The problem with everybody’s favourite solution in Syria

Simple solutions to complex foreign policy challenges are chimerical; this is doubly true in the contemporary Middle East, which, as the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack recently noted, “has never been [worse]” in terms of conflict, disorder, crisis, and chaos. ¹ The most prominent current challenge is the civil war in Syria, which in many ways lies at the root of (and at the very least significantly influences) other conflicts and problems in the region. As the United States, Canada, and other Western and world allies attempt to devise workable policies vis-à-vis Syria, a common thread links many if not most putative policy “solutions”: the need to engage local coalitions of regional actors to provide the military muscle to defeat the Islamic State, thereby setting the stage for a workable political solution to restore stability to the country as a whole.

With respect to the US presidential election campaign, for example, one of the few (and perhaps only) points of agreement among candidates of both parties is that local and regional players need to do the heavy lifting in Syria, particularly in the effort against the Islamic State. From the far left to the far right, the notion that “those with a vested interest” (i.e. regional actors) should lead the fight is a common refrain.

In this sense, the candidates largely agree with current Obama administration policy. As New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt recently noted, the Obama administration has been consistent in its efforts “to convince Arab countries to assume larger roles in the campaign.” ² In Canada, Justin Trudeau, in his recent articulation of the government’s new Syria strategy, similarly emphasized the “training and advising [of] local security forces.” ³ Overall, the coalition’s approach is clear—keep involvement as limited as possible in the hope that regional players (in particular Sunni countries with a vested interest in defeating the Islamic State) take up the slack.

Several developments suggest this strategy is moving closer to full implementation. At the time of writing, Saudi Arabia has reportedly deployed military assets, including fighter jets, to Turkey in anticipation of ramping up (or re-starting) its efforts in the bombing campaign against the Islamic State. Perhaps even more significantly, Saudi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Ahmed al Asiri has stated that the Kingdom would commit ground forces to the campaign if requested by the US and approved by other members of the coalition. ⁴ US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter called Saudi Arabia’s increased commitment “very welcome news” and further emphasized that “Saudi Arabia and its regional partners have a clear stake in this fight, and I hope its neighbors in the Gulf also intensify their counter-ISIL campaign in the coming days.” ⁵

Why such a clear and consistent emphasis on local and regional actors? The explanation does not lie with the particular dynamics of the Syrian conflict itself, but rather with coalition experiences during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and related insurgencies. The lessons from these wars were myriad, to be sure, but at a basic strategic level the key takeaway was relatively simple: Don’t send ground troops into Middle-Eastern (or South Asian, as the case may be) countries. Obviously, this is simplified, and represents public sentiment as much as it does the actual policy lessons derived by decision-makers. But few would, I think, refute the notion that robust interventionism was (and largely still is) very much out of vogue (consider, for example, the clear pejorative connotations of the term “boots on the ground” in nearly all political debates over the last several years).

The West’s initially limited response to the Syrian civil war was a product of these “lessons learned.” The prospect of yet another Middle Eastern quagmire was enough to send politicians and pundits of all stripes scurrying to the non-interventionist camp (with, to be sure, a few muted, marginalized hawks maintaining the need for assertive American power, although even they largely conceded that avoiding another Iraq or Afghanistan was paramount). The perceived “success” (at the time) of the Libyan intervention similarly cautioned against intervention in Syria, given, inter alia, the geographical and structural differences between the two cases. ⁶ Ultimately, the need to avoid deeper involvement in Syria was the conventional wisdom of the day, even as the crisis continued to escalate, spill into Iraq, and inevitably force deeper American and Western involvement anyway.

