Syria the Model

Before I go any further, let me clear the air about something. Back on the First of July, after reading this New York Times story, among others, I wrote that “if these new reports are correct, I see little to criticize in President Obama’s current Syria policy.” Unfortunately, most evidence now suggests that those reports were wrong, even allowing for what ordinary citizens don’t know about CIA activities in Syria. Whatever support we’re giving the Free Syrian Army is modest in scale and character, and ineffectively delivered. A policy that does not include effective material support is nothing but empty talk, which is no substitute for a policy when, as President Obama now recognizes, Syria may end up involving us one way or another, no matter how much we may wish otherwise.

Obama on Monday used some of his most specific language yet to warn Assad not to use or move Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons, saying that such an action would change his “calculus” about the possibility of a U.S. intervention.

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is [if] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” Obama told reporters. “That would change my calculus.” [WaPo]

We should be seeking the quickest possible end to this war, which threatens to revive Al Qaeda in the Levant and metastasize across Syria’s borders. The quickest possible end is a rebel victory, and if the strongest factions at the end of the war are relatively secular, we stand a chance of helping them establish a government that’s only half as bad as the current one. One day, it might even evolve into authoritarian constitutional monarchy! (As a lawyer, I’ve learned not to oversell.)

Even so, the overthrow of the Assad regime is strongly in our interests. The Assads are a proliferation threat — they have chemical weapons, they may have biological weapons, and they tried to acquire nuclear weapons from North Korea. Assad’s collapse will further isolate Iran and increase pressure on its regime. It will isolate Hezbollah, which could make Lebanon more stable and democratic. Hamas is already betting on a rebel victory, but Syrian regime that does not actively support Hamas would mean a less radicalized, less anarchic, and more unitary Palestine. Finally, it would deny North Korea one of its most important arms clients, and we have an interest in seeing to it that another good client doesn’t replace Assad.

Direct U.S. military involvement seems like the worst possible way to achieve our interests in Syria, yet doing nothing seems only to be benefiting those who would turn Syria into the next Afghanistan. (We tend to forget that people are just as capable of hating us for doing too little as for doing too much; Iraqi Shiites may be well positioned to compare.) In any foreign conflict, my default position is to identify an indigenous group with substantial popular support that shares enough of our interests and values to be a potential ally, empower that group, help it achieve shared interests, and cultivate an alliance with it. By helping moderate rebel factions gain strength among the population and on the battlefield, we stand the best chance of transforming Syria from a highly oppressive and destabilizing regime to one that is merely authoritarian and moderately dysfunctional.

Even in the unlikely event the regime can regain control over its population, it will never again restore stability. The Sunni majority, from the rural population to the Vice President, has become irreversibly opposed to the Assads. The bombing that killed several of Assad’s top aides calls the loyalty of even his inner circle into question. The rebels are consolidating their control over the countryside near the Turkish border, isolating the few regime garrisons that remain. The regime doesn’t appear to have enough loyal troops to regain control over Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and the engine of its economy, and the roads connecting it to Damascus, Turkey, and Lebanon. If it doesn’t, the regime won’t be able to buy fuel, spare parts, or ammunition for long. Nor does the regime seem capable of stabilizing Damascus itself, which means that the reliable forces it does have are stretched thinly.

How can lightly armed rebels possibly defeat a ruthless mechanized army, with its tanks, aircraft, and helicopters? Most news reports predict that it can’t, but few journalists understand war, which may be why they also said that in August 1996, even as Chechen rebels infiltrated Grozny, isolated and surrounded the Russian garrison into pockets, repelled all efforts to rescue those garrisons with heavy losses, and forced Russia to evacuate from all of Chechnya. We’ve known since Stalingrad that bombing a city into rubble is no way to conquer it. The Syrian military was built and trained to fight conventional wars against Israel, Iraq, and Jordan in open country. It doesn’t seem to have grasped that tanks are death traps in narrow streets if they aren’t protected by infantry.

A weapon as simple and as cheap as the RPG-7 can penetrate all but the frontal armor of most Russian-made tanks. In urban fighting, tanks are more likely to be hit in the sides, rear, and top, where their armor is weakest, where their crews can barely see, and where it’s often impossible to swing a long gun barrel. City fighting is an infantryman’s war, where morale, and access to food, water, and ammunition are more decisive than access to armor and air power. How many of Assad’s soldiers are really as ready to die for him as the rebels are willing to die to be rid of him? Judging by his hesitation to commit infantry to the battle of Aleppo, the answer is probably not many.

