[House Hearing, 115 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
BATTLEFIELD SUCCESSES AND CHALLENGES RECENT EFFORTS TO WIN THE WAR
AGAINST ISIS
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JANUARY 17, 2018
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Serial No. 115-60
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
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Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov
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Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Trey Gowdy, South Carolina, Chairman
John J. Duncan, Jr., Tennessee Elijah E. Cummings, Maryland,
Darrell E. Issa, California Ranking Minority Member
Jim Jordan, Ohio Carolyn B. Maloney, New York
Mark Sanford, South Carolina Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of
Justin Amash, Michigan Columbia
Paul A. Gosar, Arizona Wm. Lacy Clay, Missouri
Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts
Blake Farenthold, Texas Jim Cooper, Tennessee
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia
Thomas Massie, Kentucky Robin L. Kelly, Illinois
Mark Meadows, North Carolina Brenda L. Lawrence, Michigan
Ron DeSantis, Florida Bonnie Watson Coleman, New Jersey
Dennis A. Ross, Florida Stacey E. Plaskett, Virgin Islands
Mark Walker, North Carolina Val Butler Demings, Florida
Rod Blum, Iowa Raja Krishnamoorthi, Illinois
Jody B. Hice, Georgia Jamie Raskin, Maryland
Steve Russell, Oklahoma Peter Welch, Vermont
Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin Matt Cartwright, Pennsylvania
Will Hurd, Texas Mark DeSaulnier, California
Gary J. Palmer, Alabama Jimmy Gomez, California
James Comer, Kentucky
Paul Mitchell, Michigan
Greg Gianforte, Montana
Sheria Clarke, Staff Director
Robert Borden, Deputy Staff Director
William McKenna, General Counsel
Brick Christensen, Senior Military Advisor
Kiley Bidelman, Clerk
David Rapallo, Minority Staff Director
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Subcommittee on National Security
Ron DeSantis, Florida, Chairman
Steve Russell, Oklahoma, Vice Chair Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts,
John J. Duncan, Jr., Tennessee Ranking Minority Member
Justin Amash, Michigan Val Butler Demings, Florida
Paul A. Gosar, Arizona Peter Welch, Vermont
Virginia Foxx, North Carolina Mark DeSaulnier, California
Jody B. Hice, Georgia Jimmy Gomez, California
James Comer, Kentucky Vacancy
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on January 17, 2018................................. 1
WITNESSES
Sebastian Gorka, Ph.D., Former Deputy Assistant to the President
Oral Statement............................................... 4
Written Statement............................................ 7
Mr. Michael Pregent, Adjunct Fellow, Hudson Institute
Oral Statement............................................... 23
Written Statement............................................ 25
Mr. Phillip Lohaus, Research Fellow, Marilyn Ware Center for
Security Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Oral Statement............................................... 33
Written Statement............................................ 35
Mr. Robert Anthony Pape, Jr. Professor, Political Science
Department, University of Chicago
Oral Statement............................................... 46
Written Statement............................................ 48
APPENDIX
Statement for the Record of Michael J. Morell, submitted by
Ranking Member Lynch........................................... 72
BATTLEFIELD SUCCESSES AND CHALLENGES- RECENT EFFORTS TO WIN THE WAR
AGAINST ISIS
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Wednesday, January 17, 2018
House of Representatives
Subcommittee on National Security
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Washington, DC
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:08 a.m., in
Room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Ron DeSantis
[chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
Present: Representatives DeSantis, Russell, Duncan, Amash,
Hice, Comer, Lynch, Welch, and DeSaulnier.
Also Present: Representatives Jordan, Meadows, and
Krishnamoorthi.
Mr. DeSantis. The Subcommittee on National Security will
come to order.
Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a
recess at any time.
We are here today to learn more about the Trump
Administration's battlefield successes against the Islamic
State. Since coming into office almost a year ago, President
Trump has made great strides in the war against ISIS. At the
time of his inauguration, the Islamic State controlled major
cities in Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State's black flag flew
over Raqqa in Syria and over Mosul in Iraq. Today, both cities
are liberated. ISIS lost thousands of square miles in territory
at an astonishing rate.
Unfortunately, the American people are not seeing this good
news story. Instead, they see nightly stories in the mainstream
press about Russian interference and other issues. The American
people deserve to know the facts about what changed between
administrations and how President Trump is keeping us safe. We
are here, then, to talk about real, concrete successes and what
the United States Government can do to build on these wins to
ensure the safety of the American people.
We have before us a distinguished panel of experts with
deep national security experience.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka served as Special Assistant to
President Trump and advised the President on the existential
threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism. He has a
distinguished career of service in counterterrorism, is on the
advisory board of the Council for Emerging National Security
Affairs. We look forward to his testimony and thank you for
coming.
We will also hear from Mr. Michael Pregent, an Adjunct
Fellow from the Hudson Institute. He is a former intelligence
officer with nearly 30 years of experience and is an expert on
the Middle East and North Africa. We hope he can shed light on
the future challenges we face against ISIS and what we can
expect moving forward.
We are also joined by Philip Lohaus, a research fellow in
the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American
Enterprise Institute. He is an expert on unconventional and
emerging national security challenges. He served as an embedded
analyst with the Department of Defense and the Multinational
Force-Iraq, and also embedded with the U.S. Army in eastern
Afghanistan. We thank him for coming and for his testimony.
We also have Dr. Robert Pape, a professor of political
science at the University of Chicago. He has studied this
subject in detail and written numerous books on the topic. We
look forward to his perspective on this matter and thank him
for coming.
I am confident we can do more in this battle against
radical Islamic terrorism. I am heartened by the President's
dedication to our military and his emphasis on defeating, not
simply deterring, ISIS. The days of feckless leadership, of
underestimating our foe, those days need to be over. The naive
declarations that ISIS is simply a JV squad, those days are
over. We have an administration that appreciates the danger
posed by the Islamic State and I think critically is actually
playing to win against the Islamic State.
I hope the witnesses can shed light on what the
administration has gotten right, but also what we can improve
on, and where we go from here, because the successes, while
real, are not the end of the ballgame.
So, thank you, and I will yield to the Ranking Member, Mr.
Lynch, for his opening statement.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is good to join you
in this hearing to examine the progress of efforts to combat
the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, or ISIS. I
would also like to thank today's witnesses for their
willingness to help this subcommittee with its work.
As reported last month by the Combined Joint Task Force
Operation Inherent Resolve, ISIS has no capital, no physical
caliphate, and across Iraq and Syria has lost nearly all of its
territory that they once held. Since the establishment of the
U.S.-led coalition to combat ISIS by President Obama back in
2014, the terrorist group has lost nearly 40,000 square miles
of its claimed territory and currently holds approximately
2,000 square miles.
ISIS has also been reduced in deployed force strength from
peak estimates of tens of thousands of insurgent fighters to
less than a thousand. The liberated territory includes the
former ISIS stronghold of Mosul, Iraq, recaptured by U.S.-
backed Iraqi security and Kurdish Peshmerga forces last July
following a nine-month effort that began in October of 2016.
The self-declared ISIS capital of Raqqa, Syria also fell in
October of 2017 to the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces.
However, the decimation of ISIS territorial control does
not signify the outright defeat of a terrorist organization
whose motto is remaining and expanding. In a statement
submitted for the record, former Acting Director of the CIA,
Michael Morell, who served under both George W. Bush and the
Obama Administration, notes that the elimination of the so-
called caliphate cannot be confused with the elimination of
ISIS itself. In the wake of surmounting battlefield losses,
insurgent fighters have moved underground to perpetrate
traditional and destabilizing terrorist attacks in the region
while continuing to rely on affiliate organizations and social
media to direct or inspire terrorist attacks globally.
I ask for unanimous consent to enter into the record
Director Morell's statement into the official hearing record.
Mr. DeSantis. Without objection.
Mr. Lynch. The Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point
similarly reports that following the fall of Mosul, ISIS
leadership made a calculated decision to withdraw its fighters
from further sustained clashes with regional security and
coalition forces in the city of Tal Afar in the town of Hawija
in Iraq, in contested areas along the Euphrates River Valley,
and even in the battle for Raqqa. Their sole purpose was to
preserve manpower for a pivot to an all-out insurgency and the
use of guerilla tactics, including hit-and-run attacks on
secure areas by small units, the assassination of security
personnel, and the recruitment of new members among displaced
civilians for suicide bombings.
