[Peace-discuss] A credible analysis in the NYT

[David Green]

*Can Trump Avoid Making an Even Bigger Mess Out of Syria?*

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/opinion/syria-troops-kurds-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

It’s possible to withdraw American troops without leaving behind a
dangerous vacuum.

By Steven Simon

Mr. Simon worked on Middle East policy in the Clinton and Obama
administrations.

Dec. 21, 2018

American support for the Kurds of Syria was destined for a short shelf life.

The alliance was born in 2014, during fierce fighting between the Kurds and
the Islamic State. For several years afterward, the Syrian Kurds fought
alongside American troops against jihadists in northeastern Syria and were
rightly seen as a useful partner. But overriding American strategic
concerns always meant that this pairing couldn’t last. Many in Washington
and in the Middle East suspected that once the Islamic State was finally
defeated, the Kurds’ interests — in particular their desire for autonomy in
Syria — would necessarily be subordinated to America’s global priorities.

When President Trump announced on Wednesday his decision to pull 2,000
American troops out of Syria, he may have shocked many people in Washington
— including, apparently, Secretary of Defense James Mattis — but his
impulsive and uncoordinated move coincided with strategic imperative, even
if the president himself was unaware of it.

The United States never had a serious strategic stake in Syria’s future, as
it did in Iraq, which it had set out to reinvent. Washington did provide
aid on a large scale to Syrian armed opposition, but kept it mostly under
wraps, presumably to avoid implicating American prestige in a battle that
might well be lost, and where the United States’ interests are narrow.
Unlike Iraq, where the Kurds form a large part of the population and
enjoyed American patronage for decades, owing to Washington’s long struggle
with Saddam Hussein, Syrian Kurds are a relatively small minority with only
a brief connection to American power. And the battle against the Islamic
State was deliberately framed as a mission that combined counterterrorism
and humanitarian assistance, rather than state-building or regime change in
Syria.



For America, there was always a fundamental problem with getting too close
to the Kurds: Turkey, a NATO ally. Ankara was always worried about what
would happen if the Kurds of Syria got too powerful, and how that would
spill across the border into Turkey’s own restive Kurdish region. Despite
conflicts between Washington and Ankara in recent years, Turkey is still a
critical ally when it comes to Russia, Mediterranean security and
protecting Europe’s borders. Cold strategic logic was eventually going to
dictate the defenestration of the Syrian Kurds.



This inevitability was reinforced by the implausibility of the
administration’s varying rationales for a continued troop presence in
Syria: pressuring Assad by taking control of Syrian oil fields;
intimidating Iran; facilitating humanitarian assistance; or protecting the
Kurds. But 2,000 troops were not going to scare either Iran or the Assad
regime. And with the Islamic State largely gone, there was no longer a
pretext for an American deployment.

The administration’s oafish announcement of withdrawal — first put forward
in a tweet from the president, naturally — has generated concerns about a
resurgence of the Islamic State. The underlying fear is that despite the
destruction of the group’s caliphate, its ideology still exists. The
implication is that countering an ideology is somehow a military mission.
Yet the consensus of social scientists and the weight of common sense is
that occupation by foreign forces induces radicalism, especially where
occupation is accompanied by devastation and poverty.

If keeping 2,000 troops in Syria is pointless and abandoning the Kurds was
inevitable, what is the responsible way to withdraw?

If the United States leaves without any kind of coordination among the
various parties in Syria, there will be a vacuum filled by the Turkish
military and its Syrian Sunni Arab allies. Their first priority will be
fighting the Syrian Kurds; in the process, they will turn another large
swath of Syria into a wildlife preserve for jihadists.

To avoid this outcome, the United States must keep the Turks out by
addressing their concern about a Kurdistan Workers’ Party-affiliated
military entity on their border, while guaranteeing Kurdish safety. The
only way this can be achieved is by handing control of the area to a third
party with the capacity to deliver security to both Turks and Kurds. At
this stage, there is just one candidate for this role: the Assad regime.

A decision to do this would no doubt be vexed. Turkish objections, owing to
President Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s deep animosity toward President Bashar
al-Assad of Syria and his mistrust in the United States, would be just one
set of obstacles. Kurdish insistence on autonomy would be yet another.

Still, this appears to be the only real possibility for stability. But for
it to happen, the United States must do three things:

First, persuade the Kurds to get rid of non-Syrian operatives, while
shrinking their military capacity, and accept that they are not going to
get the same deal that their Iraqi cousins have won from Baghdad. The
imminence of an American withdrawal, combined with Mr. Erdogan’s
suggestions that he could soon invade the Kurdish regions of Syria, will
probably convince the Kurds that they have little choice. But the Syrian
regime could provide meaningful incentives, such as integrating the Kurdish
forces into Damascus’ chain of command and allowing a Kurdish political
party to participate in Syrian elections and applying the existing law on
decentralization to the Kurdish zone.

Second, convince the Turks that after broken promises and miscommunication
with Washington, the United States can still persuade the Kurds to take
steps to assuage Turkey’s concerns about armed Kurds on its border with
Syria. Despite their easy victory over Kurds in the battle of Afrin in
March, the Turks are justifiably concerned about the casualties they would
take in an effort to control a much bigger area. This fear should be used
to encourage Turkish restraint.

Then, either directly or through the United Nations, the United States will
have to talk to the Assad regime on the premise that a restoration of
Syrian state authority in northeast Syria, including the re-entry of Syrian
government forces, is required to stabilize that part of the country over
the long term. To this end, the United States will have to deal with the
Russians as well, so there is a coordinated approach to both the Turks and
the Syrian regime. There are quite a few moving parts to this plan, and all
the players will need to be on the same page.

This would require deft diplomacy. Unfortunately, at the moment the United
States appears incapable of that. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seems more
focused on bluster, and the administration’s special representative for
Syria engagement appears to have little clue regarding White House policy.
But if the administration fails to step up, it will have left the Syrian
people far worse off than they already are.

Steven Simon, a visiting professor of history at Amherst, served on the
National Security Council in the Clinton and Obama administrations and at
the State Department.
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