EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: To discuss the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, the alarming emergence of the Islamic State and its allure to would-be young jihadists here and abroad, I'm joined now by counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen. He spent 24 years in the Australian Army before becoming a counter-insurgency specialist working with former American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and advising General David Petraeus during the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007. He's worked in virtually every major conflict zone, including Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and he's also authored many books on counter-insurgency.

David Kilcullen, good to have you back on the program.

DAVID KILCULLEN, COUNTER-INSURGENCY ANALYST & AUTHOR: Nice to be back. Thank you for having me.

EMMA ALBERICI: The Islamic State says it's now created a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to the province of di Allah in Iraq. What do you think the extent of the Islamic State ambition is?

DAVID KILCULLEN: I think it certainly has a global ambition and actually one of the more interesting things that has happened this month is that there have been strong rumours of a meeting of jihadist groups in Libya from across Africa where one of the key issues on the agenda was whether they should continue to back al-Qaeda or they should actually shift their allegiance to the new Islamic State. And I think we need to recognise that this is actually bigger than a conflict in Iraq or the geographical spill-over of the war in Syria. It's actually a global phenomenon that has the potential to affect the world system. And I think that's why we have a lot of people turning to IS as perhaps the most significant threat that we've seen since really 9-11.

EMMA ALBERICI: We'll get to some of the global implications very shortly. But if we can just stay in Iraq for a moment, is it conceivable that IS could take Baghdad?

DAVID KILCULLEN: I think it's highly unlikely. To the extent that we can discern their strategy, what they seem to be doing is replaying a strategy that was originally devised by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was the head of the predecessor group, al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was known at the time of the "belt strategy", so the idea of dominating the belts or the rings of terrain around the outside of Baghdad and then raiding into the city with bombings and assassinations and so on. And we've actually seen IS move into those belts area in the last month or so and we've also seen a number of bombings even in the last few days in Baghdad, many of which are attributable to the Islamic State. So it seems to me like it's less likely that you'll see conventional military forces coming into and trying to capture Baghdad. It's more likely that we'll see a surge of terrorist and sectarian violence in and around Baghdad as part of their strategy to destabilise the city.

EMMA ALBERICI: It's been seven years since you helped design and monitor the Iraq troop surge. Did the US pull out too soon?

DAVID KILCULLEN: I think too soon and too completely. I think that by the end of 2010 - it's a bit hard to remember now, but we had gotten violence down by about 95 per cent across Iraq. We had a vast number of people within the Sunni community working with us to oppose al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Qaeda had recognised its own defeat and had actually moved a significant number of its people out of Iraq and we were well on track to creating long-term stability. That has all been undone and largely because of rapid and complete international withdrawal, but also because of a very sharply sectarian Shia approach by the government of former Prime Minister Maliki after the Americans left. So once international forces pulled out, that loss of leverage, by not having people on the ground and not having the ability to influence events, really allowed Maliki to give pretty much full reign to some fairly sectarian ideas about how to deal with the Sunni community. That alienated the people that were working with us until that time and many of those people are now allied with or fighting with the Islamic State.

EMMA ALBERICI: Now you say that happened after the Americans left. Why was Washington supporting Nouri al-Maliki for so long knowing even while they were there that he was leading a fairly divisive government that had already started to alienate Iraq's Sunni population? Wasn't there always the potential for this kind of chaos to emerge?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Yeah, there certainly was and I think there's lot of soul searching going on in Washington right now about the initial decision to pick and promote Nouri al-Maliki, who, when he was originally identified as a possible Iraqi prime minister, was the Deputy Speaker of the Iraqi National Assembly. He was not a particularly well-known figure, to some extent regarded as a bit of a non-entity. And - but very soon, within a year or so, began to show this very determined streak to centralise control in his own hands and to exclude other people. And I think there's been concern about that all along, but the problem in Iraq, certainly at that time, was the lack of ability to find anybody as a decent alternative. I think what we have now, ironically, is something of a similar situation in that Haider Al-Abadi, who's the guy who has just been appointed by Iraqi President Fuad Masum as the new Prime Minister, he's getting backing from all sorts of people - Qatar, Turkey, the United States, Iran. The international community generally is saying that he's the guy, but he also is regarded as something of - I wouldn't say a weak character, but he's not a strong man. And I think there's a similar kind of danger that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If your guy is too weak to control the environment, things fall apart; if he's strong and sectarian, then it can have problems in the other direction.

