Westerners who pack up their bags and join foreign wars always know what they are fighting against, but rarely do they understand what they are fighting for, writes C August Elliott.

In the documentary Point and Shoot, we are introduced to Matthew Van Dyke, an American who fell in love with the celebrity of Lawrence of Arabia so much that he left his mother and girlfriend behind to go and fight with the Libyan rebels against Gaddafi. He donned a pair of wrap-around sunglasses like a Hollywood action hero and wore a keffiyeh like an Arab tribesman. Throughout the entire film he is not observed speaking a single sentence of Arabic.

In a novel about the Caucasus War, Leo Tolstoy describes a young Russian officer who, in a bid to look like a Chechen, dresses local but fails completely. "Anyone would have known him for a Russian and not a Tartar brave," writes Tolstoy. "It was the thing - but not the real thing."

The same could be said for Van Dyke, who also cited Indiana Jones as a major influence.

The Libya he left behind is not a post-Gaddafi utopia like he imagined it would be. It is a violent, fractious nightmare best described as a real-life Fuseli painting. Nevertheless, Van Dyke is now in Syria and giving interviews to Fox News about how he has "covertly" begun training an Assyrian Christian militia group collectively referred to as the "Nineveh Plain Protection Units". In short, he is continuing with his #LawrenceofArabia life.

For all new arrivals to the Syrian conflict, regardless of whichever side you have chosen to fight on, you are likely to take up arms alongside someone like this.

Like anyone who has read about how integral TE Lawrence was in turning the tide of World War I, I have to admit that at times I have been romanced by his celebrity. Lone white guy. Oppressed people. Great travel story. Ticks all the boxes, doesn't it?

But never once have I thought that going to Syria and fighting in the war would be an effective use of my time and energies.

I spent six years in the military in various infantry roles. I spent seven years studying Middle Eastern politics. I studied the Arabic language in Syria before the Arab Spring and have almost filled two passports with the stamps of various Islamic countries. I have read the Quran from cover to cover (in English, because though I've studied Arabic since 2008, Quranic Arabic is really old school and so I've barely scratched the surface of what Islam is all about).

Despite all this, I am not even remotely qualified to be fighting for any of the revolutionary groups in Syria. I am barely even qualified to be commenting on what is happening in Syria since I haven't been there since the war began.

Syria right now is a contemporary manifestation of what France in the Dark Ages looked like before Charlemagne started kicking heads. There is now a literal alphabet soup of militias running around committing all sorts of nastiness. Without question, ISIS is the most brutal of these.

Let me paint a picture for you of two possible scenarios which await you if you choose to take up arms in Syria.

Scenario 1

You have chosen to fight with the Free Syrian Army. You have chosen the FSA as your militia-of-choice because you have read that they are one of the groups engaged in a battle against the Islamic State.

You meet an Arab guy in the Turkish city of Batman. He says he is Syrian and that he can get you to an FSA stronghold near Aleppo. You drive across the border clandestinely near Jarablus. You speak only the basic Arabic you picked up from a crash course online. You can't read the street signs. On the floor of the vehicle is a book with the following title: "معالم في الطريق". You are unable to glean that this is a book written by a man named Sayyid Qutb and as such alarm bells do not begin ringing. When your friend/driver stops at militia-manned checkpoints he speaks in Arabic to the other fighters. Because you can't tell the difference between the various dialects of Arabic you fail to notice that he is pronouncing the "j" sound like a "g". This man is not from Syria. He is from Egypt. He is a foreign fighter with ISIS. You are being driven to Raqqa and you are about to appear in the next of Jihadi John's horrific videos.

Scenario 2

You have chosen to fight with ISIS. Somehow, you make it past customs in your Western country and reach the heart of "The Caliphate" in Raqqa. You discover that rather than being the lead element in a global war against the West on behalf of the oppressed ummah, ISIS is actually little more than a local actor in a bloody civil war whose main victims are Muslims. The ranks are rife with in-fighting and bickering. The only people with prior training are the Chechen veterans and they have formed their own groups because they don't trust the other soldiers of the Caliphate not to accidentally shoot them in the back.

ISIS is little more than a local actor in a bloody civil war whose main victims are Muslims. ( Reuters: Yaser Al-Khodor )

You used to smoke back home in Sydney. You can't anymore. You liked listening to rap music. You can't anymore. You realise that murdering people who do not share your faith is against the tenets of Islam. You decide you want to go home. You can't anymore - the Australian government will throw you in prison. You realise you might never see your mother again. But you need to get out of Syria. You try to leave without telling anyone but you are discovered by the ISIS high command and then executed by a child and the video is broadcast on the internet.