We have continued to witness this marked shift to guerilla
warfare in the form of a coordinated terrorist attack committed
by ISIS operatives in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and other
regional countries. Just this week, two suicide bombers
reportedly associated with ISIS sleeper cells killed nearly 40
people at an open-air market located in Baghdad's Tayran
Square, marking the first major attack in the Iraqi capital
since Iraqi Prime Minister Haider-alAbadi declared the victory
over ISIS. This attack came on the heels of an ISIS suicide
bombing detonated at a market in Kabul, Afghanistan on January
4th that killed at least 20 people, and another at a Shia
cultural center in Kabul on December 28th that killed more than
40 people.
The persistent threat of ISIS-directed or inspired attacks
in the West also remains. Last week the Department of Justice
announced the indictment of Akayed Ullah on terrorism and
explosives charges for his detonation of a bomb in a subway
station near the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City
in December of 2017. Ullah stated in his initial law
enforcement interview that, quote, ``I did it for the Islamic
State.'' This attack followed an ISIS-inspired truck attack in
November of 2017 along the Hudson River bike path in New York
that killed eight people.
Clearly, our national security strategy must adapt to
combatting a terrorism group that the commander of the U.S.
Central Command, Joseph Votel, recently deemed a different kind
of organization that has been very adaptive. We should all be
concerned that at this point we lack a fully articulated and
detailed plan to address the remaining pockets of the ISIS
insurgency in Iraq and Syria, or implement a full-spectrum
response to combat the rise of affiliate organizations in
Libya, the Philippines, the Sinai, and other areas, which will
require close collaboration with our international partners.
President Trump has proposed a 32 percent cut, or a nearly
$19 billion cut, from the State Department budget and has left
vacant the U.S. ambassadorships in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
and other key nations in the fight against ISIS. We simply
cannot combat ISIS by neglecting the long-term security and
political stability of the region.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to discussing these
and other issues with today's witnesses, and I yield back the
balance of my time.
Mr. DeSantis. I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts.
The Chair notes the presence of our colleague, the
gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Jordan, and I ask unanimous consent
that he be allowed to fully participate in today's hearing.
Without objection, it is so ordered.
With that, I am pleased to introduce our witnesses. We have
already mentioned in my opening statement Dr. Gorka, Mr.
Pregent, Mr. Lohaus, and Dr. Pape. Welcome to you all.
Pursuant to committee rules, all witnesses will be sworn in
before they testify. So if you can all please rise, raise your
right hand.
Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you are about to
give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
All witnesses answered in the affirmative.
You can be seated.
In order to allow time for discussion, please limit your
testimony to 5 minutes. You will note the clock in front of you
shows your remaining time. The light will turn yellow when you
have 30 seconds left, and red when your time is up. Your entire
written statement will be made part of the record, and in the
question and answer period you will obviously be able to hit on
points that you may not be able to reach in your opening
statement. So please abide by that time limit, and remember to
turn the microphone on before speaking.
With that, I will recognize Dr. Gorka for 5 minutes.
WITNESS STATEMENTS
STATEMENT OF SEBASTIAN GORKA
Mr. Gorka. Thank you, Chairman DeSantis. Thank you, Vice
Chair Russell and Ranking Member Lynch, for this opportunity to
address the subcommittee today.
To begin, I would like to reiterate what the Chairman has
already stated. This is perhaps one of the greatest untold
stories of the last 11 months, meaning this administration's
success against ISIS, along with the untold story or the story
which isn't getting enough attention with regards to the
rebounding U.S. economy.
My message is a very simple one. The victory or victories
against ISIS are a function of the first rule of war. One must
not only have the capabilities to win, but one must have the
will to win. What happened at 12:01 on January the 20th last
year is that we have a new commander in chief who had the will
to win and to devolve the decision-making, the military
decision-making to the right commands and the right commanders
in the field so that will could be translated into successes on
the battlefield.
We had been told by the last president that ISIS represents
a generational threat to the United States. It seems as if
President Trump has crunched a generation down to just a few
months. How do we know this? ISIS, less than three years ago,
held territory in more than three countries of the Middle East
and had 18--according to the NTCT, the National
Counterterrorism Center, had 18 fully functional affiliates in
18 different countries around the world. It was making,
according to the Financial Times, $2 million every 24 hours in
illicit oil sales, racketeering hostage-taking, and even
through its local taxation system. And most important of all,
ISIS was the first jihadi organization in almost 100 years to
successfully reestablish a theocratic caliphate.
The Trump Administration, which I had the honor of serving,
we made the destruction of the physical caliphate our number-
one priority, and as the Vice Chairman has already noted, we
have already succeeded thanks to our military forces in the
field. None of the above attributes of ISIS is true today. It
is not a caliphate, it does not hold significant amounts of
territory, and it no longer has more than 6 million people
living on the territory of that so-called caliphate.
Why is this? Because of the D-ISIS strategy, the defeat
ISIS strategy that was implemented by the President and by
Secretary Mattis. What is the most simple summary of the D-ISIS
strategy? Very simply, we went from a war of a thousand cuts,
the so-called attrition strategy that was nibbling at the edge
of a global problem, to a strategy of annihilation under
Secretary Mattis, and it has worked. A very clear metric of
this, on one day recently more than 1,000 ISIS jihadists
surrendered. We have never, ever seen this before in modern
jihadist history. Why? Because the jihadist believes if he dies
in a war to defeat the infidel, then he will go straight to
heaven. They don't usually surrender. Now they do.
In addition to the strategy changing from attrition to
annihilation, we have also seen a far more intangible change,
which is the morale of our armed forces. The decision-making
authorities have been divested to the commanders in the field.
Under the last administration, even tactical targeting
decisions were taken inside the NSC. The NSC should be the
place for policy and strategy, not tactical or even operational
decisions. That was changed under the new administration.
As one tier, one operator told me when I was very fresh to
the White House, we understand now the commander trusts us and
has our back, and that has an unprecedented effect on the
morale of our forces and their capacity to execute their
mission.
Lastly, there is the aspect of the morale amongst our
partners and allies. With the President's Riyadh speech, he
took them to task as a friend to say they must clear their
houses, they must target and isolate the extremists in their
places of worship and in their communities, and they have done
so, especially with the GCCC taking on Qatar as its prime role
as a funder of extremism throughout the world.
In sum, we have gone from a generational threat being
crushed in just a matter of months. But the war is not won. As
we look forward, the Trump Administration must focus on its
counter-ideological policies. We must make the black flag of
jihad as reviled as the Nazi swastika. That will take a full-
throated counter-ideological push. I have recommended in my
summary the Active Measures Working Group from the Cold War and
the closer cooperation with our partners in the field, our
Muslim allies, to delegitimize the ideology of all groups that
share the jihadi creed.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[Prepared statement of Mr. Gorka follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. DeSantis. Thank you. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Pregent, you are up for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL PREGENT
Mr. Pregent. Chairman DeSantis, Ranking Member Lynch, and
distinguished members of the Subcommittee on National Security,
on behalf of the Hudson Institute, I am honored to testify
before you today about the successes against ISIS and the
challenges that remain.
Both the Obama and Trump Administrations achieved success
against ISIS. Under President Obama, ISIS lost the Mosul Dam,
ISIS was defeated trying to take the Syrian town of Kobane in
Syria and lost control of Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah in Iraq.
Under President Trump, ISIS lost its caliphate capitals of
Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and its stronghold of Deir
ez-Zor.
We learned early on that ISIS lost territory every time it
faced a capable force backed by U.S. airpower. The first
example of this was the battle over the Mosul Dam in 2014 where
the Kurdish Peshmerga, backed by U.S. Special Operation Forces
and U.S. air power, retook control of the Mosul Dam and handed
ISIS its first defeat.
The second example was Kobane. In October 2014, Secretary
of State John Kerry indicated that preventing the fall of the
Syrian town of Kobane to ISIS was not a strategic U.S.
objective. As ISIS moved on Kobane, international media
broadcasted ISIS maneuvers and artillery barrages on the city
in broad daylight. ISIS was winning, and it was being
televised. The administration, embarrassed by this, finally
authorized U.S. Special Forces to partner with Peshmerga forces
and call in airstrikes on ISIS, and ISIS was handed its second
loss.
The key lesson here that emerged from both Kobane and the
Mosul Dam was that the clear and hold force was from the area
and had a vested interest in fighting to keep ISIS out. The
most important aspect of a clear and hold strategy that was
tested and proved successful during the surge of 2007 in Iraq
basically is that the force from the area has a vested interest
in keeping it out. So the most important aspect of that
strategy is to use local force, and it has to be empowered to
keep ISIS out. It has to be empowered to do so.
After Kobane and the Mosul Dam, operations to take back
Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul in Iraq were done with
predominantly Shia forces, with the support of IRGC militias.
