their weapons and funds to more overtly Isla-

mist groups. This splintered the Syrian oppo-

sition, marginalising the FSA and paving the
way for the Islamic States rise.
The anti-Assad coalition indeed started off
on the wrong foot by trying to speciously
distinguish between moderate and rad-
ical jihadists. The line separating the two is
just too blurred. Indeed, the term moderate
jihadists is an oxymoron: Those waging ji-
had by the gun can never be moderate.
Invoking jihad
The U.S. and its allies made a more funda-
mental mistake by infusing the spirit of jihad
in their campaign against Mr. Assad so as to
help trigger a popular uprising in Syria. The
decision to instil the spirit of jihad through
television and radio broadcasts beamed to
Syrians was deliberate to provoke Syrias
majority Sunni population to rise against
their secular government.
This ignored the lesson from Afghanistan
(where the CIA in the 1980s ran, via Pakistan,
the largest covert operation in its history)
that inciting jihad and arming holy war-
riors creates a deadly cocktail, with far-reac-
hing and long-lasting impacts on
international security. The Reagan adminis-
tration openly used Islam as an ideological
tool to spur armed resistance to Soviet forces
in Afghanistan.
In 1985, at a White House ceremony in
honour of several Afghan mujahideen the
jihadists out of which al-Qaeda evolved
President Ronald Reagan declared, These
gentlemen are the moral equivalent of Amer-
icas Founding Fathers. Earlier in 1982, Re-
agan dedicated the space shuttle Columbia
to the Afghan resistance. He declared, Just
IS, Frankensteins monster unleashed
Brahma Chellaney
as the Columbia, we think, represents mans
nest aspirations in the eld of science and
technology, so too does the struggle of the
Afghan people represent mans highest aspi-
rations for freedom. I am dedicating, on be-
half of the American people, the March 22
launch of the Columbia to the people of
Afghanistan.
The Afghan war veterans came to haunt
the security of many countries. Less known is
the fact that the Islamic States self-declared
caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi like Libyan
militia leader Abdelhakim Belhadj (whom
the CIA abducted and subjected to extraor-
dinary rendition) and Chechen terrorist
leader Airat Vakhitov become radicalised
while under U.S. detention. As torture cham-
bers, U.S. detention centres have served as
pressure cookers for extremism.
Mr. Obamas Syria strategy took a page out
of Reagans Afghan playbook. Not surprising-
ly, his strategy backred. It took just two
years for Syria to descend into a Somalia-
style failed state under the weight of the
international jihad against Mr. Assad. This
helped the Islamic State not only to rise but
also to use its control over northeastern Syria
to stage a surprise blitzkrieg deep into Iraq
this summer.
Had the U.S. and its allies refrained from
arming jihadists to topple Mr. Assad, would
the Islamic State have emerged as a lethal,
marauding force? And would large swaths of
upstream territory along the Euphrates and
the Tigris rivers in Syria and Iraq have fallen
into this monsters control? The exigencies
of the topple-Assad campaign also prompted
the Obama administration to turn a blind eye
to the ow of Gulf and Turkish aid to the
Islamic State.
Like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State has been
inadvertently spawned by the policies of those
now in the lead to combat it. But will anything
substantive be learned from this experience?
In fact, the Obama team, until recently,
viewed the Islamic State as a good terrorist
organisation in Syria but a bad one in Iraq,
especially when it threatened to overrun the
Kurdish regional capital, Erbil. In January,
Mr. Obama famously dismissed the Islamic
State as a local JV team trying to imitate
al-Qaeda but without the capacity to be a
threat to America. It was only after the public
outrage in the U.S. over the video-recorded
execution of American journalist James Fo-
ley and the ight of Iraqi Christians and Yazi-
dis that the White House re-evaluated the
threat posed by the Islamic State.
Full circle
Many had cautioned against the topple-
Assad campaign, fearing that extremist
forces would gain control in the vacuum.
Those still wedded to overthrowing Mr. As-
sads rule, however, contend that Mr. Oba-
mas failure to provide greater aid, including
surface-to-air missiles, to the Syrian rebels
created a vacuum that produced the Islamic
State. In truth, more CIA arms to the in-
creasingly ineffectual FSA would have meant
a stronger and more deadly Islamic State.
As part of his strategic calculus to oust Mr.
Assad, Mr. Obama failed to capitalise on the
Arab Spring, which was then in full bloom. By
seeking to topple a secular autocracy in Syria
while simultaneously working to shield ji-
had-bankrolling monarchies from the Arab
Spring, he ended up strengthening Islamist
