Syria to Afghanistan: US Military Policy hasn’t Solved the Zone of Crisis & may Enlarge it

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/09/afghanistan-military-enlarge.html

Syria to Afghanistan: US Military Policy hasn’t Solved the Zone of Crisis & may Enlarge it
By contributors | Sep. 26, 2014
By Amin Saikal, author of Zone of Crisis: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq

The Middle East and its wider eastern environs are in the grip of multiple humanitarian and geopolitical crises. The entire region from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Iraq and Syria to Palestine and Libya is shattered by more violence than usual and long-term structural instability, not seen since the end of World War II. However, none of these issues has been more stunning than the declaration of the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) of vast swaths of territories in Iraq and Syria.

The US and its allies are so shocked by the sudden rise of IS and alarmed by the dangerous electoral dispute and the continuation of the robust Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan that they have resorted to measures which were unthinkable a few months ago. They have found it imperative to coordinate what is called a ‘non-combat humanitarian military assault’ on IS, to rethink their policy of no direct military intervention in Syria, to re-evaluate their troop drawdown from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, to beef up their anti-terrorism laws and to monitor closely the Muslim segment of their population.

They are embarrassed once again by their intelligence failures about the rise of IS and how the situation, in which the US has invested so much in blood and money, has turned sour in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to speak of other regional crises, these two developments have been in the making for some time.

In the case of Iraq, it goes back to the 2003 US-led invasion of the country. The US destruction of the Iraqi state along with that of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and Washington’s poor understanding of the Iraqi and regional complexities and its failure to have any viable plan for a stable post-invasion order, generated a massive political and strategic vacuum in the country. In a highly socially divided Iraq, various traditionally hostile societal groups found it opportune and necessary to contest one another for filling the vacuum at the cost of each other and the invading forces.