The West’s half-hearted efforts will not end Syria’s civil war

Dan Trombly 10.23am

The pressure has increased for more forceful intervention in Syria. Despite the presence of international observers, the Assad regime refuses to adhere to a ceasefire demanded by the UN.

Whether it involves arming the rebels or a repeat of the NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995, the ongoing strife in the country calls for further action, and US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry recently urged consideration of both options. Yet despite the frustration of diplomatic efforts, military options seem bleak.

Those who argue that past success in Bosnia could be replicated in Syria both ignore the history of the Bosnian war and its differences with the current conflict. The UN’s attempts to create “safe zones” resulted in the horrific massacres of Srebrenica and elsewhere. The Bosnian war was ultimately won when the numerically superior combined force of Croatian and Bosnian troops launched ground offensives, not when NATO began air strikes.

Similar attempts to implement “safe zones” in Iraq following the first Gulf War required the threat of ground assault in the south of the country, and the tactic failed frequently in the north, such as at Irbil in 1996. Even after the Desert Fox bombing campaign, forces withdrew once a Baghdad supporting faction secured that area. Notably, Saddam Hussein’s rule was not ended until troops fought their way to the capital in 2003, despite “safe zones” having been declared alongside frequent US air patrols and strikes.

In Syria, as in Bosnia and Iraq, neither protection of civilians nor regime change can be assured without superiority on the ground. Even air strikes would require a bombing campaign larger than in Iraq in 2003.

And enormous obstacles stand in the way of arming the Syrian rebels. In Bosnia, for instance, it was Croatia’s invasion that brought about a Serb defeat, not Bosnian forces. In Syria, without a ground invasion of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of troops - from Turkey, the Arab states, or the West - Syria’s rebels will remain woefully outmatched in conventional capabilities. Indeed, Turkey rarely conducts cross-border raids against PKK terrorists without several thousand soldiers.

The Syrian rebels need artillery batteries, armour and air support, not just man-portable anti-tank or anti-aircraft weaponry.

Even with Western air support, the rebels would likely continue to use the guerilla tactics befitting the outmatched force that they are, avoiding pitched battles and ceding territory to draw out hostile forces. While these might be effective tactics in a long-term insurgency, they are unlikely to result in regime change or effective protection of civilians in the short-term. Even the maintenance of a safe haven for rebel forces would need to be done outside Syrian territory, rather than in “safe zones”.

Simply arming rebel forces is more likely to cause a protracted civil war than a quick victory. The United States and others learned this is Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan during the Cold War. But in those cases, there was thought to be some value in attrition, and supporters of proxy groups were relatively indifferent to civilian casualties and the collateral damage of prolonged conflict. In Syria, such outcomes are unjustifiable on humanitarian grounds, nor on strategic aims (seeing Assad depart quickly).

Moreover, an influx of arms leaves lasting consequences. The behaviour of Libyan militias is a case in point.

An authoritarian regime such as Assad’s can hold on until hostile armoured columns roll on Damascus. Therefore the only strategically feasible option for a quick victory in Syria is a full-scale invasion. Yet no Western state is willing to undertake such a mission and a Turkish or Arab effort seems very unlikely.

Ultimately, Syria’s civil war will drag on. In the meantime, Western powers must work with Syria’s neighbours to prevent WMDs and other arms from leaving the country; they must provide aid to refugees that manage to escape Syria; and continue to exercise diplomatic options to the best of their ability.

Unless Western policymakers can convince their own populations and their Middle Eastern allies that an invasion is justifiable, providing military aid or half-hearted intervention can only worsen the consequences of Syria’s conflict - for both that country’s neighbours, and the interests of the West.

Dan Trombly is a student of International Affairs at George Washington University. He blogs at Slouching Towards Columbia.

Iraq was a failure of the neo-conservative world view

Aaron Ellis 9.17am

Iraq is the centre of the world and crucial to the United States’ wider foreign policy. President Obama is a failure and President Bush is as wise and as farsighted a statesman as General Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan.

This is the context in which we must understand the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, says Tim Montgomerie.

Last week, Mr Montgomerie attacked President Obama’s withdrawal from the country. He contrasts it with President Bush’s decision in 2007 to ‘surge’ American troops in order to regain momentum against the insurgency. Typically, Mr Montgomerie presents the reader with black-or-white choices: Bush is good, Obama is bad; and if you support the withdrawal, you “hate freedom”.