In other words, the ``clear'' phase has been touted as a
success, but the ``hold'' phase will not hold without Sunni
forces empowered by their central government to protect Sunni
areas. It is critically important that the ``hold'' force
reflect local political dynamics for there to be success. This
is not happening in Iraq or Syria.
Obama and Trump have key differences in strategy, but also
unfortunate similarities. The Obama Administration's anti-ISIS
strategy took away from the combatant commander the decision-
making process, resulting in lost opportunities to kill and
capture targets of opportunity. It publicly touted victories
hours after successful raids against ISIS, killing the
intelligence community's ability to exploit ISIS networks and
conduct follow-on raids, and it allowed the IRGC Quds Force to
increase its influence and presence in Iraq and Syria.
The Trump Administration's strategy has pushed resources
and decision-making back to the combatant commander, restoring
authorities to break the will of the enemy. It has expanded our
Special Operations missions to kill and capture key ISIS and
al-Qaeda leadership throughout the globe, and allowed the time
for our intelligence agencies to exploit intelligence before
touting success to the media and to the terrorist organizations
themselves. When you tell a terrorist organization that you
have effectively conducted a raid hours after that raid, they
throw away their SIM cards and they go to the mattresses, and
it sets back the intelligence community big time.
One of the things, unfortunately, that the Trump
Administration is continuing to do is it is continuing to stand
by while the IRGC Kuds Force increases its influence and
presence in Iraq and Syria.
So now that ISIS has lost territory, challenges remain in
holding liberated terrain with non-Sunni Arab forces. ISIS
sought out ungoverned spaces in Iraq and Syria where
disenfranchised Sunnis were oppressed by a sectarian
government. That dynamic exists today in both Iraq and Syria.
ISIS continues to seek out and operate in areas where Sunnis
are distrustful of their government, be it sectarian, secular,
or even Sunni. ISIS operates in the Sunni Pashtun areas of
Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Egypt's Sinai, Yemen and Libya,
and the list goes on.
ISIS has lost territory but has not been defeated in Iraq
and Syria. ISIS still operates in liberated areas, following
the insurgent al-Qaeda model, as demonstrated by the two
suicide attacks in Baghdad resulting in the loss of 38
personnel. The Institute for the Study of War has an ISIS
control map. That map still shows ISIS operating in most areas
declared liberated by the U.S. and Baghdad.
Losing territory is phase one of many. The next phase is
building and partnering with Sunni forces capable of
effectively holding territory. These phases are the most
important and are not likely to happen due to continued U.S.
deference to Russia and Iran and Syria, and to Baghdad and Iran
and Iraq. If this is not changed, we simply reset the
conditions that led to ISIS to begin with.
[Prepared statement of Mr. Pregent follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. DeSantis. Thank you.
The Chair now recognizes Mr. Lohaus for 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF PHILLIP LOHAUS
Mr. Lohaus. Chairman DeSantis, Ranking Member Lynch, and
honorable members of the Subcommittee on National Security, I
am honored by the opportunity to testify before you today as
you examine our nation's recent efforts to defeat the Islamic
State.
My testimony will show that while the Obama
Administration's approach incrementally degraded the Islamic
State's grip on swaths of Iraq and Syria, the Trump
Administration's timely reforms have accelerated America's
gains against the Islamic State. I caution that these gains
should not obscure the amount of work left to do to defeat ISIS
and jihadist terrorist groups more generally. Doing so will
require adjustments to our strategy, a few of which I will
discuss today.
In response to the rise of the Islamic State, President
Obama took a measured and cautious approach to reestablishing
Iraq's internal security. He relied primarily on conducting
limited air strikes and to putting a small cadre of Special
Operators to build the capacity of the fledgling Iraqi armed
forces. A similar though more restrictive approach
characterized our efforts against ISIS in Syria. In both cases,
partner forces did eventually grow more adept at fighting ISIS,
but only after the latter had weakened significantly.
The White House's decision-making style impeded rapid
progress against the Islamic State. This is without doubt.
Their risk aversion, inefficient target nominations process
and, above all, involvement in day-to-day operational and
tactical decision-making added unnecessary friction to the
decision-making process. These policies made for a time-
consuming approach to a problem that required rapid responses.
Despite this, one cannot deny that progress has been made
in the fight against the Islamic State, particularly in Iraq
and Syria. I would echo the comments made earlier by the
Chairman and Ranking Member in that regard. The siege of Mosul
resulted in the ouster of Islamic State from that city, as did
the siege of Raqqa. As of October 2017, territory controlled by
ISIS had shrunk to isolated pockets mostly along the Iraq-Syria
border.
None of this would have been possible without the valiant
efforts of American troops and partner forces. Their efforts
should be applauded. However, progress in the fight against
ISIS may have occurred sooner, or its rise may have been
prevented entirely if friction points between the military and
its civilian leadership had not impeded America's
responsiveness.
The Trump Administration has streamlined the executive
decision-making process and authorized a more aggressive
posture towards the Islamic State. For one, they appear much
more willing to rely on the expertise of military advisers.
This has made a difference. From personal experience, I have
seen how empowering decision-makers and operators on the ground
enhances operational responsiveness and increases joint and
combined synergies and operations.
Trump has also signaled a willingness to dedicate more
resources to the fight. He deployed, for example, 400 Marines
and Army Rangers to Syria in advance of the siege of Raqqa,
increased the pace of air strikes within U.S. Central Command,
and approved the training of YPG fighters in Syria. These
developments have been timely and appropriate.
These successes aside, much more work remains to be done to
defeat the Islamic State and other extremist groups around the
globe. An effective counterterrorism strategy must go beyond
air strikes and Special Operations direct-action missions. The
Administration is also yet to articulate U.S. policy toward a
post-Islamic State Iraq and Syria. The danger remains that
recent gains will be viewed as signs of total victory and
therefore used as a reason to reduce America's involvement in
the region. Doing so would be pennywise but pound foolish.
Defeating a group like ISIS and other jihadist groups will
require more than just military victories on the battlefield.
It will require a sustained commitment to our partners and
allies and the creation of new ones. It will require an
understanding of the ideological appeal of extremism and
efforts to reduce that appeal. It will require a clever and
coordinated application of all sources of national power. Above
all, it will require an understanding of the long-term and
ideological nature of this fight.
There are several things that our political leadership and
decision-makers could do to improve our global position vis-a-
vis Islamic extremists. First, the White House should map out
the role that individual agencies will play in implementing the
counter-jihadist terrorism provisions of the recent National
Security Strategy. To name just two examples, the Department of
State should redouble public diplomacy efforts that incorporate
local partners whenever possible in vulnerable countries around
the world. I would second Dr. Gorka's attestation to taking a
look at the Active Measures Working Group from the Soviet Union
era, which gives a great example of how interagency groups can
combat these types of threats. And the Department of Defense
and intelligence agencies for their parts should emphasize the
importance of military information support operations, human
intelligence and Special Forces. Bombing campaigns and direct-
action missions cannot succeed without or be replaced by the
knowledge gained by these ground assets.
For its part, Congress could consider revising U.S. code to
better reflect the overlapping nature of government-wide
counterterrorism efforts.
It is accepted in the defense community that strategy
equals ends plus ways plus means. Compared to jihadist groups,
the United States does not want for means. If America's goal is
to move the needle from degrading ISIS to finally defeating it,
the ways and ends, however, will require ongoing examination.
I thank the committee for the opportunity to discuss these
issues, and I look forward to your questions.
[Prepared statement of Mr. Lohaus follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. DeSantis. Thank you.
Dr. Pape, 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT ANTHONY PAPE, JR.
Mr. Pape. Thank you very much for having me. There is a
slideshow that will be starting in just a moment.
ISIS has been effectively defeated as a territorial entity
in Iraq and Syria, a military victory that makes America safer.
This military victory is due not to any one person or any one
president. This is America's victory due to the steadfastness
of the American people; our superb military, diplomacy, and
intelligence agencies; our regional allies like Qatar that
provided an air base for our bombers; large ground forces in
Iraq and Syria; and an international coalition that has grown
every year since 2014.
Next slide, please.
The key to our success was the application of a consistent
hammer and anvil strategy. In effect, Western air power and
local ground power worked together like a hammer and anvil to
smash ISIS to bits, while Special Forces and intelligence
coordinated the effort.
Next slide.
Our hammer and anvil strategy progressively succeeded over
three years and over three phases under the leadership of two
presidential administrations.
Next slide.
Phase 1, the containment of ISIS expansion, occurred in the
fall of 2014. Once ISIS surprised the world by taking Mosul,
the most urgent problem was to prevent ISIS from going further
to seize oil fields and other resources in Iraq that could have
vastly increased the group's power and threat. The Obama
Administration reacted quickly and decisively, leading a
coalition to use air power like a hammer to smash numerous ISIS
military offensives and contain it.
