Asia, the Americas and all parts of Africa – poured into Syria and Iraq at twelve times anything seen at the height of the American war, swelling ISIS numbers above 30,000 (for comparison, al-Qaeda, at its peak before 9/11, never had more than 25,000). Hundreds poured across Syria’s frontier with Turkey, a NATO member that nonetheless opened its border for fighters travelling to (or, increasingly, from) the conflict. ISIS provinces appeared in Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt, and extremists in Indonesia and Nigeria swore allegiance to Baghdadi’s new caliphate. Attacks by ISIS-inspired terrorists hit Europe, America, Africa and the Middle East. Thirteen years, thousands of lives, and billions upon billions of dollars after 9/11, any gains against terrorism had seemingly been swept away in a matter of weeks.

    On 10 June 2014 ISIS seized Mosul, anchor of northern Iraq and home to more than two million. Twelve days before the city fell, President Obama betrayed no inkling of impending collapse in a speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point – he failed to mention ISIS at all, having earlier dismissed them as a jayvee [junior varsity] team, wannabes lacking the capability of al-Qaeda – and spoke of what was once called the Global War on Terror as if it was winding down. You are the first class to graduate since 9/11, the President said, who may not be sent into combat in Iraq or Afghanistan.

    When I first spoke at West Point in 2009, we still had more than 100,000 troops in Iraq. We were preparing to surge in Afghanistan. Our counterterrorism efforts were focused on al Qaeda’s core leadership . . . Four and a half years later, as you graduate, the landscape has changed. We have removed our troops from Iraq. We are winding down our war in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda’s leadership on the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been decimated, and Osama bin Laden is no more . . . today’s principal threat no longer comes from a centralized al Qaeda leadership. Instead, it comes from decentralized al Qaeda affiliates and extremists, many with agendas focused in countries where they operate. And this lessens the possibility of large-scale 9/11-style attacks against the homeland. [emphasis added]

    What happened? How could the President so misjudge things, just days before the debacle? Can we recover from this? What does a coherent strategy look like after this disastrous year?

    This essay is my attempt to answer those questions. It draws on conferences such as this one in November 2014, on interviews with communities and combatants, work by my field research teams in Iraq and Syria, and analysis by other well-informed observers and researchers. The answer, like most things in war, takes a while to unfold but is essentially simple: it starts with the recognition that the West’s strategy after 9/11 – derailed by the invasion of Iraq, exacerbated by our addiction to killing terrorist leaders, and hastened by precipitate withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, opportunism in Libya, and passivity in the face of catastrophe in Syria – carried the seeds of disaster within it, and until that strategy changes, those disasters will continue.

    President Obama’s description of the strategy, italicised above, is quite accurate. We did focus on destroying the core leadership of al-Qaeda (AQ) on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, targeting the group of leaders around Osama bin Laden and cutting the links between the core of AQ and its affiliates in other countries. The goal was to dismantle AQ into a series of smaller, regional groups that could then be dealt with through local partnerships, advisory efforts and targeted strikes.

    This wasn’t just an Obama strategy. In fact, the greatest change in US strategy since 9/11 took place between the first and second terms of President George W. Bush (that is, in 2005, rather than 2009, when President Obama took office), so there’s huge continuity between the Obama administration and the second, though not the first, Bush term. For political reasons, of course, Republicans and Democrats downplay these similarities, but they’re striking all the same. The Obama administration’s rhetoric differs, it makes more use of certain tools (especially drones and mass surveillance) and its focus has been on disengaging from the wars President Bush started in 2001–03. But all those things were also true of the Bush administration itself after 2005: in substance, for ten years the United States has followed much the same strategy.

    I know this strategy intimately, because I helped devise it. So its failure is in part my failure too, and if we want to understand how things went so badly awry in 2014, we must first understand where the strategy came from, and how it failed.

    DISAGGREGATION

    Canberra and Washington, DC, 2004–05

    In October 2002 al-Qaeda’s Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah, bombed two nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians, and injuring another 209. Bali was the first mass-casualty hit by al-Qaeda or its affiliates since 9/11, and a wake-up call that spurred Canberra into action on counterterrorism.