Neo-conservatives possess a dated worldview – and it shows. They are stuck in the early 2000s and the language of the War on Terror. They show no appreciation of grand strategy in his article or the coming of the ‘Pacific Century’. This is in stark contrast to President Obama, which is why Iraq should be added to the list of foreign policy failures by neo-conservatives and not the President’s.

The two decisions of Presidents Bush and Obama that we should contrast are the former’s decision to invade Iraq and the latter’s announcement last month of a new American military base in Australia.

For no good reason at all, President Bush burdened the United States with a disastrous war in a country of only marginal importance; he handed “a massive gift” to Tehran as a result, and distracted Washington from a real challenge to its power: China.

With his own announcement, however, President Obama sent a signal to Beijing that the U.S. was no longer distracted. The new base, the President said, was “a deliberate and strategic decision – as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping the region and its future, by upholding core principles and in close partnership with allies and friends.”

The great scholar Walter Russell Mead has described President Obama’s announcement, and other diplomatic coups the U.S. achieved in Asia last month, as the “coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.”

If we understand the Iraq withdrawal in this context then it is obvious which of the two presidents can claim to be a wise and farsighted statesman. “Regardless of whether the twenty-first century will be another ‘American century’, it is certain that it will be an Asian and Pacific century”, Richard Haass, President of the Council of Foreign Relations, has written. “It is both natural and sensible that the US be central to whatever evolves from that fact.”

This undermines many of the neo-conservatives’ other beliefs. Tim Montgomerie is disappointed that the U.S. will not have a “foothold” in Iraq but he does not explain why such a foothold is important to the U.S. He has tweeted praise for a Mitt Romney line about whether a government scheme is so crucial that it is worth borrowing money from China to pay for it, but he hasn’t yet answered whether the same test can be applied to Iraq.

The fact that the interests of the United States are in Asia-Pacific also undermines the examples of post-war Germany and Japan as templates for American policy vis-à-vis Iraq. Those two countries mattered to U.S. security after 1945, justifying the time and money spent on developing them. You cannot make the same argument with regard to Iraq.

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The Iraq war may have ended but its disastrous legacy lives on

Alexander Pannett 8.00am

Yesterday, President Obama marked the final end of the Iraq war.  It has been nearly nine years since the US and its allies, including the UK, invaded the Middle Eastern nation on the pretence of removing Saddam Hussein and ending his perceived involvement in Islamist terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

While the war was trumpeted a success by President Obama - the man who once opposed it as “dumb” - its legacy has been one of instability and continued conflict across the strategically important region.

Over one trillion dollars have been spent by Amercian taxpayers and 4,500 American soldiers have lost their lives.  This is paltry compared with the alleged hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died due to the invasion and ensuing bloody insurgency.  In its wake Iraq simmers with sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shias.  Terrorism has increased and the government of Iraq clings on to power through backroom deal making and shaky coalitions with pro-Iranian factions.

The untamed use of American hard power may have eventually pacified Iraq but if its objective was to wrest the Middle East away from extremism towards a democratic future based on enlightened Western thinking then the invasion of Iraq must count as an unmitigated disaster.

Further evidence of the decline of American hard power as an effective foreign policy tool is the gradual withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan, having failed to pacify the Taliban, and the increasing friction between the US and their most dangerous ally, Pakistan.

Pakistan’s support has soured due to the repeated incursions into Pakistani sovereign territory by US military forces, most prominently the death of Osama Bin Laden. The Americans, for their part, are furious that Bin Laden was being sheltered in Pakistan and they hold deep suspicions that the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence organisation, is providing significant military and logistical assistance to the Taliban.

On Tuesday, the US Congress unveiled plans to cut $700 million of aid to Pakistan and yesterday, Pakistan responded with plans to tax Nato supply trucks that pass through Pakistani territory on their way to Afghanistan.

The armoured fist of American military might has exacerbated sectarian tensions in the Middle East and has increased the standing of Iran by making it the natural pole for anti-Western forces to align themselves with.  Iran’s rise has opened a Sunni-Shia fault line in Iraq and within neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, causing further instability as Shia minorities have looked to Iran for support and leadership.

