To its critics, President Obama’s strategy to combat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (Daesh) is weak and incoherent. Even some of the staunchest U.S. allies and partners in the fight worry that the time for what they see as the administration’s incremental approach has long since passed.

The White House maintains that its strategy is comprehensive and that it’s working. Sharp increases in airstrikes and Obama’s recent decision to deploy Special Operations troops, officials say, are part of a fundamental change in the military’s mission developed this fall, along with a new diplomatic push to end the distraction of Syria’s civil war, The Washington Post reported on Monday.

In his Sunday-night address to the nation following last week’s San Bernardino, Calif., shooting, Obama outlined the elements of the strategy, assuring Americans that there is a viable plan underway to decimate the Islamic State where it lives. “We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us,” he said, using an alternative name for the militants.

But the White House is clearly frustrated by its failure to communicate the elements of that plan and what it believes has been accomplished.

“Yes, there is a strategy,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry snapped in a speech Saturday. “I know the criticism. We all hear them. . . . But that doesn’t mean it’s wisdom.”

The administration’s insistence that its prudence and patience will pay off — vs. charges of too little, too late — have been the two opposing narratives of the 18-month battle against the Islamic State and the four-year Syrian war it has now overshadowed.

An examination of the recent course of events on the military and diplomatic fronts and interviews with a broad range of stakeholders and experts provide fuel for both arguments.

For more than a year after the Islamic State blitzkrieg swept across Syria and through Iraq to the Baghdad suburbs in the early summer of 2014, US military operations, including airstrikes and training of local ground troops, were in what a coalition spokesman, Col. Steve Warren, called “crisis mode, just trying to keep the barbarians off the gate.”

The Iraqi army had fallen apart. In Syria, as civil war raged in the west, the militants consolidated their control over the north-central and eastern areas of the country, with virtually free access to Syria’s border with Turkey to infiltrate tens of thousands of foreign fighters and equipment.

Airstrikes begun by the United States and its coalition partners — Europeans in Iraq and Arab states in Syria — were tactical, focused on targets of opportunity and the need to prevent collapse. While domestic critics and allies in the region called for more strikes, more support for Syrian rebels, more U.S. boots on the ground and no-fly zones, the administration demurred.

In a broad assessment in August, the Pentagon determined it had succeeded in its initial goals of stopping further Islamic State expansion and reestablishing the foundations of a viable Iraqi military. Amid repeated failures in Syria to organize and arm a rebel force to fight against the militants in Syria, it found hope in the establishment of a Syrian Kurdish and Arab force that has driven the militants from much of the Turkish border.

U.S. officials say that a small force of opposition fighters in the area, including about 130 Syrians trained by the Americans in Jordan who are in direct communication with U.S. forces, have had some success. But their operations are still rudimentary. To delineate their lines from those of the Islamic State and avoid their own casualties from coalition airstrikes, they light tires on fire and warn pilots to avoid the smoke.

Sources: MENA