Reportedly, Washington and
Moscow are working on ways to deconflict their tactical military operations
within Syria in the aftermath of the Russian military’s arrival on the scene in
recent weeks. That is good news. The last thing we need is to have two nuclear
superpowers inadvertently, or even intentionally, shooting at each other in some
quagmire in the Middle East.
But in another sense, of course, the two nations’ strategies for Syria are
nowhere near deconflicted.
President Putin declared that his goal in Syria was to fight ISIL. His more
plausible goal, as reflected in his military’s choice of initial bombing
targets, is to uphold President Assad’s shaky hold on power by attacking closeby
insurgents even if they are relatively moderate and unaffiliated with ISIL or
al-Nusra. Putin wants to protect his own proxies, retain Russian access to the
naval facility along the Mediterranean coast at Tartus, and—most
likely—embarrass the United States while demonstrating Russia’s global reach.
While undoubtedly concerned by ISIL at one level, he is unlikely to attempt to
defeat it militarily, given the dangers and difficulties associated with any
such mission. He will leave that problem to us. The fact that Assad has killed
most of the quarter million who have died in this war to date, and caused most
of the displacement and refugee flows as well, matters little to the callous
Putin, who in any event probably blames American naivete more than any other
factor for the fact that this war has dragged on for four and a half tragic
years.
Yet Putin’s cynicism about this war may not preclude U.S.-Russian collaboration
on a practical path forward. If we envision some type of Bosnia model for what
we are trying to achieve in Syria and work backwards, it is at least possible
that Russian and American objectives can be largely reconciled—or, to employ the
word of the day, at least deconflicted.
In terms of American interests, we need to defeat ISIL and ultimately unseat
Assad, while mitigating the humanitarian disaster befalling the country as fast
as possible. Putin needs the containment of ISIL before its offshoots wind up in
Moscow, as previous groups of jihadis have done over the years. Beyond that, he
also wants to exercise Russian leverage and influence on the Middle East stage
in a way that enhances national prestige. I would submit that most if not all of
these objectives are at least in principle compatible.
A future Syria could be a confederation of several sectors—one mainly Alawite
and largely along the Mediterranean coast; another Kurdish and along the north
and northeast corridors of the country near the border with Turkey; a third
possibly Druse, in the southwest; at least one more made up primarily of Sunni
Muslims; and then finally a central zone of intermixed groups in the country’s
main population belt from Damascus to Aleppo. The last zone would be difficult
to stabilize but the others might not be so inherently problematic down the
road.
With this arrangement, Assad would have to step down from power in Damascus
eventually—but perhaps he could remain in the Alawite sector, as a compromise. A
weak central government would replace him, but most power and most of the
country’s future armed forces would reside within the individual autonomous
sectors (and belong to the various regional governments). ISIL would be targeted
collectively by everyone. The whole thing would surely require international
peacekeepers to hold together, once a deal was struck down the road. Russian
troops could help with this mission along the Alawite region’s borders with
other parts of the country, for example.
Getting to a point where such a deal was even possible would take time and great
effort. Our training and equipping of moderate opposition forces would have to
be expanded greatly. Vetting standards would have to be relaxed in numerous
ways. Moreover, U.S. and other foreign trainers would need to deploy inside
Syria to accelerate training where the would-be recruits actually live (and must
stay, if they are to protect their families).
Those regions that could be accessed by international forces, starting perhaps
with the Kurdish and Druse sectors, could receive humanitarian relief on a much
expanded scale. Over time, the number of accessible regions would grow, as
moderate opposition forces were strengthened. This process could help reduce the
scale of suffering, and refugee flows, right away—even if it would admittedly
take a couple years for the overall strategy to have any real chance of
succeeding.
But while it could take many months or years to achieve the outcome we want,
articulation of this kind of vision now could provide a basis for working
together with, or at least not working against, other key outside players in the
conflict including Russia and Turkey and the Gulf states and Iraq. (I do not
claim that it is realistic to collaborate with Iran—that would be a welcome
surprise, but a major surprise, if it proved to be the case.)
Surely, the Russian intervention in this war was not well-motivated. In the
short term, moreover, it has made things much more complicated. But if we use
the occasion to recognize that current western strategy is inexorably failing in
Syria, we may be able to find a better path forward that eventually finds more
points of accord than disagreement between Moscow and Washington—and, more
importantly, that meshes more realistically with current realities of power and
politics inside this forlorn land.