Almost a month has passed since President Obama ordered airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria as part of his effort to "degrade and destroy" the militant group. How effective have they been so far?
"I would not want to say who's winning or who's losing yet," said Charles Sennott, co-founder of GlobalPost and head of the Ground Truth Project. "But I do think these advances, particularly the momentum they have into Anbar Province, is worrisome."
Given the seemingly limited progress so far, Sennott expressed concern that airstrikes alone would not be enough to claim victory over the Islamic State.
"I don't see any outcome here in which we don't end up having some presence of ground troops," he said.
The expectation that effective warfare can be waged from afar without personnel on the ground, Sennott hypothesized, is what allowed the Islamic State to metastasize into its current state.
"The reason we're embroiled the way we are now is because we failed to assess the ground. We didn't have good ground truth. We didn't have a good sense of what was happening on the ground filtering into the State Department, into the White House, and into the military."
"If we did," he continued, "we could have done more to support the opposition, it wouldn't have been such a black box, and we would have more quickly and effectively isolated the Islamic State."
To hear more from Charles Sennott, tune into his full interview on Boston Public Radio above.