Frankly, if you go to Syria, and you die fighting for one or other of these groups, it is quite possible that you have wasted the most precious thing you had - your life. Even if you have died on the battlefield, you have more than likely died in an attack on a strategically insignificant town in rural Syria as a small part of a minor offensive which constitutes only an auxiliary component of a large-scale campaign. Your military training or "protection from Allah" has not made you a "force multiplier". You are cannon fodder.

Many of ISIS' recruits have read more about bomb-making and jihad than they have about zakat or the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence. Jake Bilardi, an 18-year-old boy from Craigieburn, went to Syria to join ISIS having learnt everything he knew about Islam through the prism of the War on Terror. Bilardi blew himself up at a checkpoint near Ramadi. He has been profiled as a "school shooter" personality, but above all else, his main problem was that he joined ISIS knowing only what he was fighting "against".

In his own words, he knew he hated "democracy" but wasn't sure what should replace it. This is precisely the problem. Everybody in the Middle-East, both foreigners and locals, knows what they are fighting against. The murderous thugs fighting with ISIS are fighting against the kuffar. The Kurds are fighting against the murderous thugs.

A young British Royal Marine Commando recently travelled to Syria and joined a Kurdish militia. He, like many Western soldiers, was so appalled by ISIS' atrocities that he couldn't hardly wait for the British government to make a declaration of war. So he booked a flight to Turkey on a three-day leave block and put his military training to use. A week ago, he died in Syria. He died fighting with a Kurdish militia against ISIS.

To repeat, he knew what he was fighting against. But what was he fighting for? Kurdish nationalism? The creation of a Kurdish state in Northern Iraq? Or the creation of a Kurdish state in Iraq and "Rojava"? Or the creation of a Kurdish state which encompasses all the ethnically-Kurdish areas in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran?

I have personally written about how Australia should be militarily involved in a campaign against ISIS. But though at times I am frustrated by how slow state actors are to respond to atrocities, I appreciate that there is a reason for the argument that the state should have the monopoly over the use of force. And that is that individuals, by themselves, often make bad decisions. Bureaucracy can be slow and inefficient, yes. But generally, when states go to war, it is usually decided by a group of people and not by an individual, acting on a whim or reducing a complex situation to a series of simple moralisms. This creates a safety net to prevent individuals from acting rashly. And it produces good results.

Take the United States' involvement in recent action in Sinjar, for example. An Assyrian Christian population, surrounded on a mountaintop, was about to be massacred by ISIS. The Kurds stepped in to help and with assistance from a series of bombing runs from the United States Air Force, they opened a corridor to Sinjar and evacuated the civilians. Crucially, the Kurds opened their corridor without the assistance of white guys in their ranks. The Kurds knew the area, spoke the language and they got the job done. What they didn't have was planes. And so the US - after much bureaucratic deliberation - offered theirs.

This was an example of "the utility of force" - when the application of violence ceases to be an intrinsically foolhardy endeavour and becomes an effective measure yielding positive results. Lives were saved.

Contrast this with the possible consequences of Matt Van Dyke's individual decision to begin training a Christian militia in Syria. Has Matt Van Dyke heard of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre? Probably not. Here's what happened. In Lebanon, in the 80s, a Christian militia called the Phalanges were given external support to search and destroy members of the PLO, the terror group du jour. Instead, these champions of Christendom went through a Beirut neighbourhood and massacred thousands of civilians.

We can all agree that the Assyrian Christians of Syria are facing an existential threat from ISIS, but believe me, another religiously-motivated militia is the last thing the Middle East needs.

The whole Dark Age militia bullshit - currently being championed by Matthew Van Dyke, an individual - is not going to improve the situation in the Middle East. Careful, measured and rational action (involving both military and civilian efforts) directed by state actors is the key to peace.

This is an edited version of an article first published on the author's website. Read the original version.

Editor's note: The original version of this article incorrectly referred to the PLO as being Islamist. The Drum regrets the error.

C August Elliott is a former soldier. He completed foreign language (Arabic and French) and anthropology degrees to the Masters level at the ANU and now specialises in conflict ethnography and political anthropology in the Islamic world. Follow him on Twitter.