THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 11, Season 5
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Host: Tom Clark
Guests: General John Allen, Admiral Bill Gortney, Minister Harjit Sajjan, General Jonathan Vance, Janice Stein
Location: Halifax, Nova Scotia
Tom Clark: Welcome to this Special Edition of The West Block from the Halifax International Security Forum. And what a time for this conference, the first time since the events in Paris a little more than a week ago, that the world experts have come together to try and untangle what has happened and what is going on.
As I said this comes, shortly after Paris. It also comes after the bombings in Beirut. It comes after the bombings in the skies over the Sinai and this weekend, the slaughter in Mali: All expressions, deadly expressions of Islamic Jihadism.
So in this room, some of the brightest minds in the world in the area of governance, military, security, even journalism and academia are all on display here. And what’s going to be discussed here this weekend is incredibly important because it will help shape the world response to what is now a clear and present danger for us all.
We have an extraordinary panel to start and I’d like to introduce them. First of all, General John Allen who is now with the Brookings Institute but was very recently, as you all know the presidential envoy to the coalition to confront the Islamic State. Admiral Bill Gortney wears two hats at this event, not only as the Commander of NORAD, but also as the Commander of the US Northern Command. Harjit Sajjan, Canada’s new Minister of National Defence and I might just point out as well, a three-time veteran of Afghanistan and the gang wars in Vancouver. General Jon Vance, Canadian Chief of the Defence staff, used to be the boss of this guy over here, also a veteran of Afghanistan, and Janice Stein who is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and the Founding Director of the Munk School for Global Affairs. Welcome to you all.
And let me kick off this discussion right away, General Allan, is this the new normal when you take a look at Paris, Beirut, and now Mali, is this the new normal?
General John Allen: We hope this isn’t the new normal, but we have to be thinking expansively and I’ll try to make three quick points. We have to be thinking sufficiently, expansively about what is going through the minds of the leadership of this organization, Daesh, the Islamic State, and I’ll refer to it as Daesh. We talked about a long time ago that there could be a time when this organization, when it feels enough pressure at the core, could begin something that would look like a concerted counter attack, and we need to be thinking in those terms, and we need to be thinking offensively. Is this a response to the squeeze that is occurring of the core surface area of Daesh in Syria and in Iraq? And it has been squeezed, it has been diminished, the leadership is under attack, constantly, and has this now resulted in something that looks like a counter attack? And we need to be thinking in those terms.
Gen. John Allen (Ret.)
There are new elements to it, but there’s also an element of normalcy to this violence in the world that we don’t like that we’d like to get ahead of. So, you could also pose the question are our responses new normal or old normal, you have to look at both sides of the equation.
Tom Clark: Janice, I wonder if you could give us some sense before we get into how do we get into victory, which is what General Allan was talking about, tell me what victory looks like?
Janice Stein: Victory looks like a political solution in Sunni Arab heartland which is Daesh is concentrating. Where some of you may not agree with me, is that it’s not clear that we can reconstitute the states in that Sunni heartland in exactly the same way they were before this 100 year old order began this period of implosion and collapse. But we have to have a political solution for what today constitutes Iraq and Syria, and more broadly speaking, a solution which speaks to the Sunni aspirations in this part of the world.
Tom Clark: Minister Sajjan, you haven’t been in your portfolio very long but you’ve got a to-do list which is pretty extensive at this point. On the political side, everybody in this room and across the country knows that it is the policy of your government to withdraw from the bombing campaign element of the coalition and to increase the amount of training for in our case Kurdish Peshmerga troops. A lot of people have asked this in light of Paris, why can’t we do both? What’s the advantage in pulling out of the bombing mission?
Harjit Sajjan: Well one of the things we need to take a look at is, I think as both general mentioned, we need to get a good understanding of the problem itself and we don’t go into any type of conflict alone, we’re part of a bigger coalition. When you have a better understanding, I think this is where Canada’s contribution in terms of a training role can have a much more meaningful impact because we have to take a look at how did we even get here. To ISIS, it was them taking ground, so unless we train the Iraqi Forces, the Peshmerga to be able to take the fight to ISIS with additional support, we’re not going to be able to set the conditions for what General Vance had just mentioned, the other institutional building.