EMMA ALBERICI: Let's talk about the new prime minister shortly, but first I want to concentrate our discussion on the American strategy today. The US Secretary of State John Kerry says there'll be no American boots on the ground in Iraq. Curiously, though, Tony Abbott hasn't ruled that out. What is going to be the most useful support the US and its allies can now provide to the new Iraqi government?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Well certainly the requirement of what's going on right now is largely focused on humanitarian assistance, but the other thing that's happening of course is advisors and planners and a lot of equipment beginning to flow to the Kurdish Regional Government. So the US is - has acknowledged that it's actually arming the Kurds in a fairly extensive fashion. Now under the agreement of the current Kurdish Regional Government with the government in Baghdad, the Baghdad Government was actually supposed to provide a lot of that military assistance to the Kurdish Regional Government. One of the reasons why the Kurds lost control of Sinjar last week was because they ran out of ammunition because the Iraqi Government hasn't honoured that agreement. What's happening now is the US is essentially cutting Baghdad out of the process and directly supporting the Kurds.

I, though, think that it's a little bit of a stretch to describe the United States as having a strategy in Iraq right now. What it has is a series of short-term tactical responses to an immediate crisis and I'm yet to see the outlines of a long-term or regionally-focused strategy. It's worth pointing out that IS, the Islamic State, is not just fighting in Iraq. In the same week that it took these towns in northern Iraq, it captured an entire Syrian artillery regiment in Hasaka, which is an area in the north-east of Syria. It's also been fighting Lebanese forces in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and it's been expanding into Aleppo and Deir Ezzor and a number of other places in Syria. So this a region-wide issue and air strikes and humanitarian assistance in one town in Iraq is not going to provide the answer to that problem.

So I think our Prime Minister is right to keep the options open, because we really don't know where this is going to go. That said, the US has only really asked for humanitarian support at this stage, and that, to my mind, reflects the fact that they're really thinking narrow, short-term at present.

EMMA ALBERICI: And the question is: can air strikes drive the Islamic State out of the Middle East?

DAVID KILCULLEN: I think air strikes change the calculus for the Islamic State very significantly. When I was the in 2006-2007, the guys that we were fighting were guerrillas. They were moving by night in civilian vehicles, in civilian clothes, carrying out bombings and beheadings and so on and it was horrible, but it wasn't sort of conventional military. That couldn't be more different from how the Islamic State's been operating over the last six months or so in Iraq. They've been operating in the daylight, they've got heavy weapons mounted on the back of vehicles, which they call technicals. They're moving in a sort of light cavalry swarm in broad daylight, riding into people's convoys and into towns. Now they have tanks, heavy armoured vehicles. So they're much more of a conventional force that operates in the open by day. If people can remember back to the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, they're operating a lot like the Taliban did before the US invasion. That makes them incredibly vulnerable to air power. And the introduction of air strikes into the conflict creates a tactical dilemma for them. They have to either go underground again, so drop back a stage from what you might call the current war of movement, back to a guerrilla warfare approach where they go underground, or, they have to go into the cities and seek cover among the civilian population, as we've seen Hamas doing, for example, in Gaza of recent weeks. And I think the evidence so far is that the introduction of US air strikes is causing them to take the latter choice, that they're actually moving into the cities and trying to hide among the civilian population. So that's going to make it quite difficult and quite a long-term endeavour, I think, to deal with this threat. Right now, the Iraqi Government seems to have no ability to recapture the terrain that it's lost, so I think we're going to see something of a stalemate developing. And even the Kurds recently don't currently have the training or the heavy weapons to push Islamic State back. So it's more or less a static position right now. I think there's been a worry of a sort of blitzkrieg movement of Islamic State across Iraq. I don't think that's going to happen, but there's no sign of a rollback any time soon either.

EMMA ALBERICI: You mentioned just before the support that the new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has been receiving from parties in the region. Tehran has signalled its support today for the new Iraqi Prime Minister. Will the US now be forced to work with Iran to stabilise Iraq?