Next slide.
Phase 2, rollback, began in early 2015. The coordination of
air power and ground power produced results almost immediately,
with large portions of ISIS territory falling by the summer.
Next slide.
Rollback was nearly complete in Iraq by the time
administrations changed. As you can see, by February 2017 our
coalition had seized about two-thirds of Mosul, the heart of
ISIS in Iraq, controlling the large grey areas to the west.
Next slide.
By the end of the Obama Administration, over half of ISIS-
controlled territory had been liberated, the large green areas.
Equally important, these two years established the essential
mobilization and coordination of Kurdish and Iraqi government
forces that would enable the final push in Phase 3. So when the
Trump Administration took office, ISIS was losing fast, and
America's coalition was a well-oiled machine, in a position to
finish off the group.
Next slide.
Phase 3 was the final push in Syria that completed ISIS'
defeat as a territorial entity. What exactly changed under the
Trump Administration? Two things, one good and one problematic.
The good change was cooperating tacitly with the Russians and
the Syrian government so that the Kurdish-led forces could take
Raqqa and other areas north of the Euphrates while Syrian
government forces could take Palmyra and the area to the south
of the river. This change made America's strategy of hammer and
anvil more effective in Syria and accelerated ISIS loss of
territory there.
Next slide.
The problematic change was over-escalation of air power. As
this slide shows, both the escalation of air strikes and spikes
in civilian casualties related to the coalition's air strikes
occurred within weeks of the new administration. The sharp
increase in civilian casualties is not just a moral issue.
These casualties pose a strategic threat to the United States
because they significantly amplify the propaganda that ISIS and
other terrorist groups rely on to inspire people to attack
America. Let's see how they do it.
Next slide.
Just last November, ISIS released Flames of War 2, a video
targeting Westerners with powerful segments focused on how the
escalation of bombing has killed children, and the group calls
for revenge.
Please show the video.
[Video shown.]
Mr. Pape. Under the Obama Administration, we saw similar
ISIS video propaganda related to drone strikes which was
leveraged to justify attacks against the West, but nothing this
extreme.
Sir, if I may just have 20 more seconds?
Mr. DeSantis. Twenty, all right.
Mr. Pape. The next slide.
The main danger for the future is that we declare victory
and walk away. ISIS remains a threat. The root cause is not
just ISIS' ideology but its power to take advantage of
political grievances and the disenfranchisement of millions of
Sunnis. Without a political strategy to address this problem, a
new ISIS 2.0, worse than the past, could emerge.
[Prepared statement of Mr. Pape follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Mr. DeSantis. Thank you. The gentleman's time has expired.
The Chair now recognizes himself for 5 minutes.
Looking forward, one of the reasons why ISIS was able to
inspire folks in this country via social media was because of
the existence of this caliphate. People actually thought that
was a romantic concept. So, Mr. Pregent, do you think, having
broken the caliphate--obviously, people can still be inspired,
but do you think that that is helpful in combatting the
inspiration for terrorism here at home and in places like
Western Europe?
Mr. Pregent. Thank you for the question. What we saw early
on, when ISIS had success, the foreign fighters were coming
into Iraq and Syria. But after a defeat or a loss of territory,
that foreign fighter flow stopped. It ebbed. Foreign fighters
tried to leave the caliphate. They were captured. They were
executed by ISIS, and ISIS fighters who had actually lost
territory were being executed by ISIS as well.
So what we saw early on was that the brand attracted people
to the caliphate when it was successful, and when it lost
territory that flow started to ebb.
Mr. DeSantis. Dr. Gorka, when I was in Iraq back in '07,
'08, we had pretty restrictive rules of engagement. I think
that was under Bush. Under Obama, I think it was similar or
even more restrictive. Was there an effort to obviously
delegate to the commanders but say, look, fighting with one
hand tied behind your back is just not going to do the job, we
need adequate rules of engagement so we can actually win?
Mr. Gorka. Absolutely, absolutely. There are, on the
unclassified side, one can find stories of ISIS targets not
being engaged because the individual who has eyes on the pilot
or what-have-you was not allowed to engage unless somebody in
Washington had given him the all-clear from the Obama
Administration.
During Vietnam we had something called the 8,000-mile
screwdriver. It got even worse under the Obama Administration
because that decision, once you have been trained at the cost
of millions of dollars, taxpayer dollars, whether you are an A-
10 pilot, whether you are a Special Forces detachment leader,
the decision to engage the enemy once you have the requisite
intelligence should be taken by that military professional, not
by a civilian staff who is sitting in the NSC or somebody
watching a video screen in the DOD.
So, yes, the operators who I had the honor of working with
have said they were given the due recognition to execute the
mission as they had been trained to do, which not only makes
America more successful operationally but also has a requisite
effect on the morale of all our fighting forces, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DeSantis. Mr. Pregent, don't we need to, at this point,
though, support people like the Kurds more robustly than we
have under either Obama or so far under the Trump
Administration?
Mr. Pregent. We do. The Kurdish Peshmerga of Iraq have been
an ally since the beginning, since we entered Iraq. We actually
entered Iraq in Kurdish areas, and they have been instrumental
to not only defeating ISIS but also defeating al Qaeda during
the surge effort and the initial phase of the Iraq war.
What has happened, unfortunately, under this administration
is our Kurdish allies have been abandoned. After President
Trump's October 13th speech declaring that the IRGC in its
entirety would be declared a terrorist organization based on
its support for Qasem Soleimani's Kuds Force, within hours
Qasem Soleimani used his Shia militias--and they had access to
U.S. tanks and equipment--to move on Kurdish spaces. We should
have done something about that. It sent a loud message to our
Kurdish allies, but it also sent a loud message to Qasem
Soleimani.
Mr. DeSantis. I think it also hurts our national prestige
when you have people like Soleimani that have a lot of American
blood on their hands attacking an ally like the Kurds with
American equipment left over from the Iraq campaign. We have to
do a lot better than that.
The President, I think, has rightfully spoken out in favor
of the protesters in Iran. What more do we need to do? Because
when you are talking about fighting Sunni Islamic jihadism, one
of the problems I had with the Obama Administration is as they
were doing that, they did do some good things, they were
passively empowering the Iranians on the ground in places like
Iraq. We cannot do that.
So we need to support the protesters. What else should the
Administration be doing?
Mr. Pregent. Well, the good thing about this protest,
initially it started off as an economic protest, but then it
started complaining about the adventurism from the IRGC Kuds
Force, the fact that the regime was using that windfall of
money it received from the JCPOA, the Iran deal, to actually
export terrorism, to destabilize Iraq, to further destabilize
Syria, to destabilize Lebanon and Yemen. So what we should do
is we should go after the IRGC Kuds Force in Syria, in Iraq. We
can sanction the Supreme Leader's vast fortune, his network
that he set up of shadow companies to skirt sanctions. Upwards
of $86 billion goes unsanctioned that the Supreme Leader has
access to, to conduct these operations with the IRGC and the
Kuds Force.
We should also listen to what they are complaining about.
They are complaining about the Basij. The Basij is the most
unpopular directorate in the IRGC. It is the organization that
makes you disappear at night if you protest the government.
There are a lot of things we should do. We should encourage our
Iraqi allies to increase their Internet bandwidth to allow
messages to get out of Iran. We should also do that with other
neighbors that border Iran, basically hold the regime
accountable for pressure on the Iranian people, but also
pressure our European allies to voice their concerns.
Mr. DeSantis. Our time is up, but I think 100 percent we
need to be doing that, and I would just say before I yield to
the gentleman that ISIS is not the sum total of militant
Islamic terrorism. It is a part of it. There are other Sunni
jihadist groups, and then the Iranian-inspired Shia jihadist
groups. This is a good step. We have to do more.
God bless those people fighting off that Iranian regime. If
they could do something there, that would be such a positive
environment. But we are going to continue to have to deal with
this problem in the United States and in places like Western
Europe. I am concerned about Las Vegas, the lack of
information. ISIS claimed credit for that. We have no evidence
either way, but no evidence on anything bothers me, and ISIS
typically when they claim these things, they typically are
borne out. So that is a very, very important thing to know
exactly which attacks are being inspired by ISIS.
With that, I will yield to Mr. Lynch.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree on the point of
supporting our allies in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan. I think
more can be done. I agree with Mr. Pregent's testimony.
As a member of this committee, a lot of us have been to
Iraq multiple times. I have been there 20 times with my
Republican colleagues going back to 2002, 2001, to the present.
