Obama needs to answer his own question

General John Allen, Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, said Monday in Kuwait:

It’s useful to imagine Da’esh [the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant] existing in three spaces. First, in the physical space, or, if you will, in the battle space. And make no mistake: Da’esh will be defeated militarily. It will not happen overnight, but it will happen. The combined efforts of the coalition partners supporting Iraq and the moderate Syrian opposition forces on the ground will continue to eliminate the targets of Da’esh, degrade their fighting capabilities, and ultimately push Da’esh out of the territories it controls today, defeating it….

The second space in which Da’esh operates is the financial space. We must choke off the oxygen that gives Da’esh life, – its money, and its resources – and do so through targeted sanctions, stopping the oil smuggling, and ending their access to the global financial marketplace.

But we are all here today to talk about the third area in which Da’esh operates – the information space. For it is here that Da’esh celebrates its horrendous brand of warfare, and here where Da’esh recruits and perverts the innocent. And it is only when we contest Da’esh’s presence online and deny the legitimacy of its message – the message that it sends to vulnerable young people – and as we expose Da’esh for the un-Islamic, criminal cult of violence that it really is – it is only then that Da’esh will be truly defeated.

There is a big piece missing here. The sad fact is that ISIS now operates also in the governance space, providing minimal public services, a kind of justice, and jobs to several million people in eastern Syria and western Iraq. It is a mistake to imagine that we are going to be able to defeat ISIS’s military capabilities and make no provision for governance. If we do, we’ll find the terrorists, or the Ba’athists, or some other pathology back in place sooner rather than later.

The Obama Administration continues to make a basic diagnostic error. ISIS is not only a terrorist group. It is also a successful insurgency that now controls and governs territory. Pretending otherwise renders the strategy the Administration is pursuing to defeat ISIS partial, ineffectual and even counterproductive.

This is surprising, given the President’s own admission that he made a mistake not to follow up in Libya after its revolution. In August, he said:

So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?’

It is now almost November and the Administration has no answer for the day after in Syria. It continues to pooh-pooh the Syrian opposition, in my view unfairly. But if the plan does not include serious support to the Syrian Interim Government, who will govern? Mr. President, when will you answer your own question?