forces a development reinforced by the
U.S.-led overthrow of another secular Arab
dictator, Muammar Qadha, which has turn-
ed Libya into another failed state and created
a lawless jihadist citadel at Europes south-
ern doorstep.
In fact, no sooner had Qadha been killed
than Libyas new rulers established a theoc-
racy, with no opposition from the western
powers that brought about the regime
change. Indeed, the cloak of Islam helps to
protect the credibility of leaders who might
otherwise be seen as foreign puppets. For the
same reason, the U.S. has condoned the Arab
monarchs for their long-standing alliance
with Islamists. It has failed to stop these
cloistered royals from continuing to fund
Muslim extremist groups and madrasas in
other countries. The American interest in
maintaining pliant regimes in oil-rich coun-
tries has trumped all other considerations.
Today, Mr. Obamas Syria policy is coming
full circle. Having portrayed Mr. Assad as a
bloodthirsty monster, Washington must now
accept Mr. Assad as the lesser of the two evils
and work with him to defeat the larger threat
of the Islamic State.
The fact that the Islamic States heartland
remains in northern Syria means that it can-
not be stopped unless the U.S. extends air
strikes into Syria. As the U.S. mulls that op-
tion for which it would need at least tacit
permission from Syria, which still maintains
good air defences it is fearful of being
pulled into the middle of the horrendous civil
war there. It is thus discreetly urging Mr.
Assad to prioritise defeating the Islamic
State.
Make no mistake: like al-Qaeda, the Islam-
ic State is a monster inadvertently spawned
by the policies of those now in the lead to
combat it. The question is whether anything
substantive will be learned from this experi-
ence, unlike the forgotten lessons of Amer-
icas anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan.
At a time when jihadist groups are gaining
ground from Mali to Malaysia, Mr. Obamas
current effort to strike a Faustian bargain
with the Afghan Taliban, for example, gives
little hope that any lesson will be learned.
U.S.-led policies toward the Islamic world
have prevented a clash between civilisations
by fostering a clash within a civilisation, but
at serious cost to regional and international
security.
(Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and
the author, most recently, of Water, Peace,
and War, Oxford University Press, 2014.)
U
.S. President Barack Obama has
labelled the jihadist juggernaut
that calls itself the Islamic State a
cancer, while his Defence Secre-
tary, Chuck Hagel, has called it more danger-
ous than al-Qaeda ever was, claiming that its
threat is beyond anything weve seen. No
monster has ever been born on its own. So
the question is: which forces helped create
this new Frankenstein?
The Islamic State is a brutal, medieval or-
ganisation whose members take pride in car-
rying out beheadings and aunting the
severed heads of their victims as trophies.
This cannot obscure an underlying reality:
the Islamic State represents a Sunni Islamist
insurrection against non-Sunni rulers in dis-
integrating Syria and Iraq.
Indeed, the ongoing fragmentation of
states along primordial lines in the arc be-
tween Israel and India is spawning de facto
new entities or blocks, including Shiastan,
Wahhabistan, Kurdistan, ISstan and Tali-
banstan. Other than Iran, Egypt and Turkey,
most of the important nations from the
Maghreb to Pakistan (an internally torn state
that could shrink to Punjabistan or, simply,
ISIstan) are modern western concoctions,
with no roots in history or pre-existing
identity.
The West and agendas
It is beyond dispute that the Islamic State
militia formerly the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant emerged from the Syrian
civil war, which began indigenously as a lo-
calised revolt against state brutality under
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before be-
ing fuelled with externally supplied funds
and weapons. From Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA)-training centres in Turkey and
Jordan, the rebels set up a Free Syrian Army
(FSA), launching attacks on government
forces, as a U.S.-backed information war de-
monised Mr. Assad and encouraged military
officers and soldiers to switch sides.
But the members of the U.S.-led coalition
were never on the same page because some
allies had dual agendas. While the three
spearheads of the anti-Assad crusade the
U.S., Britain and France focussed on aiding
the FSA, the radical Islamist sheikhdoms
such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the
United Arab Emirates as well as the Islamist-
leaning government in Turkey channelled

By seeking to topple a secular autocracy in Syria while

simultaneously working to shield
from the Arab Spring, Barack Obama ended up strengthening
Islamist forces.

jihad-bankrolling monarchies