The War Against ISIS Is Not Over

Donald Trump used his State of the Union address last week to celebrate U.S. and coalition gains against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The president reminded his audience that a year earlier he had “pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the earth. One year later, I am proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated almost 100 percent of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria.”

He’s right to be proud. The campaign against ISIS has been a success by virtually every measure. There are many reasons for this. Among the most important was the decision of the president and his advisers to give his military leaders the flexibility they’d long sought to go after ISIS in a serious way and to lift the smothering rules of engagement that had limited our military and intelligence professionals during Barack Obama’s non-War on Terror. Those decisions immediately increased the pace and success of U.S. operations against ISIS. Military and intelligence officers tell us that the psychological effects of the new posture were equally important. It’s crucial that soldiers going into battle know they’ll be fighting to defeat their foes, not to further some public relations campaign for a politician.

But the president would be wise to avoid triumphalism. We’re reminded of the premature boasting from Obama and his advisers after early success against al Qaeda. The terror group, they claimed, was “on the run,” or “decimated,” or “on the path to defeat.” In 2012, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, even predicted the “demise” of al Qaeda by the end of the decade—a bit of bravado that was as irresponsible then as it sounds foolish now. That decade is nearly over, and al Qaeda thrives.

The Obama administration’s drone campaign made progress against al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing many top leaders in “decapitation strikes” and causing others to disperse. But short-term success does not guarantee long-term victory. Enemies adapt and adjust. Al Qaeda decentralized and invigorated its affiliates, spreading its poisonous ideology and quietly amassing more territory even as Obama campaigned for reelection by boasting of its degradation.

A worrisome report in the New York Times on February 4 suggests a similar dynamic with ISIS. “Thousands of Islamic State foreign fighters and family members have escaped the American-led military campaign in eastern Syria, according to new classified American and other Western military and intelligence assessments, a flow that threatens to tarnish American declarations that the militant group has been largely defeated,” wrote Eric Schmitt, a national security reporter. “As many of the fighters flee unfettered to the south and west through Syrian Army lines, some have gone into hiding near Damascus, the Syrian capital, and in the country’s northwest, awaiting orders sent by insurgent leaders on encrypted communications channels. Other battle-hardened militants, some with training in chemical weapons, are defecting to al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. Others are paying smugglers tens of thousands of dollars to spirit them across the border to Turkey, with an eventual goal of returning home to European countries.”