Trump reminds us that it is time to rethink our role

Allies’ concerns about US President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw 2000 troops from Syria and perhaps many more from Afghanistan overlook two critical considerations.

The first is that whether it be the original Hashashins, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Hamas, Hezbollah, Egyptian ­Islamic Jihad, al-Qa’ida, Jabhat al-Nusra or Islamic State, and now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the region has long cultivated state and non-state terror groups. With or without US boots on the ground, the seeds of Islamist hatred are sown across the Middle East.

The second is that the recalibration of Australia’s fight against terrorism on foreign soil is overdue.

Trump’s foreign policy can be hard to decipher. For a start, diplomatically setting one’s allies on fire is uncommon. And why would Trump declare victory over Islamic State? It hasn’t even been destroyed in Iraq (the definition of destruction being an enemy’s inability to reform). A ­report days ago in the Combating Terrorism Centre’s Sentinel, by Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, estimates that in the first 10 months of 2018, Islamic State mounted 1271 attacks, attempted to overrun 120 Iraqi security force outposts and executed 148 village elders, tribal leaders and district officials. It is back to its pre-caliphate days of guerilla warfare insurgency.

In its 2018 Global Threat Assessment, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence describes the geographical diversity of violent Sunni groups; they are likely to exploit conflict zones where they can combine terrorism and insurgency. In that regard, Australia has conducted itself with distinction in The Philippines against Islamic State-inspired militants, but, wherever we turn, Islamist extremism festers.

And Trump has not declared an end to targeting Western-hating extremists, or the removal of key US strategic assets from the Middle East. The US has thousands of troops, naval facilities, airfields and bases across the ­region. The biggest threat to Iran is posed by the US Middle East-based military machine, which will stay put.

Look at Camp Lemonnier, the US base in Djbouti on the Horn of Africa. No US forces are on the ground in Somalia yet the US regularly launches missile strikes via drones or fighter jets from Camp Lemonnier against the terror group al-Shabab. Among the latter’s many atrocities was the 2013 attack at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, that killed more than 70. In 2009, when captain Richard Phillips was held hostage by Somali pirates aboard the Maersk Alabama, the US landed six SEAL snipers aboard the USS Bainbridge who shot the ­pirates and rescued Phillips.

Barack Obama waged a relentless drone campaign against terror leaders in Pakistan’s tribal lands without a boot on the ground. The tomahawk cruise missiles that struck Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s airfield following his use of chemical weapons in April this year were launched from US battle­ships in the Mediterranean.

In his 2012 work on hunting ­al-Qa’ida, defence and terrorism expert Seth Jones describes four waves of terrorism over the past 25 years. Given thousands of Islamic State fighters and sympathisers fled Syria and Iraq, avoiding being wiped out by US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis’s “encircle and annihilate” campaign, it is likely there will be a fifth.

That could easily come from our backyard, given the support for Islamist extremism in the West. It may not be Islamic State but an adaptation of it. Thanks to the EU’s uncontrolled borders - of the 5000 foreign fighters who joined Islamic State from Europe, about 1500 have returned home. Do we believe their jihad has ended? Darwin’s principle of natural selection suggests those who survived are likely to be smarter, more skilled and role models for others.

In 2014, Australia’s former army chief Peter Leahy said the war against radical Islam could last 100 years. But it is hard to envisage increasingly fragmented Western governments and their voters accepting a century of endless combat missions, particularly if the result is the great-grandsons of the terrorists we killed still hate the West while Australia’s radical Islamists continue to kill and terrorise us. Pre-emptive and reactive military deployments and domestic counter-terror efforts will likely wax and wane in intensity against this intergenerational threat.

US soldiers have been in ­Afghanistan since October 2001. Al-Qa’ida was mostly quickly eliminated, the rest escaping to Pakistan to be mopped up by special forces and drone strikes. Western governments stayed on, believing they could do better than previous empires. Seventeen years later, ­following the withdrawal of all but about 14,000 US forces and European military advisers, the Taliban has retaken half the country. We learned so little.

From the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42) until its final foray into ­Afghanistan in 1919, Britain’s stance on Afghanistan oscillated between “masterly inactivity” and the “forward policy”. For 30 years following that disastrous first war, Britain applied “masterly inactivity”, having nothing to do with Afghanistan’s internal affairs, apart from guarding the border territory with India and maintaining relations with Kabul (although this included what was termed “butcher and bolt”, in which one-off punitive attacks were launched against tribal troublemakers).

The “forward policy” came back when Benjamin Disraeli moved into Downing Street in 1874 and involved seeking the most strategically advantageous position in Afghanistan and a zero tolerance for any sign of Russian interference. Yet it was Lord Curzon, Britain’s former viceroy in India (1899-1905), who implemented a clever combination of tribal ­patronage with multiple agreements that as long as the tribes did not interfere with India, Britain would leave the tribes to themselves. But do we believe we can make such deals with the cunning Taliban?

Whether it be Afghanistan or Syria, we are in the same predicament Winston Churchill described on his return from fighting in Afghanistan as a 26-year-old. The alternatives then, as now, are: go big and stay long at great cost; ­embark on an intelligence-led, counter-terrorism approach capable of striking any target; or withdraw.

Irrespective of the choice, there is no longer an American solution to every problem. A new phase of Australia’s foreign and domestic defence must begin.

Jason Thomas teaches risk management at the Swinburne University of Technology and is director of Frontier Assessments.