American disregard for the UN prior to the invasion of Iraq has also undermined the ability of international organisations to quell Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which will further destabilise the region as other countries seek a nuclear deterrent of their own.

The most dramatic expansion of democracy and removal of autocratic power in the Middle East has not come from America’s use of hard power in Iraq and Afghanistan but from the burgeoning Arab Spring movement whose source of momentum has come from the repressed democratic ambitions of the ‘Arab street’.  It is telling that in Egypt, where the second round of parliamentary elections were held today, the parties predicted to win are not those with Western secular values but Islamic ideals.

President Obama may echo George W Bush by publicly claiming the invasion of Iraq was a success but the legacy of Iraq is far from secure and the disastrous consequences for the West’s standing in the region and the concomitant rise of Iran expose the invasion as one of the worst US strategic errors since Vietnam.

Only the most determined of Manichean acolytes would see the removal of one dictator in a largely contained country as worth all the blood and treasure that Iraq has drained.  As the drumbeats for war with Iran are starting to sound, Western policy makers should take Iraq as an example of how poorly deployed hard power can exacerbate tensions and end in tragedy rather than the lofty and enlightened goals Western policy makers had sought to achieve.

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British foreign policy must be relevant and useful

Aaron Ellis 6.03am

Conservative thinking on foreign policy is a contradiction in terms. The time and energy spent on a distinctly Conservative world outlook is tiny compared to the thinking on the economy or welfare reform, for instance.

There are two reasons for this: first, there are few votes in foreign policy and second, there is scant funding for foreign policy think tanks. Many British politicians and pundits take their ideas from America.

The worldview of many Conservatives is infected by a ‘hidden Blairism’, from the Prime Minister downwards. Although Mr Cameron has often dismissed the moral certainties of Tony Blair, he buys into the ‘internationalisation’ of the national interest, which was a hallmark of Blairite foreign policy. In short, it is the belief that the world is so globalised and interconnected that every massacre or famine or failed state is a direct threat to our national security and it is vital that we get involved to sort it out. Libya is the most recent case in point.

In an attempt to fix the Conservatives’ deficiency in foreign policy, Dominic Raab MP recently wrote an op-ed in the Telegraph outlining how he thought his party should approach world affairs. Alex Massie criticised the piece for the Spectator, but I would like to explain my own concerns and offer a new foreign policy for the ‘post-coalitionists’.

On top of those detailed by Massie, there are two problems with Dominic Raab’s article: one is conceptual, the other is policy related.

Mr Raab argues that British foreign policy needs to be focused on ‘the national interest’, yet he too buys into its ‘internationalisation’, thus undermining any attempt for that foreign policy to be focused. It is in our interests, he believes, to resolve conflicts and rebuild failed states, but he fails to say which of these problems and where is specifically a national interest to sort out. By linking failed states to terrorism - a link that I criticised recently - shows that Mr Raab’s foreign policy is as much subconsciously Blairite as David Cameron’s and the coalition’s, despite claiming to be an alternative.

His policy recommendations are also similar to those favoured by the coalition government and like them, they leave you asking some basic strategic questions.

Mr Raab suggests that the UK should loosen ties with the United States and strengthen them with emerging powers. We should rehabilitate the Commonwealth. But what exactly does the UK gain from balancing power in the Far East? And with regard to the loosening of ties with the US, we need an explanation of how this radical shift would impact on the Trident nuclear deterrent and close intelligence relationship we enjoy.

The watchwords for British foreign policy in the twenty-first century must be relevance and usefulness.

Lee Kuan Yew, the great Singaporean statesman, has said that the only way his small country can exercise influence in a world dominated by geographical giants is by being relevant to them. One key feature of this policy is acquiring expertise in niche technologies. It would be obtuse to say we should become a ‘mega-Singapore’ but a policy of relevance is appropriate to Tory ideas on the economy, education and welfare reform.

Britain also needs to be useful, mostly to the United States. Prof Christopher Coker, a sharp observer of world affairs, has noted that being useful to the Americans is not in itself an objective but “a tactical instrument to follow a larger strategy - that of the national interest”. The hope is that our usefulness will be repaid in influence on US policy, as well as justifying the benefits we already enjoy. Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that this hope was misguided then, but the benefits of the Special Relationship continue to be important. Fifty per cent of intelligence processed by the Join Intelligence Committee (JIC) comes from American sources. This is a privilege we should not relinquish.