An oft-invoked corollary to the notion that the Middle East is “a mess” is that we, in the West, would be well advised to just stay out and “let it burn”; like a naturally occurring forest fire clearing out dead growth, the hope is that a more healthy and verdant ecosystem may eventually emerge. The most common retort has been that the significant humanitarian crisis occurring in Syria demands Western intervention on moral grounds. Less often has it been pointed out that allowing crises like Syria to fester and boil unabated drastically increases the potential for unforeseen strategic consequences: a humanitarian and refugee crisis that threatens the unity of Europe as well as the stability of the immediate region, high-profile acts of international terrorism linked (whether operationally or inspirationally) to the Islamic State, clashes between a NATO member (Turkey) and Russia, the possibility of conflict contagion sparking a regional war along sectarian lines—the list goes on.

And so, now, there are few who maintain that limited or no involvement is the best way forward in Syria. A significant international coalition conducts military air strikes against the Islamic State, and world powers meet at the negotiating table in an attempt to derive a diplomatic solution to the broader conflict. Yet the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan retain their significance, shaping the “local” emphasis that has become a near ubiquitous feature of putative solutions to Syria.

“Letting the locals handle it” is an intuitively appealing and rhetorically powerful argument. For politicians, the notion that local actors should bear the burden of conflict plays to the public’s perception of fairness while simultaneously allaying fears of more foolhardy foreign entanglements. For Middle East analysts like Michael Doran, Emma Sky, and others, the explicit reference point is the success of the “Sunni awakening” in Iraq in 2007, in which local Sunni tribes were instrumental in clamping down on the Iraqi insurgency. ⁷

Herein lies a crucial distinction. There are good reasons to focus on local actors in the fight against ISIS; it would be difficult to argue that amenable partners on the ground—members of local communities with legitimacy in the wider population—are not a crucial component of effective counter-insurgency operations. But Syria 2016 is not Iraq 2007, and the Sunni militias in question, as many have pointed out, will likely be supported by, and have intimate connections with, Sunni Arab countries in the region. Which is to say, such groups are not always “local” in the narrowest possible sense, but are instead part of overlapping power structures and influence networks that span the region. Both politicians and pundits recognize as much, which is part of the reason exhortations for local participation almost always implicitly or explicitly include calls for greater involvement from proximate regional powers.

Yet encouraging increased involvement from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and other actors in the region is a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. Even if such a strategy were able to produce tangible benefits in the campaign against the Islamic State, it would practically ensure continued and even amplified instability with respect to the broader Syrian civil war. Few observers are willing to acknowledge, let alone assess, the implications of this simple truth. Already, the Syrian conflict has become host to myriad regional rivalries and outside interventions, broadly positioned along a sectarian Sunni–Shia divide. The Assad regime, bolstered by Iran (and by extension Hezbollah) and Russia, has solidified itself in recent months, turning the tide against largely Sunni opposition groups (some of which are Western-backed but which also include al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra Front and other extremist groups). Given close Iranian military involvement already, the amplification of Saudi involvement (whether via proxy groups or more directly through conventional military means) threatens a wider, regional, sectarian conflict that could engulf much of the Middle East (axes of which are already on display in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere).

The Trudeau government’s emphasis on equipping and training Kurdish peshmerga suffers from similar dangers. The Kurds are an effective fighting force, to be sure, but quite clearly have their own interests (namely, territorial control over what they consider greater Kurdistan, and not much beyond), which limit the extent to which they will press the fight against ISIS. Turkey (a NATO member), meanwhile, continues to view Kurdish militias as terrorist groups, targeting them militarily whenever possible. Given recent tension between Moscow and Ankara, moreover, Russia is also supporting the Kurds, with some suggesting that Kurdish forces may even be actively coordinating with Assad regime forces and Russian air power. ⁸ Strengthening the Kurds may deliver some, albeit geographically limited, advantages in the fight against the Islamic State, but could also very well antagonize a NATO ally and/or help strengthen the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian backers.