One of the most remarkable changes that I can see from my early
trips is that back in the day we had 165,000 U.S. troops on the
ground in Iraq. That was about our peak, 165,000. The one huge
change that I think the Obama Administration brought about was
that he compelled the Kurds and the Iraqi government in Baghdad
to take responsibility and to carry the fight.
You can see it in the casualty numbers in the fight against
ISIS, several thousand Kurdish Peshmerga casualties, 10,000
Iraqi National Army casualties, and thankfully far, far fewer
U.S. casualties.
The change there, though, will not remain if we don't
support the incumbent government and empower the local
government to prevent the next iteration, as I think Mr.
Pregent and all of the witnesses have said. We have to prevent
the next iteration of ISIS from taking hold.
It appears to me, Dr. Pape--and thank you for your great
presentation--supporting the State Department is a key part of
making sure that the Iraqi government that is in power now that
has driven out ISIS, including the Kurdish authority in
northern Iraq, that they are empowered really to provide
services to those areas that they have liberated. That, I
think, will be very important. Can you talk about that, please,
Dr. Pape?
Mr. Pape. Yes, sir. We need a political strategy to win the
peace. We have won a military victory. That is only half the
battle. The task in front of us is the key fight, the real
fight, which is winning the peace. In order to do that, we need
a political strategy, and I would just expand on your points
for just a little bit.
Number one, we need a political strategy that prevents
score settling from undermining the military victories we have
just achieved. You are hearing from Mr. Pregent that we have
other instances of score settling that could easily take hold.
So if we just walk away and say, ``Oh, yes, let's let them deal
with this themselves,'' this is ripe for score settling across
the board.
Number two, we need, as you said, direct support so that
the military victory can be backed up with economic strategies,
economic policies to empower especially Sunnis, who actually
are the heart of the problem that we have. When we toppled
Saddam back in 2003, we didn't just knock off an evil dictator.
We basically created a situation of massive ungoverned space,
and the Sunni part of Iraq was the worst. And then with the
Arab Spring, this spread. Now we had more ungoverned space in
Syria, and the problem is the Sunnis need a voice in their own
future. It is not enough to put them back under a repressive
regime, and we need a political strategy to do that.
The third thing is we need to mediate more the Sunni/Shia
divide. This is in Iraq, this is in Syria. The Alawites are
Shia, of course, as you all know. But in Yemen we have a proxy
war effectively going on between the Saudis and the Iranians
inside of Yemen, and if we just let that go, if we don't
mediate that, what is going to happen is we are going to have
enormous pools of ungoverned space for those millions of
Sunnis, which is just going to be ripe for ISIS 2.0 to take
hold.
So we really need a political strategy, sir, to win the
peace.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you.
Mr. Pregent, I want to go back to one point that you made
which I thought was very, very good, the presence of foreign
fighters being drawn into Iraq. When the U.S. had 165,000
troops on the ground, foreign fighters were pouring in. But
when the Obama Administration required Iraqis and Kurds to
carry the fight, we saw the number of foreign fighters drop
precipitously. Are those factors correlated?
Mr. Pregent. Thank you for the question. The key difference
is when foreign fighter flow was coming into Iraq, it was being
facilitated by Assad, being facilitated by the IRGC Kuds Force.
These foreign fighters were coming into staging areas in Syria
and then being allowed to come into Iraq to carry out attacks
against Americans.
The foreign fighter flow in this case was foreign fighters
and their families to come into the caliphate. ISIS sold them a
false narrative that it was safe to come, and ISIS quickly
learned that unless you could shoot down an American aircraft,
it wasn't safe to plant a black flag. So the foreign fighter
flow was just a little different, sir.
Mr. Lynch. Very good. Thank you.
I yield back.
Mr. DeSantis. The gentleman yields back.
The Chair now recognizes the Vice Chairman of the
committee, Mr. Russell, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Russell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks for all
the guests being here today. We appreciate the perspective.
I guess, Dr. Pape, there is one major area we are in
agreement on--actually, a couple--the danger of declaring
victory and walking away. But no factor was more instrumental
in creating ISIS than doing just that in 2011 in Iraq. We
created the ISIS caliphate simply by our abandonment of what
was a good strategy to win the peace in Iraq.
Having commanded a task force in 2003 and 2004, and having
been heavily involved in the hunt and capture of Saddam
Hussein, I am very familiar with what our objectives were at
the beginning of that venture. We did not leave ungoverned
space, sir. In fact, after the surge in 2008, we stabilized it.
We had every member of the military here begging to continue to
have a presence, at least a brigade combat team, to draw down
but leave a presence so that we could use U.S. advisers and air
power.
Instead, we abandoned it. And what did that do? It created
Sunni Baathists, who now, having seen Iranian influence in
Baghdad, they would no longer be accommodated and they created
this narrative that they could go out and now have a better
way, that there was no accommodation, there was no future for
Iraq, and we began to see it unravel at the seams.
How do I know? Because I am heavily invested there. I still
have friends there.
Whatever saving we thought we had in terms of treasure and
troops we lost when it unraveled. When we lost friends in
Tikrit, Samara, Hawija, all the way up to Mosul and Tal Afar,
all of it unraveled at the seams. Whatever lives were spared in
the U.S. military were more than compensated by human suffering
on a grand scale with a million people in Mosul who lived
torturous lives under ISIS. We saw barbarians gain power, and
guess who was helping administrate that? We sat and wondered
that they had currency or that they had administrative skills
in the occupied territories. Guess who was doing that? The very
people we arrested, the very people we incarcerated, the very
terrorists that we tracked down and captured. The Sunni
Baathists were those that were creating that.
So I agree, we shouldn't declare victory and abandon
anything.
I am very concerned about a narrative that the United
States is involved with indiscriminate bombing. I find it as a
warrior offensive, and here is why. It assumes a lack of
training. There is no military more trained on targeting than
the United States military, period. There is none. No one
spends more treasure and more training effort and more legal
classes, morality classes, than the United States military in
terms of targeting.
It also assumes a lack of technology. We would rather spend
100 times the cost of a bomb so that we can put it in the
correct place than we would to make 100 bombs and hope that we
just hit it.
It also assumes a lack of morality on the warrior. The
warrior, perhaps more than any politician or college professor
or anyone else, when they look down the rifle sights or the
crosshairs of any weapon, they take dead serious that they hold
in their hands the taking of human life. How do I know this?
Because for me, sir, it is not academic, it is experiential. I
have been there. I have done that. I have had to take human
life. It is not pleasant, but it is not done indiscriminately.
When we see these videos and we see things like that--okay,
do you want to see dumb bombs? Do you want to see the hitting
of water works? Do you want to see the hitting of hospitals? Do
you want to see all of that? Just go to the Russian targeting
and Assad's air force targeting and you will find examples of
all of that, to include the examples of the footage that we see
in these ISIS videos.
One, we should not, nor should our national media,
propagate such propaganda by using it as B-roll and showing
these people running around, sneaking around in their tennis
shoes and standing on burning equipment as if they are heroes
or something. That is offensive. And as Americans, we should
not allow that to happen.
Instead, what we ought to do is back up the Iraqi people,
back up the free Syrian people, back up those that have been
trapped by this torturous jihadist, absolute absurdity that we
see with barbarians sawing off the heads of people, killing
children, killing women.
And you know what? Thank God for our military. We can
debate the politics all day long, but we should never, ever
assume that it is our warriors indiscriminately taking human
life on battlefields.
And with that, Mr. Chairman, I don't apologize for not
having any questions, but I yield back my time.
Mr. DeSantis. Well, I appreciate that, Mr. Vice Chairman. I
know your experience ----
Mr. Pape. Mr. Chairman, may I respond?
Mr. DeSantis. I will recognize Mr. Welch for 5 minutes.
Mr. Welch. Thank you very much.
First of all, thank you for your service and for your
statement of support for our military. I agree with what you
said about the military. Where I think we have a problem is
with the politicians who sometimes give the military a mission
that we don't support or we don't sustain.
But one of the big questions I have, because I do disagree
with some of your analysis, the one was the question on Iraq
and the wisdom of going in. We are not going to cover that
today. Two was the wisdom of totally unraveling the Sunni
governing structure once we did take Baghdad, again a political
decision made by the leader of that. So it totally created a
vacuum.
But three, the long-term question, and this is I think a
real dilemma. The military will do the job we give them to do.
They will do it with honor, professionalism, and integrity. But
then we added a new mission for the military in Iraq, and that
was nation-building, and frankly I have a question as to
whether that is an appropriate job for the military. Is it a
reasonable expectation for warriors to be required to
essentially build a nation?