    A small group of officers, led by Australia’s ambassador for counter-terrorism, Les Luck, was selected from the key national security agencies to conduct a strategic assessment based on all available intelligence. In early 2004, as an infantry lieutenant colonel with a professional background in guerrilla warfare and a PhD that included fieldwork with insurgents and Islamic extremists in Southeast Asia, I was seconded to the team. The effort produced Transnational Terrorism: The Threat to Australia, the framework until 2011 for Australia’s counterterrorism cooperation with regional partners and allies like the United States, the UK, Canada and New Zealand.

    Looking at the threat in mid-2004, we saw a pattern: the invasion of Afghanistan had scattered but not destroyed the hierarchical AQ structure. Many of those fighting for AQ in 2001 had been killed or captured, or had fled into Pakistan, Iran or Iraq. Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were in hiding; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the planner of 9/11 and Bali) was in CIA custody at an undisclosed location. What was left of AQ’s senior leadership was no longer a supreme command (if it ever had been), but a clearing house for money and information, a source of expertise, a propaganda hub and an inspiration for a far-flung assortment of local movements, most of which pre-dated AQ. Al-Qaeda’s Centre of Gravity – from which it drew its strength and freedom of action – was not its numbers or combat capability, but its ability to manipulate, mobilise and aggregate the effects of diverse local groups, none of which were natural allies.

    In this, AQ had much in common with insurgent movements, which manipulate grievances to mobilise populations, creating a mass base for a relatively small force of fast-moving, lightly equipped guerrillas. These guerrillas work with underground and auxiliary networks to target weak points such as outposts and poorly governed spaces, and might try to build liberated areas, or eventually seek to transition to a conventional war of movement. But unlike classical insurgents, who operate in one country or region, AQ was global. To succeed, it had to inject itself into other people’s conflicts, prey on them and exploit local grievances for its own ends. This meant AQ’s critical requirement, and its greatest vulnerability, was to unify many disparate groups – in Somalia, Indonesia, Chechnya, Nigeria, the Philippines or half a dozen other places. Take away its ability to aggregate the effects of such groups and AQ’s threat would be hugely diminished, as would the risk of another 9/11. Bin Laden would be just one extremist among many in Pakistan, not a global threat. He and the AQ leadership would become strategically irrelevant: we could kill or capture them later, at our leisure – or not.

    Out of this emerged a view of al-Qaeda as a form of globalised insurgency, and a strategy known as Disaggregation. Writing for a military audience in late 2003, I laid it out like this:

    Dozens of local movements, grievances and issues have been aggregated (through regional and global players) into a global jihad against the West. These regional and global players prey upon, link and exploit local actors and issues that are pre-existing. What makes the jihad so dangerous is its global nature. Without the . . . ability to aggregate dozens of conflicts into a broad movement, the global jihad ceases to exist. It becomes simply a series of disparate local conflicts that are capable of being solved by nation-states and can be addressed at the regional or national level without interference from global enemies such as Al Qa’eda . . . A strategy of Disaggregation would seek to dismantle, or break up, the links that allow the jihad to function as a global entity.

    They say you should be careful what you wish for. In designing Disaggregation, our team was reacting against President Bush, who, through the invasion of Iraq, the axis of evil speech and statements like Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists, had (in our view) inflated the danger of terrorism, so that Washington ran the risk of creating new adversaries, and fighting simultaneously enemies who could have been fought sequentially or not at all.

    For example, the US and British practice of extraordinary rendition (a practice that went back to the 1990s and involved seizing suspects in neutral or friendly territory, then covertly deporting them to face interrogation by regimes with sketchy human rights records, including Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt) undermined US and British credibility on human rights, and made it hard to pressure these regimes for reform. Naming Pakistan as a major non-NATO ally in June 2004 – even as Pakistani intelligence officers continued to sponsor the Taliban and export terrorism across their region – hampered efforts to

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