Much of the political science research on outside intervention in civil conflict stresses that such interventions can prolong and exacerbate violence, particularly when the interveners pursue distinct agendas and do not concentrate exclusively on brokering a peace settlement. ⁹ Of course, Western policy is not solely (or even primarily) responsible for the outside interventions that have occurred and are occurring in Syria, nor is there much the US or any other coalition member could do to mitigate, for example, Iranian or Russian interference. Yet by actively cultivating increased involvement from Saudi Arabia and other proximate Arab states, the US and its partners are directly contributing to what threatens to be a much longer, bloodier, and widespread conflict. The same is potentially true of the Canadian policies of training and assisting Kurdish forces. In each instance, the pursuit of short-term tactical gain (in the fight against the Islamic State) comes at the expense of what could very well turn out to be long-term strategic disaster.

We’ve seen this pattern before. In the first phases of the war in Afghanistan, for example, the US selected the Northern Alliance as its local ally, even tasking Northern Alliance fighters as the expeditionary force charged with seizing Kabul, against the explicit wishes of then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf (Islamabad having been the historic patron of the Taliban regime). The subsequent and ongoing structure of Indian–Pakistani competition in Afghanistan (India supporting the government and Pakistan the insurgency) was thus largely precipitated by US decision-making in the early stages of the intervention. ¹⁰

The dynamics of the Syria conflict are, of course, decidedly different. Indeed, they are potentially even more dangerous and destructive. Rivalry in South Asia is at least somewhat subdued by nuclear deterrence and overlaps with few other nations in the region. In addition, following the initial phases of Operation Enduring Freedom, the US and its NATO allies opted to do much of the “heavy lifting” themselves in Afghanistan, rather than leaving it entirely to local players. In Syria, by contrast, the Iran–Saudi Arabia rivalry maps onto broader sectarian divides in the region that span many nations and groups, while the plan of both current and apparently any future US administration is to place these two sides squarely and immediately on the battlefield by encouraging greater Saudi involvement.

The dangers of such a prospect are already percolating. In contrast to Secretary Carter’s sanguine reaction to Saudi Arabia’s announcement of increased involvement in Syria, Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif of Iran explicitly warned against the deployment of Saudi troops in Syria, simultaneously calling for an end to the Kingdom’s bombing campaign in Yemen (yet another theatre of Iran–Saudi confrontation). ¹¹ As Alexander Decina has pointed out, Saudi Arabia’s priority in Syria is most certainly not the immediate defeat of the Islamic State; instead “they are far more focused on Iran.” ¹² Iran’s role in Syria, as is widely known, involves support for the Assad regime. As such, the Saudis simply do not bifurcate the conflict in the same way the US and other Western nations do (military campaign against the Islamic State on one hand, negotiated political solution vis-à-vis Bashar al-Assad on the other). Because of this, Riyadh is actively involved in supporting some of the more nefarious and extreme components of the opposition to Assad, and even hinted (in conjunction with their commitment to supply ground troops to defeat ISIS) that Assad’s removal by “force” might be necessary. ¹³ Far from keeping the two dimensions separate (as Washington and Ottawa would prefer), therefore, Saudi intervention is likely to combine (or at least blur the lines between) them.

Whatever Western politicians and analysts might wish Saudi interests to be, the fact remains that Riyadh views the Syrian conflict (as well as the conflict in Yemen and conflicts elsewhere in the region) through the prism of its international rivalry with Iran. It is often difficult to appreciate this dynamic because such an obsessive focus does not always correspond with an objective, rational assessment of military or political realities. The international coalition in Afghanistan, for example, found it difficult to understand Pakistan’s persistent support of the Taliban (as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan) because it seemingly went against objective Pakistani interests in the region. Here, too, the West might expect Saudi Arabia to prioritize the Islamic State, or, on the other side, Iran to support Saudi involvement against it (Iranian-backed militias have been, after all, central to the fight against ISIS in Iraq). These assumptions are simply unlikely to play out in reality.

All of this is particularly bad news for the US, Canada, and other coalition partners with fewer vested interests in the short term and therefore, paradoxically, potentially more to lose in the long run. First, the immediate focus on the Islamic State may ultimately benefit from increased Saudi and other Arab country involvement, though because the motivation for such intervention is not the ISIS mission per se, the efficacy of these efforts will likely be less than hoped for. If anything, Riyadh may be wary of too quickly and decisively defeating the Islamic State, lest it hand a potentially significant advantage to the Assad regime and, more important, its Iranian (and Russian) backers.

