Very little peace to be found in the Middle East

The Tampa Tribune / TBO.com

Howard Altman Columns

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“Where to begin?”

That’s the question Bill Fallon asks me when I ask him about his thoughts on the status of things in his old bailiwick.

For 378 days between March 2007 and March 2008, Fallon, an admiral, ran U.S. Central Command. Headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, it oversees U.S. military operations in the most dangerous and discombobulated swath of the planet.

About the most encouraging thing you can say about what’s taking place in the Centcom region these days is that nothing’s blowing up in Glorious Kazakhstan.

At least not at the moment.

Almost any place you look at in the 20-nation region that stretches east from Egypt, there is turmoil, often on an unprecedented scale.

“It’s a mess everywhere,” Fallon says.

Overshadowed by the tumult of Syria, the Egyptians are mounting their own campaign in the Sinai against forces aligned with the jihadi group calling itself Islamic State, all while flooding the tunnels running to Gaza, which along with Israel is not in Centcom’s purview but always an engine driving developments there.

The Saudis are leading their own bombing campaign just south of the border in Yemen, which was once held up as a shining example of success but is now another smouldering ruin of human misery. Its another place the U.S. has been run out of.

Afghanistan remains a dangerous place, as the bombing of the Doctors without Borders hospital, which killed more than 20, will attest. As will the recent resurgence of the Taliban, who are taking back territory against Afghan National Security Forces who sorely miss the air power and wider support once provided by the U.S. and its allies.

Iran, of course, continues to present its own challenges, to the U.S. and to the Sunni Arab world, which looks on warily at the recently inked nuclear arms deal as they contemplate their own atomic ambitions.

And now Iran has teamed up with Russia and Iraq in the fight against the Sunni jihadis. It’s an effort that U.S. officials insist it will not join, at least not directly, by sharing intelligence or having a uniformed liaison at meetings among those three nations.

All while the spillover from Syria and Iraq has been wreaking havoc in Lebanon and Jordan, one of the best and strongest allies, who have been ferociously all in, especially after the immolation of pilot Muath al-Kassasebeh.

Meantime, Pakistan remains for now a quietly simmering cauldron, the world’s only nuclear armed Muslim nation, riven by instability and poverty.

But it is Syria and Iraq that are the epicenter right now of Centcom’s greatest woes.

And the answer to Fallon’s question of where to begin any discussion of the travails of the Centcom region.

The White House and Pentagon on Friday announced a “pause” to the long-suffering effort to train and equip individual Syrian fighters to take on Islamic State. It was largely a useless effort before the Russians moved into Syria, taking on both Islamic State but mostly the forces arrayed against their client, Bashar al-Assad.

The plan now is to arm existing groups with vetted leaders to fight Islamic State. And to have an increased focus, lead by Army Maj. Gen. Michael Nagata who commands both Special Operations Command Central, based at MacDill, and the Combined Joint Interagency Task Force, on finding new Syrian Kurdish, Arab and Christian leaders to joint the fight in Syria.

On Friday, Cmdr. Elissa Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told me that so far, about $384 million of the $500 million authorized for the train and equip mission has been spent on a program that resulted in about four score Syrians who returned to the fight.

“Most of the money we’ve spent on this program has gone toward equipment,” Smith says in an email. “We have that equipment in storage and will use it to supply these existing groups.”

Fallon has his own opinion.

“Whatever money was spent was pissed down the drain,” he says. “Whatever we gave them ended up in the hands of the bad guys.”

The entry of Russia into the fray has made a very bad situation very much worse, he says.

“He trumped us,” says Fallon of Russian premier Vladimir V. Putin. “He has decided to take it back upstairs and basically do whatever he wants to do and got us in a position where we can’t do very much about it.”

Putin, Fallon says, “has basically put an insurance policy on Assad, which is very difficult to undo in my opinion.”

As for Iraq, where Islamic State is entrenched in Mosul and Ramadi and the Iraqi security forces have had limited success, Fallon says the problems stem largely from the fact that the U.S. “disengaged too early” when it pulled out in 2011.

“When I was there, I felt very strongly that we absolutely must have kept enough people to keep an eye on those guys and keep them on the straight and narrow,” Fallon says of his time at Centcom, which coincided with the start of the surge President George W. Bush ordered in Iraq. “What it really comes down to is to not squander all the gains we made with so much blood, sweat and tears over those years.”

So far, U.S. efforts against Islamic State have been largely relegated to aerial bombardment. With the exception of Special Forces in the Kurdish north, training efforts at bases like the Al Asad Air Base and special missions attacks on high value targets, a good deal of the 3,500 U.S, troops in Iraq are confined to joint and tactical operations centers far from the fighting.

That is the wrong approach, Fallon says.

“In my opinion, we probably need to be a little more aggressive on the ground,” he says. “Dropping bombs isn’t going to get it done. Never has.”

Fallon says he is not talking about brigade-level forces returning to Iraq, but instead more pinpoint special operations forces efforts, especially to help guide munitions to target. And gaining a better awareness of what is really happening in the battlespace.

A contributing factor to the problems in the Centcom region, Fallon says, is political dysfunction.

“We do not appear to have a cohesive strategy,” he says. “As a result, all we do is react. That just isn’t going to work.”

It is a problem that began under the previous administration, Fallon says, and has continued through this one. He says there has to be a sweet spot between the aggressive Bush approach and the passive Obama approach.

And while it is tempting to throw hands up and walk away, letting the Shia and Sunni, Arab and Persian to fight it out amongst themselves, the world is too interconnected to make that practical or desirable, he says.

I ask Fallon, in his experienced opinion, what might be going through the minds of current Centcom commander Army Gen. Lloyd Austin III and his staff.

He answers by talking about the relative peace he enjoyed before coming to Centcom, when he commanded U.S. Pacific Command. And the drastic changes he found when he got to MacDill.

“When I was at Pacom, I had the luxury of the rest of the world being very busy with the other immediate problems, namely the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says. “I actually didn’t know it at the time, but I had the luxury of being able to think in longer terms and not have to put out immediate brush fires. I could think about how to deal with China and Japan and regional alliances. We could think and come up with plans and be thoughtful about it.”

All that changed when he came to Tampa.

“When I got to Centcom, it was like, forget it. There is no time to do anything,” he says. “We are here in the frying pan right now. Do something right now about figuring out the problem. That is the dilemma.”

It’s a dilemma faced by Austin, who has no shortage of fires to put out and who bore the brunt of congressional Republican outrage over the state of the fight against Islamic State when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.

“You have to make time to do that thinking and the strategizing and the planning,” Fallon says. “If it were easy, I am sure it would have already been done. I’m sure they are working overtime at Centcom trying to sort it out. It is easier said than done.”

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The Pentagon announced no deaths last week in the ongoing operations in the Centcom region.

There have been 2,347 U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, eight in support of the anti-ISIS campaign Operation Inherent Resolve, and 12 U.S. troop deaths and one civilian Department of Defense employee death in support of the follow-up Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan.