Region in Transition

The Middle East is going through the most intense period of instability in its modern history. This is partly the result of the dual shocks of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Arab uprisings of 2011: the toppling of the Iraqi state destabilized a precarious regional order and unleashed a regional and sectarian war; the Arab uprisings destabilized a precarious state order and unleashed state collapse and civil war in several countries. But the turmoil is also the result of long-simmering dysfunctions of repressive governments; sluggish and unequal economies; growing populations; tightening land and water resources; and unresolved questions of political identity, the role of religion, and social structure.

Violent sectarian nonstate actors have taken advantage of these conditions to spread their influence. Shiite militias such as Hezbollah spread to neighboring Syria, the popular mobilization units rose to rival the national army in Iraq, and the Houthi militia overran the Yemeni capital. Sunni militias rose to fill the void of collapsing states in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and al-Qaeda took advantage of these conditions to stage a major resurgence. While al-Qaeda prioritized attacks on the West, an even more radical wing of al-Qaeda, which prioritized attacks on Shiites and “unbelievers” in Muslim lands and the establishment of a Caliphate, broke away from al-Qaeda and founded the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS. Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are now locked in competition for primacy in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and other arenas. Both pose a current and future danger to U.S. and Western security.

The fight against these terrorist groups proceeds at various levels. The U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS has made slow but steady progress in both Iraq and Syria. These defeats are important not only to deny ISIS territory but also to reverse its own narrative in which it spun its early victories in Syria and Iraq as proof of divine favor and a major reason for Islamist extremists around the world to join it. ISIS is also responding to rollback in Syria and Iraq by building affiliates in Libya, Sinai, Yemen, and elsewhere and by staging attacks in Europe and attempting to do the same in the United States. Al-Qaeda is playing a long game, letting ISIS take the brunt of current attacks and meanwhile embedding in societies in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, building networks that it hopes will provide it with staying power after the ISIS phenomenon loses steam.

The fight against terrorist groups, however, also requires addressing the conditions that enabled this latest resurgence. Prime among these are regional state collapse and regional conflict. There was no significant terrorist presence in Iraq before 2003, or in Syria and Libya before the uprisings there that led to state collapse and civil war. Trying to permanently eradicate terrorist groups in vast stretches of ungoverned space is a game of whack-a-mole if their sway is not replaced with sustainable state power; there is no way around the necessity to end local civil wars and rebuild state sovereignty. Even small and relatively weak states such as Lebanon and Jordan have been able to keep terrorist groups off their territory, while larger and more powerful states—once they collapsed—have provided havens for them. Ending civil wars is not easy and will require concerted application of political power and complex diplomacy; rebuilding the capacity of shattered states to regain control of their territory will also take coordinated international support.

Regional conflict has also been a driver of the terrorist surge and needs to be urgently addressed. The Middle East has seen regional conflict before. The Arab-Israeli conflict raged for years, but it favored the consolidation of militarized police states rather than Islamist extremist groups. Nasserist Egypt and conservative Saudi Arabia were locked in proxy conflict for much of the 1960s, but that generally helped to spread the ideology of socialist Arab nationalism, not sectarian radicalism. The current conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two petro states on opposite sides of the sectarian Sunni-Shii divide, has created the conditions that have weaponized sectarian identities, destabilized states, and enabled Islamist terrorist groups, both Sunni and Shii.

There is nothing necessary or inevitable about Iranian-Saudi or Sunni-Shii conflict. The current conflict is the result of a confluence of factors from the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980–1988, regime change in Iraq in 2003, civil war in Syria and Yemen post-2011, and the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. But the current conflict is a lose-lose proposition for both Iran and Saudi Arabia—let alone for the peoples of the region. The two governments share interests in state security, regional stability, and economic growth; however, they are currently locked in a violence trap that neither seems to know how to get out of.

