| 来源类型 | Report |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| Al Qaeda and ISIS: Existential threats to the US and Europe | |
| Frederick W. Kagan; Kimberly Kagan; Harleen Gambhir; Katherine Zimmerman; Jennifer Cafarella | |
| 发表日期 | 2016-01-21 |
| 出版年 | 2016 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Editor’s note: The next president is in for a rough welcome to the Oval Office given the list of immediate crises and slow-burning policy challenges, both foreign and domestic. What should Washington do? Why should the average American care? We’ve set out to clearly define US strategic interests and provide actionable policy solutions to help the new administration build a 2017 agenda that strengthens American leadership abroad while bolstering prosperity at home. What to Do: Policy Recommendations for 2017 is an ongoing project from AEI. Click here for access to the complete series, which addresses a wide range of issues from rebuilding America’s military to higher education reform to helping people find work. Why the need for this series? The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute conducted an intensive multi-week exercise to frame, design, and evaluate potential courses of action that the United States could pursue to defeat the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) and al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. The planning group weighed the national security interests of the United States, its partners, its rivals, and its enemies operating in or influencing the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. It considered how current policies and interests are interacting in this complex environment. It identified the minimum endstates that would satisfy American national security requirements as well as the likely outcomes of current policies. The group also assessed the threat posed by al Qaeda and ISIS to the United States, both in the immediate and long-term, and tested the probable outcomes of several potential courses of action that the United States could pursue in Iraq and Syria. ISW and CTP will publish the findings of this exercise in multiple reports. This first report (available below) examines America’s global grand strategic objectives as they relate to the threat from ISIS and al Qaeda. It considers the nature of those enemy groups in depth and in their global context. The second report will define American strategic objectives in Iraq and Syria, along with those of Iran, Russia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, and will articulate the minimum required conditions of military-political resolutions to conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Subsequent reports will present the planning group’s evaluation of several courses of action. Learn more about this series. DOWNLOAD THE REPORT The key findings of this first report are: Salafi-jihadi military organizations, particularly ISIS and al Qaeda, are the greatest threat to the security and values of American and European citizens. ISIS and al Qaeda pose an existential threat because they accelerate the collapse of world order, provoke domestic and global trends that endanger American values and way of life, and plan direct attacks against the U.S. and its partners. Syrian al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra poses one of the most significant long-term threats of any Salafi-jihadi group. This al Qaeda affiliate has established an expansive network of partnerships with local opposition groups that have grown either dependent on or fiercely loyal to the organization. Its defeat and destruction must be one of the highest priorities of any strategy to defend the United States and Europe from al Qaeda attacks. ISIS and al Qaeda are more than terrorist groups; they are insurgencies. They use terrorism as a tactic, but these organizations are insurgencies that aim first to overthrow all existing governments in the Muslim world and replace them with their own, and later, to attack the West from a position of power to spread their ideology to all of humanity. Separating the elements of ISIS and al Qaeda that are actively working to attack the West from the main bodies of those groups fighting in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia is impossible. All al Qaeda groups and ISIS affiliates seek to take the war into the West to fulfill their grand strategic objective of establishing a global caliphate, albeit according to different timelines. Current counter-ISIS and –al Qaeda policies do not ensure the safety of the American people or the homeland. The primary objective of the U.S. government remains protecting the homeland and the American people, including safeguarding American values both in the homeland and abroad. The activities of ISIS and al Qaeda interact with the policies of Russia, Iran, and China to endanger the international systems upon which American safety and freedom depend. Any strategy to counter ISIS and al Qaeda will require coalition partners. However, there is no natural coalition of states with common goals that can readily work together to resolve this problem. The U.S. must lead its partners and ensure the continuation of existing guarantors of international security such as NATO. American and Western security requires the elimination of ISIS and al Qaeda regional bases and safe havens. Salafi-jihadi groups independent of al Qaeda and ISIS form a base of support from which the enemy draws strength and resilience. ISIS and al Qaeda use the extensive safe haven and infrastructure of locally focused Salafi-jihadi groups to help plan, train, and equip fighters for attacks against the West. Destroying specific cells or nodes actively preparing attacks against the West is not sufficient. Al Qaeda and ISIS will be able to reconstitute the threat as long as Salafi-jihadi military organizations continue to support them. Editor’s note: The following is the report introduction. Download the complete report at the link above or read the report on your desktop