Time may not be on Assad’s side, but it’s not on ours, either. Assad is running out of time because his finances, his army, and his government are dissolving. Most of the Army’s Sunni conscripts can’t be trusted to face the rebels without defecting. The consistent trend is that the rebels are growing stronger and the regime is weakening. Several months ago, it was reported that Assad had enough money to sustain the war effort for six months, but that was when Aleppo was still Syria’s economic engine; today, it’s being reduced to a modern-day Grozny or Stalingrad. Support from Iran and Russia could extend the regime’s rule, or permit it to survive in a rump Alawite state, but can’t keep it alive forever.

Time is on the side of Al Qaeda and other radical elements. Not so long ago, the Syrian uprising began as a peaceful, pro-democratic protest movement (granted, the Syrian concept of democracy may not be that well developed). The armed opposition initially formed from within the Syrian Army, which (for all its Ba’athist — read, fascist — origins) was a secular institution. Unfortunately, the secular opposition doesn’t seem to be getting the best outside support. The lethal aid that is getting through is coming from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and as a consequence, rebel factions with Islamist, extremist, and even pro-al Qaeda views are gaining strength, even as Al Qaeda seems to be fading globally. Its fighters are highly visible in the rebel strongholds in the North and East, near Iraq, where Al Qaeda had been a spent force. Turkey, whose own president is widely suspected of harboring his own Islamist sympathies, is probably ambivalent about this. The situation is starting to resemble Afghanistan in the mid-1980s, when Saudi Arabia and Pakistan began to channel disproportionate shares of foreign aid to similarly extremist commanders in the mujaheddin, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jallaluddin Haqqani, whom we find ourselves fighting today. Our mistake then was to defer to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia rather than insisting that the aid to go relatively tolerant commanders, like Ahmad Shah Massoud, Ismail Khan, and Abdul Haq, whose successors are still strong allies against the Taliban today.

Many of those who cite Afghanistan in their arguments do so to support a non-interventionist argument, which is pretty much the policy that George H.W. Bush followed in the 1990s.

“The United States has a rather checkered history with arming opposition groups – we’re currently fighting one,” an administration official said, alluding to the decision in the 1980s to arm militias in Afghanistan that later morphed into al-Qaeda. “You really have to think hard about the second- or third-order effects of making that decision,” the official said, adding that in Syria “there could be a number of extremist elements.”

“The agency and others are trying to learn more about them,” the official said. “It’s still the case that without actual access to Syria, it’s hard to know exactly who they are.” [WaPo]

But obviously, this compels us to find out just what the Free Syrian Army stands for and who its leaders are, not to simply do nothing and let the next Taliban destroy its secular competition. The consequence of learning the wrong lessons from Afghanistan is that they’ve paralyzed us. We can see where non-interventionism in Afghanistan got us in the rudderless years of the George H.W. Bush and administrations: good men did nothing, evil prevailed, and Afghanistan’s war eventually came to New York and Washington. Think of all the damage a few Afghan-based terrorists did to the world without inheriting a supply of chemical weapons. President Obama is now threatening to intervene if the Syrians use chemical weapons against his own people, but he isn’t acting to prevent the far greater danger.

This leaves us with the question of what we should do. It’s a question that will be repeated in North Korea. Former Ambassador Gregory Schulte suggests some of the answers when he writes about how America helped pave the way for the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. The Milosevic regime’s character, for all its genocidal infamy, was nothing like the Kim Dynasty, but the ideas in Schulte’s article seem useful in paving the way to shape the direction of events if a mutiny or uprising breaks out and attracts support from the civilian population, much like it did in Syria and Libya. When that happens, the rebels will appeal to the outside world for aid, and they will do so by appealing to our common interests. We tend to forget that some of our alliances in Afghanistan have been both enduring and helpful to our interests. If we’d had the vision to help our Afghan allies stabilize Afghanistan and defeat the Taliban in the 1990s, we’d be living in a far better world now.

In Syria, of course, events have moved beyond this. The rebels in Syria need weapons to drive the regime’s helicopters and L-39 ground attack jets over 15,000 feet, where they’re much less accurate. We should help them do that, but there’s no need to take the risk of giving them man-portable anti-aircraft missiles. Syria’s road network is good enough to supply friendly rebel elements with towed 57-millimeter anti-aircraft guns. We could also help with training and intelligence, which we may well be providing now.

When the same questions arise in the North Korean context in the next few years, it will be our outreach today and our material support tomorrow that will decide whether North Korea will become a Chinese colony or a part of a unified and democratic Korean state.