Fighting Entropy
By Richard Fernandez in PJ Media and
the Belmont Club Blog
Most of us have watched movies where
a mysterious threat attacks an unsuspecting community. They may be vampires
ravaging an Alaskan town or a blob-like being swallowing a town. Typically the
defenders, at first confident, are rapidly dismayed when they find that police
firearms have little effect against the creatures. With that realization
the characters go from complacent to desperate in a few minutes of movie time
until the hunted survivors are forced by desperation to try an outlandish
theory from a crackpot who has a peculiar insight into the nature of the
monsters.
Sometimes real life resembles a
horror movie, as in the present instance when Westphalian states find to their
surprise that the state-killing bullets in their arsenal can’t kill Islamic
extremism. Perhaps the epitome of such weapons is the precision guided
missile-firing drone or its equivalent, the special forces raiding team
directed by the signals intelligence wizardry of the NSA. This targeted
force is like Zeus’ thunderbolt; it is inconceivably potent, almost
unimaginably effective. Surely such a thing can destroy what the
president of the United States aims it at.
The United States has killed Saddam
Hussein, Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, and Osama bin Laden. It was
instrumental in the death of Imad Mughniyah. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
current head of ISIS, is probably lying crippled in some safe house never to
walk again from the effects of a March 18, 2015 airstrike. And now a US
special operations team has killed one of the next in line, the chief of ISIS’
oil smuggling business, its “chief financial officer”, a Tunisian with the nom
de guerre Abu Sayyaf.
A U.S. official with direct
knowledge of the intelligence and the ground operation described Sayyaf as “CFO
of all of ISIS with expertise in oil and gas” who played a increasing role in
operations, planning and communications.
“We now have reams of data on how
ISIS operates, communicates and earns its money,” the official told CNN,
referring to some of the communications elements, such as computers, seized in
the raid.
Now that America has put a bullet
through the body, head and wallet surely all that is left is to watch ISIS die.
SECDEF Ashton Carter believes they’ve dealt it a serious blow. But others are
not so sure. “Michael Weiss, author of “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror,” said
Abu Sayyaf was largely unknown to close observers of the organization.” Killing
him won’t hurt it any more than its been hurt before.
Weiss said he’s skeptical the United
States would risk lives to capture the head of ISIS’s oil operations. ISIS
hasn’t made significant money from captured oil fields since U.S. bombers began
striking its infrastructure, he said.
A Pentagon spokesman confirmed in
February that oil is no longer a main source of revenue for ISIS.
“It may be the case that he wasn’t
the primary target in this operation,” Weiss said. “The U.S. might have been
trying to kill or capture a higher-value ISIS leader who was thought to be at
the same location. But it’d make sense to play up Abu Sayyaf’s prominence after
the fact since U.S. soldiers’ lives were at risk here.”
But like the monster in the movie,
it’s taken “three billion electro-volts of energy and it’s still coming on”!
Why have none of the previous heavy blows slowed ISIS or any of the
affiliated rebel groups down? Why is the jihadi organism
inexplicably resistant to leadership disruptions, whether caused by drone
strikes or the murderous work of rivals from other factions? How can it stand
against the Olympian thunderbolt? This is an important question to answer.
It’s resistant because it is not
a state.
No it’s not made of “solid nuclear
material”. But unlike a state, headed by an Emperor of Japan or Fuhrer,
Islamic militancy has the apparent ability to reconfigure itself on the fly; to
find energy from catastrophes that would delegitimize ordinary state
institutions. The Syrian rebel scene is a case in point. It’s a
constellation of merging and splitting groups with fanciful names like
“Defenders of Jerusalem”, “Knights of Justice”, “Shields of Revolution”, “Sham
Legion”, “Knights of Constantinople” and “Euphrates Volcano”. It’s a
regular Legion of Doom.
In this environment a damaged
Al-Qaeda evolves into ISIS or spawns an al-Nusrah, like a Hydra sprouting heads
or water groping a path down a slope. Groups are constantly dividing,
consolidating and taking each other over. Instead of dying under the
blows of the administration, the collective organism mutates; it has now
acquired the unnerving capacity to engage in “united front” tactics with governments and rival armed groups in Iraq and Syria.
As Waleed Rikab, a former captain in
the Israel Defence Force’s 8200 intelligence unit and head of the Strategic
Research Department at the web intelligence firm Terrogence explained to
Business Insider, Jabhat al Nusra has patiently ensnared its more secular
competitors in the Syrian opposition.
“They do things in an inclusive way.
They are actually doing what bin Laden recommended: To become an insurgency
that’s really embedded within a local struggle,” Rikab said.
In a recent report Rikab shared with
Business Insider, he tracked how Nusra had been taking advantage of other
opposition groups and the Syrian civil war more generally.
“The group appears to have
reinvented itself, recovering from tougher times when it was overshadowed by
the Islamic State,” writes Rikab.
He notes that Nusra “has embarked on
the implementation of an inclusive model for conducting jihadist activity,
which is proving to be successful without alienating local populations or other
rebel factions, and “appears to be more successful than ever at cooperating
with other rebel groups and the execution of joint operations.”