DAVID KILCULLEN: To some extent that's actually already happening. There are already Iranian advisors from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and also from the Quds Force in Iraq and they've actually lost people killed already in this conflict. So it's a sort of de facto boots on the ground that we actually have Iranian and US advisors both there currently. And it's one of the weird dynamics of this conflict. If the US were to successfully support the Iraqi Government in driving al-Qaeda out, but not have - not transform the current relationship between the Iraqis and the Iranian Government, you could end up with Iranian-controlled territory all the way from Western Afghanistan to the Golan Heights, and that would be hard to spin as a victory, I think. So, crises make strange bedfellows and it's a crisis that we're in right now and I think people need to to some extent take a deep breath, step back a little bit and think about, "OK, what we are we actually trying to achieve here in a wider geographical sense and over the long-term?"

EMMA ALBERICI: The Islamic State has also - you mentioned North Africa and its inroads there. It has also reportedly made some ideological inroads into Indonesia. So now you have young men and women carrying the IS flag through towns and villages in the world's largest Muslim state. How much of that - how much of a concern is that, given the proximity to Australia?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Well I think it is a concern and it was interesting to see - somewhat disturbing to see Abu Bakar Bashir, the head of Jemaah Islamiah, make those comments this last week suggesting that they need to think about supporting the Islamic State rather than al-Qaeda. Although it's also worth noting that he got a lot of pushback from even within the other jihadi groups within Indonesia. I think that jihadist groups in Indonesia generally have a very low level of support, dramatically lower, actually, than you see in really any other country or any other region in the world, but of course you don't need a numerically large number of supporters to be able to pose a significant terrorist threat. So I think it's a real threat, but I think there's dangers in overblowing it and potentially alienating significant numbers of people.

I think the real areas where IS is gaining adherence right now are in Yemen, in Somalia, other parts of Africa, Libya, into West Africa in the Sahel and that, to my mind, is actually the real dangerous area of this kind of expansion of the Islamic State. It's worth pointing out, though, that one of the reasons why the Islamic State is currently gathering adherence - it's like a snowball rolling downhill - its military success and the momentum that that generates causes people to join the movement. Should that military success be broken, I think that the magnetic effect of the Islamic State would dissipate to some extent.

EMMA ALBERICI: What's the relationship between al-Qaeda and IS?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Horrible. They hate each other. And in fact, one of the issues is that when the war in Syria broke out, al-Qaeda, that is, Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda, designated Jabhat al-Nusra, which is a group that's fight fighting the Assad regime in Syria, as the kind of designated al-Qaeda organisation in Syria and directed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of IS, to go back into Iraq and focus on Iraq and ISIS basically said, "No, we're not going to do that, we're going to continue to operate in Syria." Al-Qaeda sent a number of mediators to try to resolve that dispute and one of them was killed in the conflict. And Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda group, has actually been fighting IS, like, with bullets on the ground in Syria over the past year or so in a number of clashes. So they're not only political enemies, they are active military opponents in Syria. And, you know, the view has been that Islamic State was even too extreme for al-Qaeda. I think that's not quite the right way to see it. Al-Qaeda is as brutal and as extreme as it ever has been, but it's a power struggle, it's a turf struggle between these two groups. I think al-Qaeda's future right now more heavily centres on Afghanistan and on what's about to happen as international forces leave the country in the next year. And the possibility of a similar collapse and loss of leverage in Afghanistan after we pull out that we've already seen in Iraq is probably the best hope for al-Qaeda right now that it could sort of bounce back after the international forces leave Afghanistan. And to some extent it's leaving the turf of the Middle East to IS right now because of their military success in Iraq.

EMMA ALBERICI: We are out of time, but I wanted to very quickly ask you for how long you estimate the West will now be fighting Islamic extremism around the world.

DAVID KILCULLEN: This is a multi-generational conflict and it always has been and I think that the challenge is to figure out how to do this in a way that's effective enough, cheap enough, non-intrusive enough to be sustainable over the lengthy time that's required. I think that this immediate operation in Iraq, we're looking at something on about the scale of the Kosovo intervention in 1999 or Operation Unified Protector, the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, so several months, mainly air power, but I wouldn't rule out troops on the ground. But that's this immediate operation. And unless we think about this in a much broader fashion, I think it's quite likely we'll be having a similar kind of conversation in 20 or 30 years about the threat of Islamic extremism around the world, which I think we need to clearly distinguish from Muslims, who are not the problem here; it's a really small numerical group, but as we said, you don't need a lot of people to sustain this kind of movement over a lengthy period of time.

EMMA ALBERICI: David Kilcullen, it's always enlightening having you on the program. Thank you very much.

DAVID KILCULLEN: Thanks for having me.