Tom Clark: Let me ask you though, just before I go to Admiral Gortney, on that point, the idea in Canada’s case, we are training Kurdish Peshmerga troops, they fight not under the Iraqi flag, they fight under their own flag. When the shooting is all over, they don’t want part of Iraq. Can we count on them to take the fight to Daesh? Can we count on them if there’s an offensive that’s going on in Bagdad for example? Will they leave their compound? These are interesting questions, who exactly are we supporting?
Harjit Sajjan: Well this is complexity I think we have been very mindful of. And I’ve stated this before, any contribution that we make or decisions we make, we need to fully understand the dynamics. This is not just strictly about we have to fight ISIS, but we also have got to look at all the regional dynamics and the relationships between the Kurds, the Sunni’s, the Shia’s and the entire region. So when we do add the contribution for something, we’ve got to make sure it has the right impact on the ground and we don’t end up creating another problem set for us as well.
Tom Clark: Admiral Gortney, I want to get to you because you wear two very interesting hats in this operation, and I refer to it as the ‘home game’ and the ‘away game’. And the home game has to, I would imagine, reflect the ‘away game’, the strategies have to be integrated. And when you were charged with NORTHCOM, but when you were charged with NORAD, the defence of the North American homeland, if you want to put it that way, you’ve got a whole new set of problems we’ve talked here about the idea of homegrown radicalization, the fact that in the Paris attacks, the mastermind in fact was a Belgian, lived in Belgium, didn’t come in the refugee stream. What are the particular challenges that we face in terms of North America, is there going to be a greater pressure for example to implement continental security, perimeter security for North America?
Admiral Bill Gortney: Well I see under my NORAD hat, which is the aerospace defence, my mission not changing. We execute that under Operation Noble Eagle and we have been monitoring the threat reports and the threat streams of AQ, Al Qaeda, AQAP, and we were assuming that Daesh would also go to the air to spread their message of terror. And so that mission will continue to be there and we’ll work with our mission partners in order to defend the skies in the territory above Canada and the United States. The other piece is an additional element to what Jon talked about though, under my NORTHCOM mission set, is the very sophisticated social media campaign that Daesh is creating that is encouraging citizens to do harm to their fellow citizens, be it here in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, in Paris, in Germany, in the UK, wherever, and that’s going to be a long-term problem. The ones that I’m most concerned about in that particular regard, are those that are not communicating back, those that are in the receive mode of this very sophisticated social media campaign and choose to do something and they’re not communicating back. If they’re communicating back, we may have the tools that might pick them up and our law enforcement partners who are in charge of this in the United States would be able to do something about it.
Tom Clark: We’ve been bombing in Iraq and Syria for almost a year now, how can there be any targets left? You would think that we’ve hit them all by now and yet we continue to find new targets to hit. Has it been that our rules of engagement have not matched the task at hand? In other words, I submit that I think it’s two thirds of the missions come back without having dropped any ordnance because of the rules of engagement for American Forces and I imagine General, it’s the same for Canadian Forces, that we can’t drop bombs if we think we’re going to kill civilians. Now the Russians have—I’m not sure it’s even a rule of engagement, they just bomb and they don’t care about it. Are we going to have to change the nature of the military campaign? Do we have to become a little bit more bloody about it? Do we have to care a little bit less about the rules of engagement?
Admiral Bill Gortney: I hope we would never relax the restrictions that we put on our air crew and open up the collateral damage. We’re very, very serious about that. We’re only there to do damage to those that we want to do damage to.
Gen. Jonathan Vance. I’m with Admiral Gortney here, you can’t carpet bomb your way to victory either, so what we’ve set up here and what General Austin and Centcom is running, and what the coalition is contributing to, is a carefully managed operation that’s not trying to and is not selling the fact that we’re going to defeat it with air power. So a fighter that comes back with bombs still attached because the collateral’s too high, that’s a good thing. A fighter that does strike, that’s a good thing because we know it’s probably going to be important and contribute to degradation.
Tom Clark: With that, we’re going to take a short break. The West Block from the Halifax International Security Forum, we’ll be back right after this.