The group is effective on the
battlefield, but have been careful to distinguish themselves from ISIS — even
if they are cut from the same ideological cloth.
That’s impressive, considering Obama
cannot even get his allies to attend a summit at Camp David.
Part of the reason why the
state-killing bullets of Obama don’t work is because they’re designed to kill
something ISIS is not. The error is instinctive. Calling Abu Sayyaf a “chief
financial officer” or ISIS “oil-minister” is a case in point. He’s nothing of
the sort. The man is probably just a glorified border smuggler. Mike Giglio of Buzzfeed described the oil smuggling business on the Syrian-Turkish
border in great detail. It’s a million dollar a day business for ISIS at best,
conducted with drums, plastic cans transported in vans and pickup trucks or
pumped over buried pipes to Turkey. On the scale of world affairs, a million
dollars a day is hardly even a major oil business; it is something more
suitable for a Turkish gangster than an energy mogul. Yet we think of him
as a “minister” because ministers can think in no other way.
But non-states can operate on
chump-change, and Obama doesn’t fully grasp this. Cities, elaborate
bureaucracies, constitutions — all of the paraphernalia of a Westphalian state
that Obama cherishes — are irrelevancies to ISIS-like organizations. Armin Rosen notes that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was hiding out in a
hick town in Iraq with a population of less than 5,000. When president Obama
described ISIS as a “jayvee team” he was being entirely candid, unable to
imagine how a bunch of big beards in a few SUVs could possibly stand up to the
might of the One Who Rides Around in Air Force One and Dances with the Stars,
making the classic mistake of mirror imaging.
Non-states have different needs
vulnerabilities from Westphalian states. One analyst who understands this is former Army intelligence
analyst Jessica Lewis McFate
who writes: “ISIS is a state-breaker”. It doesn’t thrive on hierarchy or order
and UN meetings. It thrives on chaos. She explains that the basic unit of
jihadi control is conquered territory, which is not the same as a state
territory. Conquered territory is the current area open to plunder and may
shift as need arises. Such opportunities only present themselves in a
collapse.
Control of cities … are not,
however, the metric by which to measure the defeat of ISIS’s fighting force.
ISIS’s ability to remain as a
violent group, albeit rebranded, has already been demonstrated, given the
near-defeat of its predecessor AQI in 2008 and its resurgence over … a vast
dominion across Iraq and Syria.
In this most dangerous form, ISIS is
a counter-state, a state-breaker that can claim new rule and new boundaries
after seizing cities across multiple states by force, an unacceptable modern
precedent.
ISIS, despite its name, does not
live to become a Westphalian state. On the contrary, it lives by breaking
down Westphalian states. It gets its energy from the throes of a dying
country; from ransoms, looting, extortion, smuggling, people trafficking, rape
and pillage. Thus Obama’s decision to dismantle American hegemony in the Middle
East, whatever its merits, had the unfortunate side effect of increasing
entropy. That, plus the wayward consequences of the Arab Spring supercharged
the rise of ISIS-like organizations.
It fed the beast with a huge input
of chaos and quick, give it another burst. Send Saudi Arabia after it
with its corrupt, incompetent army. What could go wrong?
The jihadis are so fat on
fuel they can hardly masticate the feast. One can only imagine what will happen
when the Jihad ingests a major regional country, the oil-rich Gulf States,
including Saudi Arabia. It will look like Libya, only much bigger. When the jihad
eats Saudi Arabia it will glow like a nova on the nutrients of a collapsing
House of Saud. And then it will be on to Europe. It’s in the cards. Journalists are becoming gradually aware that the flood of migrants to
Europe is yet another money making branch of the jihad.
Extremist groups like the Islamic
State group reap millions of dollars by smuggling people from the Middle East
and Africa into Europe, a fresh report reveals, adding that some 170,000
refugees traveled by sea to Europe in 2014. Frontex, the border-surveillance
organization of the European Union, predicts the number will be higher this
year.
Officials from Africa and the
European Union have been trying to find ways to prevent illegal migration. The
Guardian reported that Europe has plans to smash Libyan smuggling networks
using military power.
It’s in the cards because Europe is
where the loot will be after MENA is sucked dry. The key to understanding
Islamic extremism’s invulnerability to ordinary Westphalian bullets is to grasp
that it is something like a living life form, which exists not at the level of
the state, but in small groups and clans. It is self-organizing,
“triggered by random fluctuations that are amplified by positive feedback. The
resulting organization is wholly decentralized or distributed over all the
components of the system. As such it is typically very robust and able to
survive and self-repair substantial damage or perturbations.”
To survive it needs a constant
source of outside energy to keep it going and that insight is perhaps why
Ashton Carter and the US military tried to take out its “oil minister — in the
hope that the loss would power it down, like an angiogenesis inhibitor. However it is unlikely that killing or capturing Abu
Sayyaf will of itself, hurt ISIS by much. We need another kind of ray to
put the crimp on it, but that is for another post.
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