On the other hand, if there are gains that our military
makes, they have to be consolidated, so just leaving the field
accentuates that vacuum. But, as I recall, one of the reasons
that we didn't stay was not so much an unwillingness even on
the part of the Obama Administration but an unwillingness on
the part of the Baghdad government to acknowledge that the rule
that would apply to our troops would be American law and
American military law, as opposed to Iraqi law, and we were not
going to allow our soldiers to be put in that kind of jeopardy
in that political environment. That is my take on it.
But I will ask this question, and I will start with you,
Dr. Pape. How do we get this balance between avoiding the
problem that Mr. Knight said, you get these battlefield gains
and then you leave, and then you lose them all, but do that
short of taking on the responsibility of full-scale nation-
building that costs hundreds and hundreds of billions of
dollars, something that we are continuing to do in Afghanistan?
Mr. Pape. The first step is to avoid this false dichotomy
that it is either nation building or no political strategy
whatsoever.
Mr. Welch. Can I interrupt? Congressman Russell, sorry. I
was saying your name wrong.
Mr. Russell. Oh, thank you. Look, when we went into Iraq,
for example, we had five very clear objectives. It was defeat
Saddam's army, and then it was to kill or capture Saddam
himself, it was to stabilize the area and key infrastructure,
and then it was to set the conditions for free elections and
nascent institutions, and then they could rebuild governance
for themselves.
How do I remember all five of those things? Because it was
very, very clear to us when we went in. And you know what? That
was the spring of 2003. Every one of those objectives we met.
I think part of it--and I totally agree with you and even
find myself in agreement with many of Dr. Pape's statements.
But as we debate the politics of it here, let's have a crystal-
clear view of what created and got us there. It was
intransigence. It was abandonment. Our State Department has to
be involved with that, as well.
Mr. Welch. I agree with that. Thank you, Congressman
Russell.
Go ahead.
Mr. Pape. The first step, I think, is to see that it is a
false dichotomy that it is either nation building or no
political strategy. A good example of the middle ground that we
need to navigate is Bosnia in the 1990s. I am sure many of you
know that for years there was an awful civil war occurring, '92
to '95, in Bosnia. Well, there is no civil war there now. It is
actually quite stable.
How did that happen? That happened not because we went in
to nation-build Bosnia, but it is also not because we just
walked away. It is because we navigated a political strategy
that really worked with the three different warring factions,
and that is why that is stable. That is a really good example,
and it is one that we should be using for the future.
Sir, I would also like to say that I am very pro-military.
I worked with the U.S. Air Force for three years in the 1990s.
I was one of the faculty that helped stand up the School of
Advanced Air Power and Space Studies that now exists to this
day. I educate to this day; the Air Force and the Army sends me
military officers to get Ph.D.s. Some of my military officers,
one of whom came to the University of Chicago, is running Air
Force intelligence in South Korea. One is commanding U.S.
forces in Syria right this second. So I absolutely believe we
have the best men and women with the best morals that are
involved in the military.
The other thing I would like to say is you and I have an
awful lot that we should go and talk about because when we
toppled Saddam, we had objectives but not a plan for the
Sunnis, which opened the door to AQI. And then what happened is
we had this false idea that they were all religious. Well, I
was one of the people with my work, coming to Washington dozens
of times to speak with NSA, CIA, our Secretary and Deputy
Secretaries of Defense to argue for what became the Anbar
Awakening. So I wasn't just loosely doing this from Chicago. I
came to speak to our 3rd ID in February 2007 before they went
into the surge in Baghdad for two hours in front of all their
military officers to talk specifically about their strategy in
the different neighborhoods in Baghdad.
I fully believe we need to not have this repeat of a
problem that we let it unravel.
Mr. DeSantis. The gentleman's time has expired.
The Chair notes the presence of our colleague from North
Carolina, Mr. Meadows, and I ask unanimous consent that he be
allowed to fully participate in today's hearing.
Without objection, so ordered.
The Chair will now recognize the gentleman from Kentucky
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Comer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Gorka, it is a pleasure to have you here today. I have
a few questions for you. First of all, in your opinion, what
should our level of support for the Iraqi government be moving
forward?
Mr. Gorka. Thank you. The level of support in Iraq isn't
about the Iraqi government. I am going to get technical for a
moment here, but bear with me. The outline of this argument is
in the Military Review article that I have given to the
committee.
In the United States U.S. Army doctrine, there are two
types of function that fall under irregular warfare. One of
them is counterinsurgency. Everybody is familiar with that, the
so-called Petraeus doctrine, Field Manual FM 324. The other
one, which is less well known, is called Foreign Internal
Defense. It is one of the core missions that the Green Berets
were created to execute.
America is not good at counterinsurgency writ large because
we are not an empire. Counterinsurgency is what empires do on
their own soil, whether it is France in the northern Akwa Akpa
in North Africa, which became Algeria, or whether it is the
United Kingdom in Northern Ireland or elsewhere. What we are
exceptionally good at is foreign internal defense such as El
Salvador, such as Colombia.
It is not about how we support or how much we support the
Iraqi government. It is about how everybody who needs to be
part of the solution in Iraq is part of the solution. The great
test--I think it was the Iraqi member who mentioned this--is
now the political objective.
Iraq, whether or not we invaded under correct objectives or
not, is irrelevant. We did, and we are there, and we are
assisting Iraqi forces. As a former African American general
said, you break the china in the china shop, you have to fix
it. So how do we do that?
We have to have our local partners, all of them, not just
the Baghdad government, be part of the solution. The objective
is a very simple one, sir. Everybody who lives in Iraq has to
agree that living together in a functioning Iraq is better than
a continued civil war or instability. It sounds simple, but as
Clausewitz said, war is simple but not easy.
So the challenge is not how much we support Baghdad but the
following question, as Mr. Pregent has rightly demonstrated,
that we must not allow Baghdad to become an appendix of Tehran,
and we have allowed it to do so for far too long. We have to
have our local Sunni allies, not just from Iraq but from the
region, such as Egypt, such as Jordan, buy into the future of
Iraq and assist them to stabilize the region.
All too often--and I will end on this--our successes
against the Sunni jihadists in Iraq have led to the Shia
jihadists, such as the IRGC and the Kuds Force, profiting from
those successes. So the goal is to support Baghdad as much as
possible while supporting our other partners even more.
Thank you, sir.
Mr. Comer. That leads me to my next question, Dr. Gorka,
and I get asked this a lot. Should Americans expect to be in
Iraq indefinitely?
Mr. Gorka. A great question. In my time in the White House
as strategist to the President, I always reminded people of the
question number one of strategy: Why should we care? It is a
very simple question. Some nations--I know it is not
politically correct. Some nations are more important than
others. It is called life. Iraq is a geo-strategically
important nation.
How long should we expect to be there? Let's go back to the
mission set. Why are we there? To make sure that that part of
the world is not used to plan and execute attacks against us
here in America or against our partners and allies. That is the
metric.
How long does that take? How long is a piece of string? But
at the end of the day, it is much more effective to help our
local Sunni partners effect that stability than to have U.S.
forces in U.S. uniforms that are targets on the ground be there
for a long period of time. So the ideal situation is, again,
foreign internal defense, a very small footprint of trainers
and advisors who help our local partners execute that
stabilization mission.
And if I may, with regards to the parallel to Bosnia,
Bosnia and the Balkans is not a good example of strategy. I
don't know when Dr. Pape was last there, but Bosnia has become
a hive of recruitment for Iran and it is a hotbed of extremism
today. It may not be a civil war as it was in the 1990s, but
Bosnia is not solved in any way, shape, or form.
Mr. Comer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DeSantis. The gentleman yields back.
The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Ohio, Mr.
Jordan, for 5 minutes.
Mr. Jordan. I thank the Chairman.
Dr. Gorka, in his testimony Dr. Pape basically said that
not much of the credit should go to the Trump Administration,
it should also go to the Obama Administration. In fact, he said
in his testimony, ``The Obama Administration reacted quickly
and decisively, leading a coalition to use air power like a
hammer to smash numerous ISIS military offensives and contain
it,'' talking about how the Obama Administration did an amazing
job dealing with ISIS, and I think his point was terrorism at
large.
Do you agree with that assessment of Dr. Pape?
Mr. Gorka. Not in the slightest. It makes for a good
PowerPoint visual, but it wasn't an anvil and a hammer. It was
a scalpel used now and again in a fashion in which the
Commander in Chief was not interested in winning.
Will is key to success. Remember, the former senator from
Illinois campaigned for president under a very simple bumper
sticker when it came to national security. Let's remind
ourselves, 10 years ago he said Afghanistan was the good war,
Iraq was the bad war. Once he became Commander in Chief, he was
locked into that narrative, which meant sooner or later, if he
was going to be true to his campaign pledge, we had to leave
Iraq.