Tom Clark: Welcome back to the Special Edition of The West Block from the Halifax International Security Forum. I just want to bring up something and again for all of you and then I am going to move into the crowd in a minute. You know the history, we’re talking about how you get there and you’ve just General, examined one of the sort of tactical ways to do that, but let me ask you this because the history of training forces in that part of the world, surrogate forces if you want, has not been all that terrific. We spent what was it, $550 million training, the American did anyway, training surrogates from rebel armies in Syria, 60 of them actually graduated and surrendered on the first day and then the program was brought—
General John Allen: I’m going to take issue with that question. You finish it though.
Tom Clark: Okay well fair enough, but the program was ended after that in terms of training. But outside of the issue that I brought up with you minister in terms of who we’re training and therefore the complexities on the ground of dealing with so many diverse groups, is the Iraqi Army up to the attacks after Mosul in 2014? Is there anything in Syria that can work for us on the ground to supplement the conditions that we’re laying out with our campaign right now? Janice?
Janice Stein: So to come back to General Allen’s point just for one minute to answer your question, what we’re actually seeing is action in the provinces. Another way of thinking about what happened in France is Europeans were attacking Europeans with actually very minimal logistical and financial support unfortunately, which makes it tougher, right? The Russian plane, that was in the Egyptian theatre. It was done very likely by networks operating in the Sinai, so these are very localized actions that wreck a considerable amount of damage with localized resources and actually, and this makes it harder, stunningly little support from the network. Yes there’s back and forth, but what moved? Not a lot of money, very small number of people, and the weapons are purchased in local markets.
Tom Clark: General Allen, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you an opportunity to rebut something I’ve just said.
General John Allen: Well I think we need to be accurate here. Much of the money that was spent out of that $500 million and we didn’t come close to the end of it was spent on equipment. And you are right, it didn’t produce the numbers that we wanted, but something very important did happen in Northern Syria and it’s called the Kurds and the Turkoman and the Syrian Sunni Arab elements that came together and in a concerted operation enabled by the international coalition. Moved Daesh off the Syrian Turkish border all the way from Iraq to the Euphrates and we’re currently working with the Turks to build the capacity to close the remaining portion of that border, about 98 clicks. The rest of the border is no longer in the hands of Daesh and that was an enabled and supported indigenous force that moved Daesh off the border.
Gen. Jonathan Vance. There’s no one silver bullet and training is a part of a continuum and a valuable part. The failure of a unit or even a long-term effort in training is probably less a function of a failure in training and equipping, but a failure of the state organs and institutions to be able to sustain and be able to employ that force effectively such that that force is loyal to the cause, is getting paid, has got you know all the things that a force needs to have to go be effective in their own land. So, I’d say that the training was extremely effective, great individually trained people, that they fight or not is not necessarily a function of training. It’s a function of where they’re coming from, what are they fighting for, did they see any value in the fight on that day. And so it is an effort that has to go beyond the training, but you can’t do it without the training.
Tom Clark: Here’s a political question for you minister, how important is Russia?
Harjit Sajjan: I think it’s important for us to understand, just in the beginning of the conversation that I just mentioned here, is that we need to make sure that we have a good understanding of the dynamics at play. With Russia, we obviously know the dynamics that are playing in Syria right now is further complicating the situation. We need to make sure that we understand the dynamics within how Russia plays and how it interacts with the other countries.
Tom Clark: On that note, we are once again, going to take a short break and we will be back with more of The West Block from the Halifax Security Forum right after this.
Tom Clark: Welcome back to the Special Edition of The West Block from the Halifax International Security Forum. We are talking about the aftermath of the massacre in Paris and I’m going to go up into the audience now.
Female Audience Member: I wanted to ask a question about the media recruitment when we’re talking about Daesh. In the same way that we’ve not been able to get STOP recruiting through the social media networks because governments have to follow certain rules and regulations about how we operate, there are groups who are ironically kind of aligned with us at this point, like Anonymous who have declared war on ISIS and have effectively taken down thousands of accounts over the last few days. So I wanted to ask some of the members of the panel what they thought about the government’s ability to work with, if there was a possibility to work with some of these groups, to get at this digital recruiting and find a way to sort of stop it.
