Conflicting goals impede Obama’s anti- ISIL efforts

President Obama won office in part on his promise to pull America out of its endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so he has been resistant to recommitting U. S. troops on his watch.

But Obama’s plan to disengage has collided with the reality that without U. S. help, America’s allies have fared poorly against the Islamic State ( also known as ISIL or ISIS) and the Taliban. Hence Obama’s reluctant decisions to deploy 3,500 troops to try to rebuild the feckless Iraqi army, and to leave more troops in Afghanistan for longer than he wanted.

Now the same thing, more or less, is happening in Syria, where Obama’s previous hands- off policy has helped foster chaos, a refugee crisis, the rise of ISIL and, now, intervention by Russia. What to do? Ultimately, the U. S. might have little choice. ISIL’s depravity is seemingly limitless. It decapitates its victims or burns them alive, holds women in sexual slavery and commits mass slaughter of its enemies. The group’s affiliates are spreading beyond their footholds in Syria and Iraq, and one of them might be responsible for planting a bomb that downed a Russian passenger jet in Egypt.

So far, the Obama administration hasn’t found the key to victory. A year- long air war has pounded ISIL, which has its headquarters in northern Syria.

But airstrikes can only do so much, and U. S. forces have wound up flying 95% of the missions against ISIL in Syria as allies have melted away. The White House tried to back a ground campaign, but it abandoned a train- and-equip plan for moderate rebels that struggled to find suitable recruits and wound up costing an absurd $ 2 million per trainee.

On the heels of that fiasco, now the White House is trying two tracks. One is diplomacy, a series of talks with Russia and other nations to try to find a way to end the civil war in Syria and form a united front against ISIL. This looks almost pointless given the savage intractability of the fighting in Syria, but negotiations often look pointless — until they work. This is worth a try.

The other track is military: deploying up to 50 U. S. special operations forces to “train, advise and assist” Kurdish militia and — potentially — Arab fighters in northern Syria. Besides breaking Obama’s pledge not to put U. S. “boots on the ground” in Syria, the plan sounds minimalist. If the ISIL threat is as grave as policymakers say, why not 500 troops, or 5,000, or more?

The answer is that Obama is caught between conflicting imperatives: the security one of destroying ISIL, and the political one of trying to avoid another major commitment of U. S. troops.

It is, of course, vastly preferable to have local forces fight ISIL, and Kurdish militia fighters have proved to be capable and effective. So leveraging their abilities and possibly joining them with Arab fighters in a campaign to seize ISIL’s capital of Raqqa seems like a reasonable approach.

If this works, the blow to ISIL would be severe, and the plan would be worth expanding. If not, the administration might eventually have to resolve its clashing goals — destroying ISIL, and avoiding U. S. casualties — in favor of more robust participation in an international coalition to defeat the terrorist threat.

MOHAMMED BADRA, EPA A boy receives first aid after an airstrike in Douma, Syria.