Second, the broader conflict in Syria is likely to escalate and, potentially, spread to other regions of the Middle East, as various groups and actors begin to coalesce around a broader Sunni–Shia divide driven fundamentally by the Iran–Saudi Arabia rivalry. Hopes of a negotiated settlement will be dim if the main drivers of the conflict care less about a mediated political transition in Damascus and more about scoring victories against a long-standing political (and religious) rival. The notion that sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia is endemic, primordial, and/or somehow inevitable is fundamentally erroneous; but this divide can exacerbate violence when it is mobilized and employed for political purposes, particularly insofar as it resonates with populations for whom religion is a key component of cultural identity. Once it is so mobilized, conflict resolution can become exceedingly difficult.

Of course, a more robust Western intervention against the Islamic State, up to and including those dreaded boots on the ground, could raise the spectre of that other oft-cited bugaboo, the power vacuum. What comes after the Islamic State has been defeated? How can we be sure it does not re-emerge? Or that some similar organization will not rise in its wake? These questions underscore how important solving the other half of the Syria question (the fight against the regime) ultimately is, and why suggestions of ignoring the resistance to Assad in favour of the fight against the Islamic State are so myopic.

The answer to “after ISIS” is predicated on a political solution in Damascus. Assuming that a Western coalition could defeat the Islamic State, it would require some form of a central Syrian government (even if highly federalized and even if initially quite weak) with whom it could work and eventually cooperate to ensure stability in those areas currently (or in this scenario formerly) held by ISIS. This possibility is only really plausible, however, if it is Western troops (or even UN peacekeepers) leading the effort. Any transitional regime in Damascus is likely to maintain at least some Iranian influence (again, such are the realities following Russian involvement). It is unlikely that such a regime would work cooperatively with Saudi or Saudi-backed forces were they to be the ones occupying former Islamic State territory. If anything, this scenario would be ripe for renewed or continued conflict as the two sides stared each other down across a sectarian divide.

Ultimately, easy solutions to the Syria crisis simply do not exist. Re-examining the assumptions underpinning “consensus” policies such as that which seems to be emerging with respect to the coalition fight against ISIS illustrates how even the most obvious (and widely endorsed) options have major problems and potentially disastrous consequences. The collective impulse to limit Western involvement in Syria was understandable given the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, but non-intervention has also proven itself to be problematic. Now, in large measure still captive to that impulse, the US, Canada, and other Western nations are out-sourcing important components of the campaign to nations who have drastically different priorities. Yes, local players have vested interests in the conflict, but those interests are simply not our own. Now they needn’t crash the party, but have been formally, and repeatedly, invited.

As the number of US Special Forces on the ground continues to slowly, but steadily, rise (3700 at the time of writing), it appears that Washington may be recognizing the imperative to do more. Yet a commitment of American and Western ground forces in line with, for example, the “surge” in Iraq 2007 is not only unrealistic (given the political environment) but would merely reignite many of the legitimate concerns relating to that experience with respect to controlling territory and the consequent problems of insurgencies, instability, and nation building. In the end, it may be that Washington and its allies have conceded that the only realistic option with respect to Syria (and ISIS) is to “manage” rather than “solve” the problem. As Pollack has suggested, they may be content to keep “muddling through.” ¹⁴

The opportunity to forestall the multiple strategic consequences of instability in Syria has essentially passed; there is no option of re-winding the clock to the early days of civil strife in which a more robust intervention may have mitigated or prevented the present disorder. Indeed, there are few good options at all. Particularly sobering, however, is the realization that a commonly held and widely endorsed component of the West’s avowed approach to Syria—letting the locals handle it—even if it were to be achieved, could very well escalate rather than diffuse the violence. Call it another Middle Eastern quagmire.