And I agree with the statements already made, we are not
responsible for the creation of ISIS, but the decision of the
then-Commander in Chief to leave without a SOFA--we could have
gotten a SOFA. It is not a question. America has always managed
to get Status of Forces Agreements. We could have got one.
Leaving without a SOFA meant that ISIS could become the most
powerful jihadi organization of the modern age.
Talking to the military, it is very simple: the Commander
in Chief and his White House did not have the will to win
because they had made an ideological decision that Iraq was the
wrong war.
Mr. Jordan. Mr. Pregent, what would be the--I mean, if you
had to summarize the legacy of the Obama Administration when it
comes to foreign policy and dealing with terrorism, what would
you say that it was?
Mr. Pregent. Well, unfortunately, the call saying that ISIS
was a JV team was unsettling for a lot of us that followed the
Zarqawi movement from the al-Qaeda model to the ISIS model.
What I would say to the Obama strategy against ISIS, Mosul
was left to ISIS for two-and-a-half years, to 4,000 ISIS
fighters. A population of 1.6 million Sunnis was left under
brutal control by this terrorist army for two-and-a-half years
without a single effort to call up the 30,000 Sunnis that
Maliki had kicked out of the Iraqi security forces. Fallujah
was left to ISIS for three years.
So if you look at the strategy, there was no attempt in the
beginning to build a Sunni force like we did during the surge,
the awakening, the Anbar Awakening, the Sons of Iraq. We
couldn't do it because the Administration had embedded 5,000
Americans with a predominantly Shia force that was heavily
influenced by the IRGC Kuds Force. It basically made our
advisers hostages to our policies in Iraq. If we called for the
standing up of a Sunni force, it would put our soldiers in
harm's way.
Mr. Jordan. Broaden it out a little bit. What are things
like today in Libya?
Mr. Pregent. It is ungoverned space. ISIS can do what it
wants ----
Mr. Jordan. Wasn't that supposed to be--I had the privilege
of serving on the Benghazi committee, and my read on all of it
was that Libya was supposed to be the Obama Administration's
shining example of foreign policy success, Secretary Clinton,
the State Department's example of how it was going to work:
throw out a dictator, usher in the Arab Spring, put no troops
on the ground, and this was how it was going to work. And what
we wound up with was that tragedy on September 11th, 2012, and
then this narrative where, because it happened 56 days before
an election and it went against their narrative during the
campaign, they had to create this story that it was somehow
inspired by a video, a video-inspired terrorist attack.
So when I think about the legacy of the Obama
Administration relative to terrorism and what Dr. Pape said in
his opening comment, I just see an entirely different scenario
altogether. Am I accurate, Dr. Gorka?
Dr. Gorka, and then Mr. Pregent.
Mr. Gorka. I will be very blunt, as blunt as you have been,
sir. For eight years, narrative was more important than
reality. It wasn't the reality on the ground. It was spin. And
when you have the deputy national security adviser whose
qualifications are a Master's degree in fictional writing, it
tells you everything you need to know.
Mr. Jordan. Mr. Pregent, you get the last word.
Mr. Pregent. I would just say that the message that was
sent to the terrorists was an unserious one, and it actually
led to ISIS and other groups.
Mr. Jordan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DeSantis. The gentleman's time has expired.
The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from California for
5 minutes.
Mr. DeSaulnier. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the
Ranking Member, and thank you to the panelists for this
informative hearing.
So, Dr. Pape, I would sort of like to talk about why we can
learn lessons from what has happened on the military side. It
is more sort of where we go from here. So recently in the San
Francisco Bay area, where I am from, the FBI fortunately caught
a disaffected gentleman who is a former Marine Corps veteran
who was working through social media to plan to blow up Pier
39, a very touristy area, over the Christmas holiday.
So in the context of--I am confident that the American
military is adjusting with our partners to take care of a
military threat, but it is the radicalization, the use of
social media to turn Americans into radicals and to appeal to
this radicalization. To me, it is the combination of
disaffected human beings wherever they are in a globally
connected community.
So talk to me a little bit about how sophisticated their
ongoing operations are vis-a-vis social media.
Mr. Pape. Absolutely, sir. This is something I study; and
our center, CPOST, a half-dozen full-time people, 40 people
work on this problem, the propaganda problem. And I was just at
our U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago just a couple of days ago
giving a two-hour briefing to the new attorney general for
Chicago who has just come in.
This is a serious problem that the end of the caliphate has
not yet stopped, if it is going to stop at all. So our national
counterterrorism representative for the Midwest started that
briefing by giving a two-minute statement saying that we have
seen no decline in the pace of radicalization inside the United
States with the collapse of the caliphate. In fact, Saipov just
did the attack in New York in November when most of the
caliphate was gone.
So you are exactly right, sir, to be concerned.
The fundamental problem that we are seeing is that inside--
the threat we face here at home is now a home-grown threat. I
have looked at all 158 cases of individuals indicted in U.S.
courts for ISIS-related offenses or carrying out attacks inside
the United States. Two-thirds of those individuals were born in
the United States. The other one-third are immigrants, but they
are people who have been here for many, many years. Over 83
percent are watching these jihadi videos as the gateway in.
Lots of other things are happening too, but these videos are
the gateway that is starting the process. Saipov himself, the
guy who did New York, says it was the videos that radicalized
him.
So, sir, we have to be very vigilant. We can't just sort of
think, oh, yes, we dealt with ISIS and it is dead and we are
going to walk away. We really have to pay attention here inside
because the video propaganda doesn't die with the caliphate.
The video propaganda is really difficult to get off the Web. It
can go to the Dark Web. There is a whole lot more to say about
this, but we are nowhere near in a position to think we have
cleansed the threat, and it really would be kind of foolish to
think that internally, yes, we are done, check that box.
Mr. DeSaulnier. So to go to the second part about
encryption, as we develop new technologies and they learn from
those technologies or use them, our struggle here in Congress
to preserve American traditional civil liberties but also do
all our due diligence to make sure we are making people safe
here in America and in the West from terrorist attacks, could
you talk a little bit about that, particularly encryption
applications?
Mr. Pape. Yes. A few years ago there was a terrific panel.
Michael Morrel was on the panel. It was a commission. Jeff
Stone, a professor from the University of Chicago was on this,
to really look closely at our steps of international phone
calls to see whether or not--because this was Snowden and so
forth, became quite a big deal. We need a new such major effort
to really look closely at exactly where we should move that
bubble.
Jeff Stone, a former dean of the University of Chicago Law
School, professor of civil liberties, provost--we need to bring
together security experts, legal scholars to really look
closely at exactly--because the fact of the matter is we are
developing more encryption technology day by day, and the
terrorists are only just a few weeks behind.
Mr. DeSaulnier. Let me ask you one last question, Dr. Pape.
So in the context of sewing more radicals in Syria or Iraq,
what are our responsibilities to go in and rebuild those
countries, particularly Syria?
Mr. Pape. It is tremendously in our strategic interest.
There are moral issues, sir. But the fundamental problem is we
have created, over a period of many years, since 2003, enormous
governance problems for Sunnis in Iraq, and now the spillover
effects in Syria, and unless we take diplomatic efforts with a
sustained political strategy to, number one, prevent score
settling among the folks we actually worked with; number two,
to have more direct economic support; and number three, to
mediate the Sunni/Shia divide, we are going to be right back
here again, or very likely, in just a few years.
Mr. DeSaulnier. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. DeSantis. I thank the gentleman.
The Chair notes the presence of our colleague, the
gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Krishnamoorthi. I ask unanimous
consent that he be allowed to fully participate in today's
hearing.
Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Chair now recognizes Mr. Hice for 5 minutes.
Mr. Hice. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Pregent, let me ask you, all the bureaucratic processes
that were added under the Obama Administration, can you address
through the international security team, can you address how
that impacted the military?
Mr. Pregent. Well, commanders were being questioned by
aides in the National Security Council whether or not they
should actually go forward with a target. One of the biggest
complaints coming from combatant commanders was that they
weren't necessarily trusted to make those decisions. Initially,
again, we talk about aircraft flying with munitions that
weren't able to drop their bombs when they actually had targets
of opportunity on the ground.
The biggest complaint is the targets of opportunity. That
is a small window in which a commander has an opportunity to
hit ISIS and hurt it, and when you have to call back to D.C.
for permission to do it because there happens to be an oil
tanker in the convoy, the ISIS convoy, that not only allows
that target of opportunity to go away but it sustains a
terrorist organization.
Remember, ISIS early on, in 2015, was estimated to receive
$500 million a year in the illicit oil trade, and that was
because they were able to simply move during the daytime.
