http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...is-capital.html
Citat:
What the politicians ultimately will decide, even they may not know. But among veterans of the terror wars in France and the United States, there is a growing focus on the capital of the putative caliphate, Raqqa, in eastern Syria.
Thus a CIA veteran with long experience hunting Osama bin Laden and trying to outmaneuver ISIS, speaking privately, tells The Daily Beast, “Everybody is going to respond to this thing with solidarity, tying little ribbons on trees and that sort of bullshit,” when what’s needed, in his position is, “to drive a stake in their heart.”
How would you do that?
“Put together a force of 6,000 or 7,000 airborne soldiers and just take Raqqa. Don’t issue warnings. Don’t assemble tank columns. Train the force, then use it,” said this gentleman, a veteran of the clandestine services, but not of the military. “They have made Raqqa the capital of their state. Take it and you have changed the ground immediately. You can’t fight ISIS with baby steps, and what happened in Paris gives you the immediate rationale to do something strategic. Otherwise? They are winning.”
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Alain Bauer, a leading French criminologist and advisor to officials in Paris, New York and elsewhere about counter-terror strategies, is among those who believes that ISIS is lashing out precisely because it is under pressure on the ground. But a war of attrition fought like the Battle of Paris this week has to be addressed at the source.
“If we really want to do something, we need to erase Raqqa,” Bauer told The Daily Beast.
What keeps this from happening? In Bauer’s opinion, the United States. “Every bombing is a nightmare to negotiate,” he said. “Here’s a target. ‘Oops, there’s a garden there. Oops, there’s a family there. Oops, you cannot destroy this, you cannot destroy that.”
But ISIS is embedded among the civilian population.
Bauer thinks there’s an important distinction. “They are representing the civilian population,” he says, at least those who have remained and sometimes profited from the group’s presence. “They are not enslaving them. And a war is a war.”
But we have seen the deleterious effects of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would an occupation of Raqqa be different? Isn’t that what ISIS wants, to lure the West into a quagmire?
“ISIS wants us to conquer the territory, which is not what I said,” Bauer told The Beast. “We need to erase Raqqa.”
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Scott Atran, an anthropologist frequently consulted by U.S. government agencies and the military, sees the struggle again ISIS primarily in ideological terms. He has studied closely, for instance, the work that guides much of the group’s strategizing, The Management of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji, published almost 10 years ago. A typical maxim from that treatise: “Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.” That is, suck U.S. troops into the fight.
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And what about Raqqa, I asked Atran, thinking he would propose a nuanced approach.
“It’s going to take more than smashing them in Raqqa,” he said. “You have to smash them completely.”
But then he asks, “Who’s going to do this?”
In the days to come, we may well discover the answer.