Some very interesting ideas in this article:
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/isis-transforming-into-functioning-state-that-uses-terror-as-tool/ar-AAdgIOq?ocid=DELLDHPHere are some highlights I found most interesting, though I recommend the whole article.
ISIS Transforming Into Functioning State That Uses Terror as Tool
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While no one is predicting that the Islamic State will become steward of an accountable, functioning state anytime soon, the group is putting in place the kinds of measures associated with governance: issuing identification cards for residents, promulgating fishing guidelines to preserve stocks, requiring that cars carry tool kits for emergencies.
That transition may demand that the West rethink its military-first approach to combating the group.
“I think that there is no question that the way to look at it is as a revolutionary state-building organization,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is one of a small but growing group of experts who are challenging the conventional wisdom about the Islamic State: that its evil ensures its eventual destruction.
In a recent essay in Foreign Policy magazine — “What Should We Do if the Islamic State Wins?” — Mr. Walt argued that the Islamic State could indeed prevail in the face of a modest, American-led military campaign that has been going for almost a year and still left the group in control of large areas of Iraq and Syria.
He wrote, “an Islamic State victory would mean that the group retained power in the areas it now controls and successfully defied outside efforts to ‘degrade and destroy’ it.”
He added that now, after almost a year of American airstrikes on the group, it is becoming clear that “only a large-scale foreign intervention is likely to roll back and ultimately eliminate the Islamic State.”
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Under the Islamic State, he said, life can be brutal, but at least it seems more stable for those who can avoid crossing the group’s leaders. “Here they are implementing God’s regulations,” he said. “The killer is killed. The adulterer is stoned. The thief’s hands are cut.”
A similar sentiment helped the Taliban consolidate power two decades ago in Afghanistan: While the Taliban were feared, and their justice was often brutal, they were also respected by many Afghans for standing against corruption and chaos — and they remained firmly in control until the American invasion in 2001.
John E. McLaughlin, who was deputy director of the C.I.A. from 2000 to 2004, said he was recently at a dinner party in Washington at the home of an Australian diplomat when the discussion turned to the threat of the Islamic State.
“It suddenly just occurred to me, if you add everything up, that these guys could win,” he said. It was a controversial notion, he explained, because the group’s graphic brutality, which it showcases to the world in gory videos released through social media, has fed a sense that its demise is inevitable because it is so evil.
“Evil isn’t always defeated,” he said.
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Drawing on parallels from history, experts say, the group’s violence can be seen in a different light. Mr. Walt mentioned the guillotine of the French Revolution, and the atrocities of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the Communist one in China — imperfect analogies, to be sure, but ones that underscored the violence and oppression that can precede creation of a revolutionary state.
“At the time, these movements were regarded as completely beyond the pale and a threat to international order,” he said.
Mr. McLaughlin pointed to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant organization seen as a terrorist group in the eyes of the West and now a legitimate political player, and also reached back centuries to the brutality of English royalty.
“If you look at what the English kings did to consolidate their territories in the 14th and 15th centuries,” he said, “they were not only beheading people but disemboweling them.”
William McCants, the director of the Project on U.S. Relations With the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and an expert on the evolution of the Islamic State, said the historical analogies are accurate.
“We in the West have bought into this idea that insurgency and counterinsurgency is a battle for hearts and minds,” he said. “We forget how many states have been established through brutality.”
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Inside Islamic State territory, the group’s violence is regarded differently than it is in the West. In the communities it controls, citizens have already grown inured to violence. In Iraq, citizens have lived with war for more than a decade, including the days of sectarian civil war when a signature act of some Shiite militias was to drill the heads of Sunnis. And before that, they lived under the police state thuggery and corruption of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
Now there is a limited sense of order, and cleaner streets, a low bar, perhaps, but a reality amid years of war and anarchy. Hassan Hassan, an analyst who has studied the Islamic State and a co-author of a book on the group, said that on the ground there is “a logic of savagery.” If people avoid any sign of dissent, he said, they can largely go about their lives.
“Not happily,” he said, “but they can live at peace.”
He added, “They feel like there is a functioning state.”
I think this article was so interesting to me because it challenges some notions on the topic which I held as invariably true:
1. Because ISIS is so brutal, their defeat is inevitable because the world will not tolerate their evil.
2. Due to the brutal nature of ISIS, their rule cannot be an improvement over the previous governments in the minds of the people, even if those government were hopelessly corrupt.
3. ISIS rule cannot provide stability or peace for the populace.
4. ISIS brutality is unprecedented in the attempted establishment of a state.