Initially, one of the biggest problems with the ROE as it
relates to getting permission from D.C. to do something was
that ISIS could move around freely during the daytime without
being hit. Those convoys who were flying black flags after
taking territory should have never been allowed to move without
being hit, and the biggest complaint was that they had to get
permission from D.C.
Mr. Hice. Okay, so you are saying that our commanders were
not trusted, and with that the National Security Council, they
were actually making decisions about strikes rather than our
leaders in the field?
Mr. Pregent. Right. They were delaying the decisions, which
made the targets of opportunity go away, and then they were
questioning whether or not they should be attacking convoys
with oil in them anyway due to environmental concerns.
Mr. Hice. This seems like insanity to me. So what other
decisions was the National Security Council making that should
have been made by our commanders on the field?
Mr. Pregent. Well, I can only contrast the difference
between the Obama and Trump Administrations. Combatant
commanders now can make those decisions on the ground. They are
able to use lethal force to degrade ISIS, to defeat ISIS, and
they are trusted, and that should be no surprise. Both H.R.
McMaster and Secretary Mattis were both combatant commanders in
Iraq. They didn't have to ask D.C. for permission to do
anything.
So it is good that they pushed it down to combatant
commanders in Iraq and Syria to be able to do these things
without asking permission, as well as Afghanistan. So that is
the key difference.
Mr. Hice. All right. So with that, obviously, there has
been an enormous difference in impact and what has been
accomplished from the previous administration and the rules of
engagement versus now.
Mr. Pregent. Yes. ISIS, the leadership, once we initially
had success with our information operations campaigns. In 2015,
we talked about an imminent move on Mosul. That resulted in
ISIS highlighting targets and convoys of ISIS fighters and
equipment to leave Mosul and go to Syria during the daytime
without being hit. That is not happening now. We did not see
ISIS try to reinforce Mosul. We did not see ISIS try to
reinforce any of the territories that were taken under the
Trump Administration.
One of the key differences also is every piece of territory
that ISIS lost under the Obama Administration using this proxy
force of a predominantly Shia Iraqi security force with IRGC
militias, there was a negotiated evacuation of ISIS fighters.
You saw that in Fallujah with convoys leaving Fallujah. You saw
that in Ramadi. Initially in Mosul we saw that, but the
combatant commanders on the ground wanted to close off Mosul so
nobody could get out, and that was one of the differences that
I think has expedited the loss of territory for ISIS.
Mr. Hice. The way you phrased it a while ago was extremely
strong, where our commanders were not trusted. That is just
stunning to me. Whereas now they are trusted, and the
difference of outcome between those two points of view is
enormous.
Mr. Pregent. I will just go back to what Secretary Gates
did in Afghanistan. He walked into a Joint Special Operations
Center and saw a phone line connected directly to the NSC. He
said what is that for? They said it goes back to the NSC. He
said rip it out of the wall. If they call you, if the White
House calls you, you tell them to call me. That is a key
difference.
Mr. Hice. That is excellent. Thank you for your
testimonies, each of you.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Mr. DeSantis. The gentleman yields back.
The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Illinois for 5
minutes.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Thank you, Chairman DeSantis, and thank
you, Ranking Member Lynch, for allowing me to participate in
today's hearing. And thanks to all of you for coming today.
On January 27th, 2017, the White House issued a Holocaust
Remembrance statement that made no mention of the Jewish
people, Jewish deaths, or the Nazi policy of Jewish
extermination. This is a notable break from past
administrations. President George H.W. Bush's Remembrance
statement was explicit. ``On Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial
Day, Jews recall the Nazi atrocities that claimed the lives of
six million of their fellow Jews.'' President George W. Bush
was just as clear in his statement. The Holocaust was ``a
policy aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish people.''
It is important to accurately remember the past, even more
so in these types of situations. According to Holocaust
historian Deborah Lipstadt, minimizing the Third Reich's focus
on Jews is a common tactic of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis.
Dr. Gorka, on Monday, February 6th, 2017, Michael Medved
asked you on CNN if President Trump's statement was ``at least
questionable in being the first such statement in many years
that didn't recognize that Jewish extermination was the chief
goal of the Holocaust.'' Your response was, ``It's a Holocaust
Remembrance statement. No, I'm not going to admit it because
it's asinine.''
Dr. Gorka, it wasn't asinine for President George H.W. Bush
to recognize Jewish extermination in his Holocaust Remembrance
statement, was it?
Mr. Gorka. I don't know if the good member, Mr.
Krishnamoorthi, has arrived at the wrong hearing. I was invited
here to discuss the Trump policies towards the defeat of ISIS.
If you wish to lower this meeting to a ----
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Sir, please answer my question. Did you
understand my question?
Mr. Gorka. Well, since it was so inaccurate, it is hard--
Michael Medved does not work for CNN, number one. Number two,
you have arrived 75 minutes into this hearing and may have
arrived at the wrong hearing.
So, no. I would like to ask you, do you know ----
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. I will assume that you are not prepared
to answer the question.
Mr. Gorka. If you keep interrupting me--would you like ----
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Mr. Gorka, I will reclaim my time. Dr.
Gorka, please answer the question. Was it asinine of President
George W. Bush to recognize Jewish extermination in his
Holocaust Remembrance statement?
Mr. Gorka. It is asinine ----
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Please answer the question.
Mr. Gorka. Will you hector me, or allow me to answer?
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. I allowed you.
Mr. Gorka. Will you continue to hector me while I am to
answer?
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Will you answer the question?
Mr. Gorka. I am trying to, but you are interrupting me.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Please do so.
Mr. Gorka. The President's grandchildren are Jewish. How
asinine is it to posit that his White House would do anything
not to recognize the tragedy of the Holocaust? That is my
answer.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Dr. Gorka, are you saying that it was
not questionable that it was asinine to mention that this
Holocaust Remembrance statement omitted the mention of Jews?
Mr. Gorka. It is asinine to posit that a Holocaust
Remembrance statement is not about the Holocaust. Yes, I hold
that line; it is asinine then, it is asinine now.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. So you stand by your statement.
In recent years there has been a disturbing rise in far-
right parties in Europe, from AFD in Germany to Marie Le-Pen's
National Front in France, to Jobbik in Hungary. In fact, the
President of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor,
described Jobbik as ``unabashedly neo-Nazi'' in an October 1st,
2014 interview with the Times of Israel.
Dr. Gorka, in an August 6th, 2007 interview with Hungary's
Echo TV, when asked if you supported the formation of a militia
run by Jobbik, you responded ``that is so.'' You explained this
militia as a necessary response to ``a big societal need.''
You, of course, stand by this statement; correct, Dr. Gorka?
Mr. Gorka. No, because I never made that statement. That
was a 12-minute interview which had been scurrilously edited
down to two-and-a-half minutes. That is a lie, sir, on the
record. It is a distortion of the facts. I reject it. And my
father, who defended Jews during World War II as a teenager,
has been recognized on the record by Rabbi Billet and the
Tablet magazine, the most important Jewish magazine, as having
done so. Sir, I reject your absolute smear campaign ----
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. You can argue all you want with the
record, sir.
Mr. Gorka. It is an edited interview.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. You can debate with me on television
about this record.
Mr. Gorka. It is 13 minutes long.
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. We will hand this to the reporter so
they can verify what you said.
Mr. Gorka. Absolutely, and I will share with them ----
Mr. Krishnamoorthi. Sir, on August 15th, 2007, the World
Jewish Congress ----
Mr. Gorka. Mr. Chairman, are we here to discuss ISIS?
Mr. Krishnamoorthi.--called this militia a serious
violation of human rights. Do you still support this
organization?
Mr. DeSantis. The gentleman's time has expired. I
appreciate that. That was a little bit far afield. But I will
say, if we are going to be bringing up things related to
Israel, this subcommittee has taken the lead on not only
framing the issue of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's
capital--I led the trip last March where we looked at the
different sites that will be ready. We were disappointed when
the President didn't announce that in May, so we had another
hearing here in November stressing that this is something that
he should follow through on. And to his great credit, he did
that, and I am eagerly anticipating news from the State
Department about how they are going to implement that
directive. We are not going to be satisfied if they take years
to do it. It needs to happen this year, and we need to have a
temporary site up and running.
So we are going to follow that issue 100 percent. I just
give the President a lot of credit because we haven't talked
about it since we did our hearing in November. That was a big,
big deal, long overdue. Other presidents have promised it.
Jerusalem is and always has been the capital of the Jewish
people.
And with that, I want to thank the witnesses again for
appearing with us today.
The hearing record will remain open for two weeks for any
member to submit a written opening statement or questions for
the record.
If there is no further business, without objection, the
subcommittee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:33 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
APPENDIX
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