Chelsea Manning breaks silence to criticise Obama's Isis strategy

Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq before being arrested for passing state secrets to WikiLeaks, says the only way to defeat Isis is to allow the group to set up its own contained “failed ‘state’” where over time its fire would “die out on its own”.

Writing in the Guardian, Manning says her experience as an all-source analyst near Baghdad in 2009-10 leads her to doubt the strategy being followed by the Obama administration. She warns that the US-led mission to destroy the extremist group is destined to fail because it will merely feed a “cycle of outrage, recruitment, organizing and even more fighting that goes back decades”.

Even with the support of non-western forces, attacking Isis directly from the air or with special forces on the ground risks mission creep and the repeat of past errors. “I believe that Isis strategically feeds off the mistakes and vulnerabilities of the very democratic western states they decry,” she writes.

Presenting a radical alternative blueprint for how to deal with the extremist group, Manning argues that the best way to degrade Isis is to allow it to set up a failed “state” within a clearly demarcated territory. There, Isis would gradually become unpopular and unable to govern, she predicts, and the ideology of its leadership would be discredited in the region, potentially forever.

“Eventually, if they are properly contained, I believe that Isis will not be able to sustain itself on rapid growth alone, and will begin to fracture internally. The organization will begin to disintegrate into several smaller, uncoordinated entities – ultimately failing in their objective of creating a strong state.”

Manning was posted to Forward Operating Base Hummer outside Baghdad where as an intelligence analyst she had a ring-side seat on the largely Sunni insurgency, poring through classified databases to track the movements and tactics of groups including Isis. She was arrested in May 2010 and is now serving a 35-year sentence for leaking vast quantities of secret official documents and military videos to the open-information website WikiLeaks.

Manning wrote the Guardian article in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is in military custody. An appeal against her sentence is expected to be heard by the US army court of criminal appeals next year.

As the global coalition of more than 30 countries takes shape around the search for a military response to Isis, Manning’s proposals point in a strikingly different direction. Western countries, she says, should show sufficient discipline to let the barbarity and brutality of the group’s attacks – including recent beheadings of two Americans and a Briton – work against them.

Instead of “bombs and bullets”, the US and its allies should seek to weaken the jihadi threat through a combination of containment and propaganda, she says. They should staunch the flow of money to the extremists by halting ransom payments for hostages and cutting off oil revenues from Bayji in Iraq.

She also says US and its allies should try to reduce the numbers of young people joining the Isis camp from western countries by countering the narrative put out by the group in its recruitment videos.