Winning The War On Islamic Terror

In Syria, darkness is descending. Even as the functionaries of the “Biden Catastrophe” babble inanely about the “pragmatic” Islamic leadership of Syria’s new rulers, all of the pillars of Sharia rule are being put in place. Christmas has been labeled a forbidden holiday. Senior leaders of Al Qaeda have been put into key positions. All groups not under the control of Al-Jolani and his madmen have been ordered to disarm.

Our current policy, based on the mind-boggling proposition that men dedicated to a lifetime of jihad will now choose peace and coexistence is doomed to failure. That begs the question. What should be our policy not just regarding Syria but regarding the growing Islamic forces that now control Afghanistan, Yemen, the tribal areas of Pakistan, and vast swathes of Africa?

Let me suggest some pillars on which to build.

1. Stop pretending like we are not at war. The enemy remains in the field. The fact that we stopped shooting back does not mean he went home. All we are doing now is giving the people who want us all dead or subjugated time and space to prepare to destroy us. We must either fight back or accept defeat.

2. Define the enemy. We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with radical Islamists who wish to destroy not only the West but most of the existing Muslim states of the world.

3. Use all of the available levers of power. The Iranians have set the Middle East on fire. In large measure, they did so because we allowed them to earn tens of billions of dollars from oil sales in violation of existing sanctions. Without that money, Tehran could not have armed and emboldened its surrogates. There would be no Houthi blockade of the Red Sea. There likely would never have been a Hamas attack on Israel. Had we maintained our sanctions much of the chaos we now face could have been avoided.

4. Acknowledge the role of nation-states. As noted above the Shia surrogates of Iran draw their live blood from Tehran. Iran is not the only nation-state that plays this game. The Sunni supremacists who now rule in Damascus have been aided and abetted by Ankara. Meanwhile, Turkey continues to be part of NATO and aspires to have even tighter integration with the West. It cannot have it both ways. If Erdogan the Conqueror wishes to recreate the Ottoman Empire he should be made to pay an immediate price for that and his countrymen should be fully apprised of the cost their nation will pay for choosing to side with the forces of the 6^th Century over those of the 21^st.

5. Act judiciously. Every mad imam in the hinterlands of some Third World country is not a threat. We do not need to surge forces into all the backwaters of the world. Think carefully about the consequences of our actions before we move.

6. Rebuild our human intelligence apparatus and do it now. This war is fought and will be fought in the shadows. We should not be reacting to developments. We should be a move ahead of our opponents. In order to do so we need men and women on the ground telling us what the enemy is going to do before he does it. We are fighting blindfolded, and that is a prescription for disaster.

7. Keep big DOD out of the war. The mammoth American defense edifice is built to fight a conventional war. It is powerful almost beyond estimation. The world has never seen anything capable of this kind of force projection. It is also slow, ponderous, and bound by a pervasive corporate mindset. It has demonstrated conclusively since 9/11 that it is incapable of the kind of low profile, flexible, short fuse operations necessary to win against our elusive Islamic adversaries.

Nowhere was this more evident than in our foray into Afghanistan. In a matter of months, CIA operatives, Special Forces personnel, tribal allies, and limited amounts of U.S. airpower crushed the Taliban, took Kabul, and eliminated a terrorist safe haven. Then big DOD woke up. Conventional forces flowed in. Bases were built. Contractors were hired to build roads, teach the Afghans about gender equality, and substituting Italian goats for those they had been herding for millennia.

We sealed our fate. It took twenty years but from that point on our defeat was inevitable.

Consider what that effort would have looked like if we had continued to handle Afghanistan in the manner we had done from the outset. We would have maintained a minimal presence. Our personnel on the ground would have been intelligence officers and special forces operators. We would have avoided any effort to remake Afghanistan into a Western-style nation-state and remained laser-focused on preventing that nation from ever again being turned into a launching pad for attacks on our nation. We would have engaged with tribal leaders, respected the local culture, and remained largely invisible.

Thousands of Americans would likely still be alive. Tens of thousands of Afghans would too. Kabul would never have fallen. Al Qaida would have no space in which to train, arm, and prepare for the attacks yet to come.

How do all these factors impact what we should do in Syria? We should focus on the only thing that really matters to us, which is preventing the Islamic forces attempting to solidify control there from creating what amounts to a new caliphate dedicated to the destruction of us and our allies. That means employing all forms of American power short of conventional forces against this nascent threat. Turkey cannot continue to fund and arm jihadist monsters and not pay a price. Al-Jolani cannot change into a suit and smile into the camera and be taken seriously as a “pragmatist”.

What is emerging is a pariah state. It must be treated as such. It must be isolated and starved of resources and those forces within Syria which want a true secular state must be encouraged. And, meanwhile, we must intensify our human intelligence collection on this growing monster so that we have the most complete picture possible of what is happening inside it. Then, when and where we choose, we can act to take out select targets, preempt threats, and prevent the darkness inside Syria from seeping out and hurting those outside it.

We do not have a choice about whether or not to go to war with Islamic terror. That war is already underway. We can’t change that. We can change how we fight. We can decide to win the war on Islamic terror.