De-escalating regional distrust and conflict and building a more stable regional order is as challenging as it is necessary. The nuclear deal with Iran showed what strong American leadership, and a smart balance between coercive power and diplomatic creativity, can achieve. That same combination of leadership, power, and diplomacy needs to be brought to bear to get Iran to conform to international norms of behavior in regional affairs and to build a less conflictual and more stable order among the region’s main players.

Part One of the current volume brings together a number of experts in the field of terrorism and security to provide analysis and insights into current conditions in the Middle East, the enabling factors for the rise of terrorist groups, the dynamics within those groups, and recommended policies to confront and eventually defeat them.

The first contribution is from Marc Lynch, a professor of political science and director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at The George Washington University and author of The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East (Public Affairs 2012). He examines the key dynamics in the full or partial collapse of four Arab states—Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq; he explains the links among state collapse, civil war, and the enabling of terrorist organizations. Most importantly, he assesses the likely conditions of those four countries during the first year of the next president’s first term and suggests policy approaches to wind down or resolve those conflicts, reconstitute state sovereignty, and deny territory to terrorist groups.

The second article is written by me, Paul Salem, vice president for policy and research at the Middle East Institute and author of Broken Orders: The Causes and Consequences of the Arab Uprisings (Dar An-Nahar Press 2013 [in Arabic]). My article is titled “Working toward a Stable Regional Order,” and in it I examine the conditions that have led to the collapse of regional order and the escalation of proxy conflict between Iran and the Gulf Arab countries. Further, I describe what leadership role the next U.S. president can play in marshalling international and regional influence to de-escalate dangerous regional conflict and build a more stable regional order—an order that would be far less hospitable to radical sectarian terrorist groups.

Charles Lister’s article is an examination of the internal dynamics within both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda and the growing competition between the two. Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and the author of The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency (Oxford University Press 2016). He explains how this competition is both straining and strengthening the two groups. He explores how the United States and its allies in the war on terror can exploit points of weakness in both groups, particularly elements of their rivalry.

The next contribution is from Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and a foremost authority on the ideology of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. His article lays out the ideological worldview of these two principal terrorist groups and examines their narratives as they and their adherents see them. The author uses this template to explore which successes and failures are most critical to their own narrative and how that knowledge can suggest policies that weaken their own internal cohesion and dampen their appeal to Islamist extremists globally.

The final article of this section is from John Allen, a retired Marine Corps four-star general who was commander of the International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces Afghanistan (USFOR-A) between September 2014 and October 2015 and U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL. He draws on lessons learned from the U.S.-led alliance’s experience fighting terrorism in both Afghanistan and the Middle East, providing policy guidance for the next president in terms of building on America’s large anti-ISIS coalition and crafting policies and priorities that would more effectively weaken and defeat these terrorist groups.

These five articles taken together provide a rich and multilayered analysis of the depth of the challenges plaguing today’s Middle East, emphasize the links between these challenges and the rise of terrorist groups, and indicate the level of wisdom and nuanced complexity that will have to be part of any sustained and successful strategy to defeat terror groups in the long run and prevent them from coming back. The individual authors, of course, do not see eye to eye on all matters; nor do these articles claim to provide a comprehensive examination of the conditions of today’s turbulent Middle East—that will always have to be an ongoing and wider endeavor. But the authors do agree that the war on terror must be understood as not only a battle of killing terrorists where and when they pop up, in an endless game of whack-a-mole, but that it must be conceived of as a wider strategy that addresses the conditions that enable and empower such groups and that has not only a military component but political, diplomatic, and socioeconomic components as well. This view requires a sober assessment of the structural dysfunctions of the region and ways to address them; a keen understanding of the terrorist groups, their organization, and their ideology; and a deep appreciation for what is meant by strategy, and what level of complexity and public commitment has to be built into it.

I do not seek to draw conclusions prematurely in an introduction, but leave the reader to engage with these expert texts on their own terms. Overall conclusions and policy recommendations are drawn together in the final concluding essay of this volume.