In the past month, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched three major terror attacks: the downing of a Russian airplane over Sinai, two suicide bombings in Beirut and coordinated suicide attacks against civilians in Paris. The wave of violence had five targets: Russia, Egypt, Hezbollah, Lebanon and France. The ambitiousness of these actions appears to mark a shift in ISIL’s strategy that will likely trigger heightened military attacks against its facilities, supply lines and leaders. After the Paris attacks, French President François Hollande promised a “merciless” response against ISIL. All five targeted foes will undoubtedly step up the military means they have already used against ISIL in Syria, Lebanon and Sinai. The United States and others who fight ISIL will also expand their attacks. Global military and intelligence coordination against ISIL will be enhanced significantly. But all this will probably not succeed if those fighting ISIL simply repeat the military-heavy strategy that has not destroyed Al-Qaeda in the past 17 years of nonstop attacks. In fact, it will further ISIL’s strategy of destabilizing the Middle East and drawing all sides into a conflagration of violence. The more critical and urgent strategy that is needed now in view of ISIL’s widening circle of targets abroad — but that has never been attempted — is to accompany military attacks with serious actions to address the underlying political, economic and social drivers that created and maintain ISIL.

Futile military solutions

Since U.S. President Bill Clinton first attacked Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Sudan in August 1998, that group has survived, decentralized and even expanded in areas of chaos such as Yemen and Afghanistan. ISIL and Al-Qaeda may be the fastest growing political brand names in the Middle East and South Asia, where they continue to gain adherents and establish affiliated groups across many lands. They remain relatively small operations with just some thousands of hardcore members, compared to much bigger and more established nationalist Islamist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, Ansarullah (Houthis) in Yemen, or the Mahdi Army (Sadrists) in Iraq. Yet their ability to create havoc through terror attacks remains high. ISIL will find it more difficult to keep expanding its “state,” now that both the U.S. and Russia are actively attacking it and other militant Islamists in Syria and Iraq, and regional powers such as Iran and Turkey are joining the fight. But it is the time for all those Middle Eastern and foreign powers seeking to defeat ISIL to acknowledge that their military actions alone will not succeed. They must find a way to work with Middle Eastern societies to start targeting and reforming the underlying drivers of discontent, mainly in Arab countries, that have funneled recruits and funds to Islamist militants for the past few decades. The power of ISIL resides not in its military prowess or frightening brutality, but in the very extensive list of reasons why individuals in the Middle East and abroad join or support it. Examining these reasons may provide an agenda of structural problems within the Arab World that must be solved, if we hope to defeat ISIL and avoid seeing it replaced by something more vicious. The common denominator among ISIL adherents appears to be a combined sense of anger at current conditions — no jobs, no income, no voice, no power — and hopelessness about improving their future wellbeing. This same combination of anger and helplessness also sparked the non-violent Arab uprisings in 2010-11, which have mostly failed to deliver on their promise. In fact, both material and political conditions have worsened for most young people in the region since then. In the mind of those who join ISIL, the group promises to overturn corrupt political systems and offer a new life in the Islamic State and the wider utopian Caliphate that would protect all Muslims and provide them with a decent life.

Disrupting groups such as ISIL militarily without removing the causes that give them life is a fool’s strategy.

Sustained military attacks alone have proven difficult to eradicate Al-Qaeda and ISIL, because they merely augment the social, economic, psychological and political stresses that generate mass discontent, vulnerability and desperation and create new ISIL recruits faster than Arab and foreign armies can kill them. In some cases, the assaults against ISIL reinforce one of its main attractions — the sense among some Sunni Muslims that their religion is under attack and must be defended, and only ISIL and similar groups seem to defend them. Military attacks against Muslim majority states such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and Libya also create new zones of anarchy, which are the prized recruiting grounds for ISIL and Al-Qaeda.

A total way of life