computer at the bottom of this page. Introduction The terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and San Bernardino, California have focused the West again on the threat that militant Salafi-jihadi groups pose to its security and way of life. They have provoked France, Britain, and the United States to increase their military efforts against the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq. They have demonstrated the fallacy of the idea that ISIS can be indefinitely contained within Iraq and Syria, the Middle East, or even the Muslim-majority world. They have revealed the inadequacy of current strategies to address the threat. These tragedies have thus created space for a serious discussion about the nature of the threat and the responses required to counter it. Pervasive mischaracterizations of the challenge The current discussion of these attacks is cementing fundamental mischaracterizations of the national security problem, however. It presupposes that there is a single war, that ISIS is the only enemy or adversary in that war, and that defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq is tantamount to defeating the organization as a whole. It has given superficial credibility to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s call for a grand coalition of all major powers to unite in the ght against ISIS. It largely ignores al Qaeda, including its powerful franchise in Syria called Jabhat al Nusra (JN). It also downplays the importance of the sectarian war that has engulfed the Middle East. That sectarian conflict is one of the primary drivers of the massive flow of refugees now undermining the integration of Europe, facilitating the destruction of multiple states in the Middle East such as Iraq and Yemen, and encouraging the mobilization and radicalization of global Sunni and Shi’a populations in the face of what increasing numbers of people perceive to be existential threats. Any effort to counter the al Qaeda and ISIS threats will fail as long as conditions on the ground do not change. The media’s and policymakers’ single-minded focus on ISIS encourages Americans to overlook the fundamental incompatibility of Iranian and Russian regional and global objectives with those of the U.S. and Europe. Such a narrow lens ignores Russia’s revisionist grand strategy that links Moscow’s actions in Syria with its continued war in Ukraine, its subversive activities in the Baltics, and its mounting global military aggression. It simplifies an extremely complicated set of multi-actor, multi-theater conflicts into a problem that can be solved through counter-terrorism-targeting and homeland security measures. It guarantees that the West will not design or execute a coherent strategy to secure its vital national interests. The San Bernardino attack in California adds superficial validity to the idea that the U.S. must turn inward to secure itself. It brings to the fore domestic issues such as gun control, law enforcement procedures, immigration policies, religious freedom, profiling, and many others. Each issue is important in its own right, and finding the right balance among competing valid concerns is essential to enhance America’s ability to protect its citizens without compromising the civil liberties and individual rights that are the bedrock of our society. Defensive and internal measures will not adequately protect Americans at home, however. Passivity abroad will facilitate the continued collapse of the international order, including the global economy on which American prosperity and the American way of life depend. More states will fail; more conflict will displace refugees; adversaries will revise borders by force and will contest the freedom of the seas; others will test weapons of mass destruction. The symptoms of the collapsing world order have appeared already: the promises of the Arab Spring have largely failed states; ISIS has overrun the borders of Iraq and Syria; Russia has annexed border provinces in Ukraine; refugees and migrants have overwhelmed Europe and collapsed the Schengen Zone; Iran has red missiles in the Straits of Hormuz; China has built islands to allow it to project power; and North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon. The collapse of world order creates the vacuums that allow Salafi-jihadi military organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS to amass resources to plan and conduct attacks on scales that could overwhelm any defenses the United States might raise. Even a marginal increase in such attacks could provoke Western societies to impose severe controls on the freedoms and civil liberties of their populations that would damage the very ideals that must most be defended. Sound strategy against these enemies requires effective action against their bases as well appropriate domestic efforts. The inextricable interrelationship between the strength of ISIS and al Qaeda in the Muslim-majority world and the threat of direct attack the groups pose within Europe and the United States is one of the most important findings of this exercise. Attempts to identify and target the specific enemy cells planning, preparing, or executing attacks on the U.S. homeland separately from the larger groups of which those cells are a part will inevitably fail to protect the American people. The regional bases of ISIS and al Qaeda provide a pool of resources and specific capabilities that will enable them to direct growing numbers of sophisticated attacks into the West whenever they so desire. American and Western security requires the elimination of ISIS and al Qaeda regional bases and safe havens. There are multiple, separate wars ongoing at the start of 2016. Many share belligerents. The war in Yemen stems from a geopolitical struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia that has been gravely exacerbated by the ongoing war in Syria. A broader regional war in the Middle East may emerge as the Saudi-Iranian conflict escalates. Russia’s establishment of an airbase in Syria close to