WASHINGTON – The worm of paranoia begins to eat into even the hardest adversary. An example is a Twitter post last week displaying an Islamic State leaflet offering a $5,000 reward for information about “crusaders’ agents” in the ranks.
Maybe Western spies are secretly burrowing into the Islamic State right now. But then, maybe the leaflet is a fake, intended to induce the fighters to doubt their comrades. The point is that the jihadists can’t know. Either way, the worm turns.
The leaflet got me thinking about one of the little discussed aspects of the U.S.-led campaign to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State — namely the role that can be played by “unconventional warfare.” These are the Sun Tzu arts of battle — the tricks and feints and deceptions that can make adversaries weaken themselves, question their doctrine and doubt their leaders.
These unconventional operations can be far less costly in money and lives than action on the battlefield. Rather than a wild spray of bullets from an Apache helicopter gunship (which often creates as many enemies as it kills), these unconventional tools can subtly encourage an adversary to attack itself. In using such deceptive tactics, it must be said, the U.S.-led coalition would be emulating Russia’s “green men” infiltration in Ukraine.
There are a few celebrated cases that illustrate how devastating such a campaign can be: In the late 1980s, the Abu Nidal Organization was shattered by internal disputes that were encouraged by the intelligence services of the U.S., Britain and Jordan.