If we are to be successful then it is essential to impose restraints. Britain needs to determine our areas of expertise that make us relevant and which areas of the world we are useful to. These decisions require leadership. In my opinion, we are still waiting.

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Bad history is as much a risk to Britain’s security as bad policy

Aaron Ellis 8.50am

David Cameron has had a complicated relationship with history. Accuracy has on occasions been spurned, in favour of misleading but politically expedient analogies. The Prime Minister flattered an audience in Pakistan in April when he said that the British Empire was responsible for “so many of the world’s problems”, including Kashmir (to the irritation of many historians and journalists).

Arguably, bad history is a main reason why Mr Cameron supports the Afghan war. It is rooted in a superficial understanding of that country over the last two decades - an understanding which also informs a fear of failed states. That fear obscures the real problem of the war in which Britain and its NATO allies are enmeshed.

The Prime Minister accepts the conventional wisdom that failed states breed terrorism and offer a safe haven to groups like al-Qu’aida; if we leave Afghanistan now, then the country will collapse and the evil that was demonstrated so spectacularly on September 11^th 2001 will be resown amidst the chaos. “This is a great example of a country that if we walk away from and if we ignore and if we forget about, the problems will come visited back on our doorstep”, the Prime Minister has warned. In the week of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, this is not a consideration easily dismissed.

In the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), the ‘lesson’ of abandoning Afghanistan is even transformed into a doctrine for pre-emptive action. We must intervene early in failed states with aid and a small military presence to offset the risk of future, dearer costs to our safety. This echoes the worldview of Tony Blair, which the Prime Minister had supposedly rejected when he said you cannot drop democracy from 40,000 feet.

The past is not quite as had been made out by politicians. Soon after Moscow stopped funding the Communist regime in Kabul, Afghanistan certainly became a failed state: government authority collapsed and rapacious, violent warlords filled the vacuum. But the Taliban reimposed authority over most of the country and it was under the umbrella of their authority that al-Qu’aida found shelter, something which worried the United States well before September 2001.

In the last years of the Clinton administration and in the early months of the Bush one, the Taliban came under strong pressure to hand over the terrorists they harboured. It has been argued that they resisted this pressure because Washington showed ‘no appetite for taking the level of political, diplomatic, military and economic risk required’ to make them think otherwise about the benefits of keeping Osama bin Laden and his associates in Afghanistan.

Conceptually, the lessons David Cameron has drawn from ‘abandoning’ Afghanistan are also flawed. The link between failed states and terrorism has been under continuous criticism since the mid-2000s. ‘In chaos, not even terrorists are safe,’ one study has noted sensibly. A country with no infrastructure, riven with factions vying for power, is not the best place from which to wage a global war. Terrorists need weak states, with pockets where the government has no authority, and alienated locals who can give their fighters the help they need. In other words, terrorists need Pakistan.

The problem this war poses London and Washington is not a quasi-military one, as the failed state narrative suggests, but a diplomatic one. How do we make the weak (but proud) government in Islamabad do what we want them to do – tackle al-Qu’aida – when they either can’t or won’t? Our safety depends on the answer to this question rather than pouring money and men into war-torn countries.

In his excellent history of British Foreign Secretaries, Lord Hurd, a TRG patron, wrote: “The most dangerous form of ignorance is that smidgeon of shallow knowledge which lacks any understanding of the characters or contexts of past decisions.” In my opinion, this aptly describes the foreign policy rhetoric of David Cameron.

Our current Prime Minister is not the only person to buy into the failed state narrative via a misreading of Afghanistan’s history; by ignoring the mounting evidence to the contrary, however, he has committed the government to an expensive but futile counterterrorism policy. Britain will invest itself financially and militarily in unfortunate, but strategically unimportant countries. Meanwhile, where there are terrorist safe havens, in weak countries with proud, autocratic governments, we will find ourselves fumbling about diplomatically – as we have been in Pakistan and Yemen.

This policy, informed by bad history, puts our security at risk and will prove costly to a government with dwindling resources. 

Follow Aaron on Twitter @ThinkStrat

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