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Air power alone won't beat ISIS

Star Desk
This is a significant moment in the US-led campaign to "degrade and destroy" the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).
The US and its allies have been collecting intelligence data on IS targets for some time. The Syrian leg of this campaign was always going to begin in high gear and high tempo. The first night of attack involving aircraft, armed drones and sea-launched cruise missiles indicates it.
This is not, though, a knock-out blow but the strategic aim is clearly to push ISIS off balance by striking at its leadership and support apparatus and hopefully - the Pentagon would say - to keep it there, said a BBC analysis.
So far this campaign both in Iraq and Syria has rolled out as most analysts and the White House itself would have predicted.
The question now is not so much what comes next - air strikes are likely to settle down into a regular pattern with bursts of more intense activity related to developments on the ground.
The real questions are: can the other elements of the US strategy be rolled out equally effectively? Can the conditions for an IS defeat be established on the ground?
Washington is planning to train and arm 5,000 Syrian rebels as part of the effort, although the top US military officer, General Martin Dempsey, said between 12,000 and 15,000 men would be required to recapture" lost territory" in eastern Syria.
Dempsey said defeating IS would take more than air strikes and that "a ground component" was an important aspect of the US-led campaign.
Take the case of Iraq. Here US air power does seem to have halted the advance of IS, especially into Kurdish-held areas of the north. But the US air activity has not yet really begun to evict ISIS from Iraqi soil. That is crucially going to depend upon two factors.
Firstly, the availability of a well-trained and motivated force on the ground to fight IS toe to toe and gain territory. Kurdish Peshmerga forces are being equipped and trained. The US is attempting to restore the credibility of at least some of the Iraqi military, which originally crumbled in the face of the IS onslaught. But all this will take time.
In Syria, rebels fighting Assad is also fighting the ISIS. But US is still undecided on arming them fearing the arms may eventually come to ISIS. Moreover, US airstrikes on anti-ISIS but al-Qaeda's Syria branch al-
Nusra Front has already made the possibility of a united opposition on the doubt. Al-Nusra is the most skilled of the rebels in Syria and the possibility of losing them is a big concern.
The second crucial factor is political. And until today, no concrete form is visible. A versatile formation like ISIS can in a sense be defeated militarily but the likelihood is that it will simply morph into another phenomenon and reappear at a later date.
Conditions need to be created so that Sunni tribes turn away from it due to its brutality and constricted vision - in other words military factors are employed to help to defeat ISIS from within. The political battle is every bit as important as the military.
But above all it should be remembered that, as many analysts are noting, this struggle is all part of a wider civil war within the Muslim and Arab world that pits to some extent cross-cutting coalitions of Sunni states against Shia; Iran against the Arab states; and those seeking to maintain the status quo against those who would shatter it. And whatever the outcome, in civil wars, some would say, there are no clear victors.