Why We Aren't Bombing ISIS

Richard Miniter Contributor

I investigate foreign policy and national security issues.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Three out of every four times that Obama dispatches American warplanes over Iraq, they return to base without dropping any bombs or firing any missiles.

“Seventy-five percent of the sorties that we’re currently running with our attack aircraft come back without dropping bombs, mostly because they cannot acquire the target or properly identify the target,” said U.S. Army General (ret) Jack Keane in testimony before the U.S. Senate last week.

That’s why White House and Pentagon briefers usually talk about the number of sorties, not the number of air strikes. The number of missions flown is four times larger than the number of bombing runs.

Gen. Keane offered a straightforward solution. “Forward air controllers fix that problem,” he said.

Forward air controllers are specially trained to guide aircraft onto ground targets, often by radio or painting targets with lasers. They are on the front lines and often the difference between victory and defeat.

America’s swift seizure of territory in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya was largely due to such specialists, but the administration has been reluctant to send them against ISIS. Obama officials fear that additional “boots on the ground” would anger antiwar activists and combat deaths would be unpopular with the general public.

Without effective air strikes, the U.S. is fighting a phony war against ISIS.

Meanwhile, ISIS is reaching into North Africa, positioning it to attack what Winston Churchill once called the “soft underbelly of Europe”: Greece, the Balkans, Malta, Italy, France and Spain. Islamist groups in Tunisia, Libya, Nigeria, and elsewhere come under ISIS’ infamous black banner.

What’s needed in Muslim Africa is not forward air controllers who radio for bombs from above, but a kind of forward air controller who calls in waves of money and ideas. The landscape can be made inhospitable to ISIS if the ground is skillfully prepared. What’s needed is someone who is trusted simultaneously by military and civilian leaders, by religious and tribal leaders, as well as the financial elites in precisely those African nations where ISIS is seeking to expand. Ideally, it would also be someone who is also trusted by the United States and has a proven track record of combating extremism and expanding economic opportunity in the region.

That’s quite a job description. Fortunately, the perfect candidate exists: Morocco’s king, Mohammed VI.

By his country’s law and custom, the king is “commander of the faithful,” a religious role that allows him to promote his nation’s “mystical” and quietist form of Islam over forms that focus on using violence to make social change. Morocco’s main form of Islam emphasizes the changing of the self through increasing discipline and deepening obedience; radical Salafi forms of Islam (embraced by al Qaeda, ISIS and parts of the Muslim Brotherhood) stress murdering and maiming innocents to stampede the survivors into submission.

This is a war of ideas. On its outcome hangs the future of five different civilizations (Arab, Chinese, Indian, Russian and Western). So it is vital to supply the right ideas to the right people at the right time across the region.

The king is already making substantial progress. Using his own funds, he awards more than 500 scholarships for imams every year, enabling the clerics to come to Morocco to study its time-tested form of Islam. This strategic move gives imams in Mali, Mauritania and other West African nations the intellectual ammunition and confidence to argue against extremism. One of ironies of these debates is that the extremists often know very, very little of the Koran and the Sharia that they seek to impose. Since they would lose, radicals are now starting to avoid getting into public arguments with imams.

Significantly, the king has pushed for the creation of female imams, known as “murchidate” or “mosque keepers.” These female imams fundamentally change the conversation just by being in it. The radicals who believe that Sharia strips women of all rights now face arguments from female religious leaders for the first time.

Inevitably every counterterrorism program has a poverty-fighting component on the grounds that people distracted by work and family are unlikely to find time for building car bombs.  This simply isn’t true. Extremists are usually among the most educated people in their society, usually hail from intact middle-class families and have plenty of access to high-paying professions. Terrorism in the work of engineers, lawyers and doctors—not displaced herders and starving farmers.

Still, economic development is worth doing because it provides fragile societies with the capacity to resist ISIS. Here too, King Mohammed VI has played an important role, providing a model program that should be widely copied. It is called the National Human Development Initiative. It has been running for more than a decade and has made measureable and significant progress against rural poverty. Before the development initiative, few of rural poor had access to bank accounts and smart phones. Now many of them own both.

And free trade is an important part of the war against ISIS. The U.S. Senate just passed the African Growth and Opportunity Act. America’s free-trade treaty with Morocco and that kingdom’s free-trade agreements with other African nations set up the potential for a vast trade zone. King Mohammed VI has led the way in striking free-trade deals with sub-Saharan nations. Now some of the poorest nations in the world can use Morocco as a waypoint to sell into the world’s richest market. As trade flows increase, private investment will lengthen runways, widen roads and string electrical lines—providing the infrastructure American and allied forces need to fight extremists.

And, of course, African nations desperately need military training and equipment.

ISIS is still weak in North Africa and there is still time to reverse its gains. But time is short.

President Obama should ask Morocco’s king to be a kind of forward air controller, to use his on-the-ground perspective to increase the effectiveness of the overhead American effort.

If America does nothing, in a few years, much of Africa could look like Iraq and Syria do today and ISIS will be a vast enemy with the resources, revenues and reach to wage world war.

And, future generations will wonder why, if we saw the danger looming, we didn’t summon the will to act?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardminiter/2015/06/01/why-we-arent-bombing-isis/