VC Day (Victory over the Caliphate) is nigh:
Iraqi forces launched an offensive on Saturday to capture Rawa, the last remaining town under Islamic-State control, leaving the group's self-proclaimed caliphate on the verge of complete defeat.
The capture of the town would mark the end of Islamic State's era of territorial rule over a so-called caliphate that it proclaimed in 2014 across vast swathes of Iraq and Syria.
Syria's army declared victory over the militants on Thursday, after seizing the last substantial town on the border with Iraq.
My view on defeating ISIL across Iraq and Syria was to focus on defeating ISIL in Iraq while building up non-jihadi forces in Syria to take on Assad after we then moved on to defeat ISIL in Syria. I called it "Win, build, win":
That is, first we focus on a WIN in Iraq as the main effort by defeating ISIL and their local Sunni Arab allies by providing air support (using special forces and forward air controllers to guide them when possible) to local allies on the ground.
Local allies will be Kurdish forces in the northeast to drive southwest; Iraqi forces bolstered by US (and allied) embedded advisors (we will provide enough advisors for 9 brigade and 3 division headquarters) plus Iraqi counter-terrorism forces in the center to advance north and west; and possibly a Jordanian force to advance into Anbar from the west.
It is possible that we will have a contractor-based ground force that we hire that might provide part of that ground force in the center to advance north.
We will need to get another Awakening with sufficient Sunni Arabs to help tear out the jihadis who go underground as local spearheads backed by our air power push into ISIL-held ground.
Second, while we do this, we will BUILD the non-jihadi Syrian opposition. We plan to spend up to a year training 5,000 troops that we intend to use as a buffer forces along the Iraq-Syria border. Hopefully this complements our efforts north of Jordan and efforts out of Turkey to support non-jihadi rebels.
While we build up the Syrian opposition to become a viable alternative to the jihadis for those who want to fight Assad, we will strike targets in Syria to support the Iraq main effort in Iraq and to shape the battlefield for the last step. ...
Third, when Iraq is secured we attempt to WIN in Syria. Hopefully, those Syrian rebels we trained who hold the border in the east have attracted new recruits and we can back them as they advance west and defeat ISIL in Syria.
The fourth step is to continue the win over ISIL by helping non-jihadi Syrian rebels in the east, in the south, and in the north to overthrow Assad. I'm not sure the Obama administration is on board with this final step.
So yeah, the whole thing will take time. It is possible that the third step won't be finished before 2016 is over--but I think step one should be achieved next year if we can strike decisive blows as we did in Afghanistan in 2001 and as the French did in Mali--and that the fourth step won't begin until the next administration.
But we started the campaign to defeat ISIL in Syria too early, finishing that about the same time as the campaign in Iraq is being won.
And we failed to build up non-jihadi rebels in eastern Syria to replace ISIL once ISIL was defeated.
No, the Kurds don't count. They won't lead the fight west to oust Assad simply for the privilege of bleeding and then returning to their northeast homeland.
And we took too long. ISIL occupied territory and had relatively few troops holding that territory. This should have been an opportunity to hammer them relatively quickly.
I complained about how we seemed to be taking our time early and couldn't believe it took us about as long to prepare to attack Mosul as it took to invade Nazi-occupied France in World War II.
So here we are with Russia, Syria, and Iran taking advantage of the fact that our war against ISIL went too slow in Iraq and ended up defeating ISIL in Syria before we could build non-jihadi Arab resistance to Assad in the east.
UPDATE: Yeah, the proto-state of ISIL had a lot of attributes of a state because it had the former Saddam bureaucrats to help run it.
And as a terror proto-state rather than a terror insurgency, we should have exploited the proto-state's need to control their territory with the military power of a terror insurgency in order to defeat them far more rapidly than we did.
