CIA chief says US can’t destroy ISIL on battlefield

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan says the United States cannot destroy the ISIL terrorist group militarily on the battleground.

“I believe firmly that we’re not going to resolve this problem on the battlefield,” Brennan said during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation”, aired on Sunday.

The CIA chief argued that it was up to the Iraqi and Syrian governments to decide how they are going to restore peace in their nations.

“There has to be a viable political process that’s able to bring together the actors inside Iraq and Syria and for them to be able to decide how they are going to have a peaceful future,” he said.

“So it’s a combination of military and political pressure that needs to be brought to bear,” added Brennan, who served as chief counterterrorism adviser to President Barack Obama before heading the CIA.

In recent weeks, senior officials and military experts have raised similar concerns about the US strategy against ISIL.

“We are not only failing, we are losing this war,” General John M. “Jack” Keane, who previously served as vice chief of staff of the US Army, said during a hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee last month.

Frederick Kagan, a director at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told the Senate panel that regaining the momentum against ISIL would require up to 20,000 US troops on the ground in Iraq.

In 2006, Keane and Kagan both advised former president George W. Bush to drastically increase troops in Iraq when it became clear the US strategy was failing.

Last September, Obama announced an open-ended military air campaign to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the ISIL forces in Iraq and Syria by enlisting the support of scores of allies.

Congressional Republicans have also been highly critical of Obama’s strategy, including his refusal to deploy combat troops on the ground in Iraq.

They cite the fall of the Iraqi city of Ramadi to ISIL and the group’s recent gains in Syria as the latest signs that Obama’s strategy to defeat the terror network is failing.

Brennan, the CIA director, disputed the idea that the US intelligence community has been caught off guard by the new wave of ISIL attacks. "We saw a growing strength."

Many of the so-called moderate militants, who were trained by the CIA in 2012 in Jordan to battle the Syrian government, later joined the ISIL terrorist group, according to several reports.

The US plans to finish the training of 3,000 militants in Syria by the end of 2015 and an additional 5,000 by next April, the Pentagon says.

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