ISIS Transforming Into Functioning State That Uses Terror as Tool
While no one is predicting that the Islamic State will become steward of an accountable, functioning state anytime soon, the group is putting in place the kinds of measures associated with governance: issuing identification cards for residents, promulgating fishing guidelines to preserve stocks, requiring that cars carry tool kits for emergencies.
That transition may demand that the West rethink its military-first approach to combating the group.
“I think that there is no question that the way to look at it is as a revolutionary state-building organization,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is one of a small but growing group of experts who are challenging the conventional wisdom about the Islamic State: that its evil ensures its eventual destruction.
.. Inside Islamic State territory, the group’s violence is regarded differently than it is in the West. In the communities it controls, citizens have already grown inured to violence. In Iraq, citizens have lived with war for more than a decade, including the days of sectarian civil war when a signature act of some Shiite militias was to drill the heads of Sunnis. And before that, they lived under the police state thuggery and corruption of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
Now there is a limited sense of order, and cleaner streets, a low bar, perhaps, but a reality amid years of war and anarchy. Hassan Hassan, an analyst who has studied the Islamic State and is a co-author of a book on the group, said that on the ground there was a “logic of savagery.” If people avoid any sign of dissent, he said, they can largely go about their lives.
“Not happily,” he said, “but they can live at peace.”