Turkey’s border on NATO’s southern flank connects the war in Syria with that in Ukraine, as both challenge the brittle alliance. The United States must prevent the separate wars from merging into a general war, involving great powers, regional powers, and non-state actors. Such a situation may not be imminent, but it is possible and can stress the United States beyond anything we now see in January 2016. Goals and methods of this planning exercise The Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute have conducted an intensive multi-week effort to develop and evaluate various possible courses of action. The exercise began with a complete re-consideration of the vital national security interests and objectives of the United States, its partners, rivals such as Russia and Iran, and its enemies including both ISIS and al Qaeda. The exercise also considered the nature of the current international environment in which many factors are undermining global order, stability, and international laws and norms. It evaluated the threat posed by the persistence of safe havens for al Qaeda and ISIS in Iraq and Syria as distinct from the individual cells of those organizations planning and conducting attacks in the West. The group then designed and tested many possible courses of action to mitigate and, if possible, eliminate these conditions and the threats. None of the courses of action we examined, including a continuation or minor modification of the current strategy, achieved American national security objectives. The planning team is therefore continuing to examine other approaches to the problem and re-evaluating its assessments as circumstances on the ground change. Debate about Western strategy toward Iraq and Syria continues in the U.S. and Europe, however, and negotiations between some Syrian opposition groups and the Assad government are scheduled to start on January 25, 2016. Examinations of American grand strategic interests and of the nature of the enemy groups and the threat they pose to the U.S. and the West should inform all of these discussions. We have decided, therefore, not to wait until we have completed developing possible courses of action to begin presenting our findings. The planning group will thus present its results in several publications. This first paper examines American global grand strategic objectives as they relate to the threat from ISIS and al Qaeda. It also considers the nature of those groups from ideological, structural, and military perspectives and evaluates the relationship between the territory and resources those groups possess in the Muslim world and the direct violent threat they pose within the United States and Europe. The second paper will present the group’s assessment of American strategic objectives in Iraq and Syria in light of the issues considered in this first report. It will also describe the interests and objectives of Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia in Iraq and Syria as they relate to the overall goals of those states. It will then articulate the minimum conditions that a political-military resolution of the conflicts in Iraq and Syria must meet in order to meet U.S. national security requirements. The group will publish one or more additional papers describing in detail the specific courses of action we have evaluated, assessments of their results and whether or not they would achieve core American security objectives, the risks they pose to those objectives, and approaches to mitigating those risks. These results will most likely appear in February 2016. Conclusion Americans must confront the magnitude of the security disaster we face squarely, neither simplifying the challenges nor minimizing the requirements. Yet we must not throw up our hands in despair and retreat behind our own walls. Retreat will cause a terrible situation to become much worse and will raise the cost and difficulty of repairing it in the future by orders of magnitude. Enemies and adversaries, such as al Qaeda and ISIS, will thrive. Focusing inwardly and defensively will severely undermine core American values suchas liberty and diversity. Retreat will accelerate the collapse of the global order and economy, thereby severely damaging America’s prosperity and the well-being of all Americans. The argument for caution, passivity, and delay is easy to make. The desire to turn away from so vexing and complicated a problem is strong. Nothing about the situation in Syria, Iraq, or in the Middle East generally inspires optimism. But inaction is also action, and refusal to choose among bad options is a form of decision. Drifting along the current path in order to avoid dangerous and unpleasant action will almost certainly fail to achieve vital American national security interests and will put the safety of the American people and their allies in greater danger. The U.S. must choose a new course, risky and costly as it will surely be. This project will ultimately recommend such a course as it evaluates options, but its primary purpose is to reframe the debate and discussion in the hopes of igniting well-grounded creative thinking that may produce a better way out of the shadows in which we now find ourselves. © 2016 by the Institute for the Study of War. All rights reserved. |
| 主题 | Defense ; Terrorism |
| 标签 | AEI on Campus ; Al Qaeda ; Counterterrorism ; Iraq ; Syria ; The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) ; US Grand Strategy Series ; What to do policy recommendations on terrorism |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/al-qaeda-and-isis-existential-threats-to-the-us-and-europe/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/206213 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Frederick W. Kagan,Kimberly Kagan,Harleen Gambhir,et al. Al Qaeda and ISIS: Existential threats to the US and Europe. 2016. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| PLANEX_Report1_FINAL（3107KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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