Tom Clark: Who would like to take that on?
Gen. John Allen (Ret.) I think it’s a very important proposal actually and I can’t tell you specifically on this particular day how much the US government has reached out, but within the context of the coalition, the British and the Emirates are leading the process and other members of the coalition are participating, and part of that process is dealing with the tech industry and working to understand how we can use industry standards for content, both as a tool for us and as a weapon against them. So your question is really important. As Janice said, we’re really waging war against Daesh in spheres, the physical sphere where we’re dealing it on the ground, in the financial sphere as we seek to shrink its resources, but maybe the most important sphere and where the decisive outcome will be determined is in the information sphere. And part of that is having a superior message, part of that is having a deterrent message, part of that is ensuring that our Arab friends with a Muslim voice are prominent in that message, and so it has to be a very inclusive approach.
Janice Stein: One interesting way to think about it, is how are we reaching out to young Arabs who are creative, edgy, willing, looking for opportunities in voice, but don’t necessarily have the tools that we need. Maybe our role is to enable the messaging and enable the creativity and the diversity and the richness, and then back off from the control and run that risk because we can populate the environment with diverse authentic narratives that to me, is a big part of a successful strategy. Good with that? Okay.
Admiral Bill Gortney. The mission analysis, we’ve done a mission analysis of it in the headquarters and quite frankly we feel that Daesh’s centre of gravity is their message, that they’ve established a caliphate and so we have to counter that. That’s where we should go. It’s one of the elements. You go after where they have power, you go after where they have money, but we really need to go after their message. And to be honest, if we don’t get after it, I don’t really understand why we’re not more successful. If you look at the horrors how they execute their government, probably the wrong term of art, but how they go about it that that is attractive to somebody, someone would find that message attractive is just amazing to I’m sure this group that’s here today. So we absolutely have to go about it and I’m in full agreement ma’am, you can’t have a clean C2 on this, we can’t have a governance structure, but we need to figure it out.
Male Audience Member: I’m just back from Kiev and I was there in the day of that horrible tragedy in Paris. And I talked to many common people and they were saying exactly the words that admiral has used. We are the collateral damage because they were saying Americans were not serious about fighting ISIS. When Putin got involved, now it became serious, then the airplane, then Paris, and now what? World will unite? It would be another anti-Hitler coalition and everybody will forget about Ukraine and Eastern Europe and that’s what they fear.
Janice Stein: I understand precisely the direction of your question and it’s a reasonable fear for the community in Kiev to have, but strategy has phases. So it’s entirely conceivable to have a phase concentration on Daesh, which is global, rather than simply NATO, but that does not mean in any way that you take your eye off the ball in Ukraine, that you legitimate what happened in Europe and there is a morning after Daesh as well.
Tom Clark: Unfortunately we have reached the end of the time allotted for this, but just as a closing thought, if you could give me a brief closing thought on this point, what is the one thing that is going to stand in the way of victory against Daesh? General Allen?
General John Allen: An absence of coherence within the coalition and an absence of having a universal understanding of what our objectives are.
Tom Clark: What’s minister, the one thing that can stop us winning this fight?
Harjit Sajjan: We need to fully understand how this problem occurred and I think we talked a little bit about that. Once we get really good understanding about that, then you can start looking at how to reverse engineering for the solution as well.
Tom Clark: General?
Gen Jonathan Vance. I think in patience. I think we need to see what can be successful in what time horizon, do exactly as the general suggests, apply all the tools that you can that are appropriate for that time horizon, but recognize it’s going to take a long time.
Tom Clark: Well ladies and gentlemen that brings us to the end this. I think by the number of hands that were still raised, we could have gone on for another couple of hours. It is going to be a discussion that is going to inform every discussion this weekend. And I submit to you that no discussion is more important than the one we’re having now. Terrific panel, General Allen, Admiral Gortney, Minister Sajjan, General Vance, and Janice Stein, thank you all very much for being here. I appreciate it.
And with that, I’ll just say that it The West Block for this week, the special edition from the Halifax International Security Forum. Join us next Sunday from Paris at the International Climate Conference, an equally vexing problem for the world. See you next Sunday.
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