Bombing our way to a strategic solution to Islamic State in Syria

Ironically, IS supplies to be targeted are largely being funded by the sale of captured oil to neighbouring countries, some of whom are allies of the West, like Turkey and Jordan.

At the same time, Defence Minister Kevin Andrews has revealed that Australian forces will soon be helping to direct drone strikes against IS targets, including in Syria. This is perhaps overstating the case because the likely reality is a few RAAF personnel embedded with US Air Force drone units acting under US direction.

Embedding Australian personnel in US and British units is a long-standing arrangement that gives us invaluable experience of working with state-of-the-art equipment, in large military formations, or with specialist units that do not exist in our much smaller order of battle.

What Minister Andrews did not mention was our Special Forces embedded with US and British Special Force units who have already been operating "outside the wire" against IS.

All of this activity is positive from a Defence perspective in terms of playing our part as a reliable US ally, which in turn benefits us in many ways in the Five-Eyes alliance relationship.

A downside is that we do not have much control over our personnel when they are embedded.

Pulling them out of allied units if we disagree with our allies' actions is not an option. This was a consequence of the Fraser government pulling key naval personnel out of British units deploying to the Falklands in 1982, when Australia did not want to get involved. The Brits were furious at losing Australians who had been trained to perform key operational roles, and could not be replaced at short notice.

We were subsequently told in no uncertain terms by both the US and Britain that if we wanted to gain experience with their units in future, we would not have a right of veto over operational deployments.

Since then we have backed off from interfering or have adopted a "need-not-to-know" policy. I recall Prime Minister John Howard stating publicly before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, that our forces had not yet been engaged against Iraq, when in fact our embedded Special Forces personnel had already been in action for several weeks. John Howard was, of course, well known for plausible deniability.

That is not to say that Australian embedded personnel cannot be influential if they are not happy about a proposed allied course of action. Australian Major-General Jim Molan used his veto power while embedded with US forces in Iraq as chief of operations when he felt that proposed military courses of action were likely to result in civilian casualties.

In my experience, our embedded personnel are invariably respected by the Americans and Brits for their integrity and professionalism.

Apart from its training value, our commitment of more military resources to countering IS in Iraq and Syria does not make much sense. The more we do militarily in the Middle East against IS and announce it publicly, the more likely it is that its acolytes will try to mount attacks in Australia or against Australians in Muslim countries. What is happening in Syria and Iraq is essentially a Sunni versus Shia war involving powerful regional backers in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

A US-led "crusader" coalition getting involved is not going to achieve much for the coalition's or Australia's national security interests. The US still has no long-term strategy for countering IS, and its past military involvements in Iraq since 1991 have been spectacularly disastrous for the region. One could go back further, to the US-engineered coups in Syria and Iran – in 1949 and 1954 respectively – to find other examples of short-term benefits resulting in negative long-term consequences.

Looking at the counter-terrorism aspects, it is generally accepted that terrorism needs to be countered both strategically and tactically. We do pretty well at the military tactical aspects, but less well when it comes to strategic aspects. According to the findings of Global Terrorism Index 2014 (GTI 2014), despite all our efforts, the level of global terrorist activity has greatly increased in the last decade. This is based on data collected by the US government-sponsored National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, based at the University of Maryland.

GTI 2014 notes that most of the public conversation about terrorism has focused on conventional counter-terrorism efforts – intelligence gathering, policing, and use of military force. However, it notes that such efforts are often ineffective, and may even be counterproductive.

Firstly, by setting national security above human security objectives the West has – whether directly or through proxies – too frequently responded to the threat of "terrorism" with the use of violence. Such violence has, all too often, been indiscriminate, and has had a tendency to worsen the conflict rather than contribute to sustainable peace.

Secondly, counter-terrorism efforts and related actions taken under the label of "stabilisation" and "state-building" have often failed to address the drivers of conflict in meaningful ways, especially when they reinforce abusive and exclusive governance and corruption – as in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Thirdly, the Western response has typically neglected to focus on sustainable solutions to conflict that involve and respond to the concerns, priorities and potentials of conflict-affected populations.

A range of strategic options is available to us for countering IS that I will cover in a follow-up article, but Western military involvement in Iraq and Syria is unlikely to provide a long-term solution – and risks greatly increasing IS's appeal to young Muslims.

Clive Williams is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University's Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism and a visiting professor at the ANU's Centre for Military and Security Law. He was recently in Turkey.