Syria needs a good negotiated settlement
I have generally appreciated the work of Andrew Tabler and his colleagues on Syria. It is hard-hitting, clever and up to date. But their piece on “No Settlement in Damascus,” which opposes a negotiated solution, is not up to standard.
Bilal Saab and Andrew Tabler reject the idea of a negotiated outcome, ignoring the nature of that outcome. They implicitly discount the possibility that at some point Bashar al Assad will decide he has had enough. If that day arrives, in my view it will be far preferable for him to negotiate his exit and a turnover of power than to depart from the country, leaving the state to collapse and the country to find its own equilibrium.
A negotiated solution does not necessarily mean a power-sharing arrangement, as Saab and Tabler assume, though inclusivity is an important characteristic of regimes that survive over the long term. A surrender is also a negotiated outcome, one that the Americans unwisely did not bother obtaining in the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Syrian revolutionaries would be making a serious mistake not to accept a negotiated transfer of power that genuinely leads to Assad’s ouster and the end of the regime.
Saab and Tabler are unimpressed with the record of negotiated settlements in civil wars. Their appreciation of the examples they cite is faulty. I know the Balkans ones best. Negotiated settlements in Bosnia and Macedonia (both power-sharing arrangements) have certainly been frustratingly difficult to implement, but they saved both countries from almost certain fragmentation and much more death and destruction. They also cite renegotiation of settlements in Africa as evidence of failure. While power-sharing does not correlate with post-election peace in Africa, renegotiation of agreements does.
Their description of the reasons for preferring no negotiated outcome includes this:
At a time when no legitimate government and no legal institutions exist to enforce a contract, warriors are asked to demobilize, disarm, and prepare for peace. But once they lay down their weapons, it becomes almost impossible to enforce the other side’s cooperation or survive attack. Adversaries simply cannot credibly promise to abide by such dangerous terms.
In fact, warriors are not always asked immediately to demobilize and disarm in a negotiated agreement. Good agreements have often recognized the need to allow belligerents to keep their arms, at least for a transition period. This is something that a thorough-going defeat at the hands of their enemies will not allow and a principal reason why belligerents will sometimes negotiate.
Saab and Tabler offer a flat statement about rebel victories:
More durable than negotiated solutions are rebel victories. Monica Duffy Toft, an associate professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has argued that rebels typically have to gain significant support from fellow citizens in order to win. Once in government, rebels are also more likely to allow citizens a say in politics to further bolster their legitimacy.
Tell that to the Rwandans, or to anyone living in a country where the rebels or the government takes on a sectarian or ethnic tinge. In Syria you are going to have a hard time convincing the Alawites and other die-hard supporters of Bashar al Assad that their say in politics will be greater after this revolution. There are losers in revolution–the question in this one is whether they will be slaughtered en masse or get a chance to survive.
The specific issues Saab and Tabler raise with respect to Syria are not, unfortunately for their argument, only issues that arise in negotiated settlements:
- Assad may well escape rather than be captured or killed, so the complete victory the rebels seek may be frustrated even without a negotiated settelement.
- Trust will be hard to come by, but that is going to be true in the absence of a negotiated settlement as well.
- Enforcement of a negotiated settlement is a big issue, and I entirely agree that 10,000 UN peacekeepers are unlikely to be sufficient. But who is going to prevent atrocities in the aftermath of a rebel victory?
- Yes, a negotiated settlement would require allowing Iran a place at the table, but that will be necessary without a negotiated settlement too, witness Iraq and Afghanistan.
The main trouble with their argument is that Saab and Tabler simply don’t acknowledge the very real horrors that are likely to occur without a political settlement. I’d definitely want one that ends the regime and definitively removes Bashar al Assad from power and from Syria. But so long as it does, a negotiated settlement is far preferable to the violence absence of one will bring.
PS: Here’s a message sent by a Syrian colleague:
This arrived as a link attached to following message:
Last year was full of tragedies for me, as I lost some of my closest friends when they were killed by Assad soldiers. I was also detained and tortured, my house was destroyed, and my family was forcibly displaced. I dreamed that the end of the year would bring a glorious freedom to the Syrian people, the freedom for which I and my people have sacrificed a lot. Instead, the end of the year brought new massacres, which should not occur in the 21st century.
Despite all this, I recall some bright aspects in the past year, among them getting to make many friends around the world who may not share my race, religion, or language. However, they share with me common human values for which we started our Revolution in Syria.
I am very proud to have met each one of you, and what I have seen of you of compassion to help my people and to promote the common noble human values in which we believe. I hope you had a Merry Christmas and wish you a happy new year filled with joy. However, please do not forget your brothers and sisters in humanity who are dreaming of being able in the coming year to restore basic rights, to which you have already gotten. They desperately need your help and support.
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6 thoughts on “Syria needs a good negotiated settlement”
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Dan, just back from a conference on the lessons of Bosnia for Syria, held in Sarajevo, I found the piece more compelling. I suspect the Bosnian participants in the conference would, as well. True, Dayton ended the killing in Bosnia, but at a significant long-term cost that Bosnians are still paying, including an utterly dysfunctional political system that has made it impossible to rectify the “transitional” constitution that was part of the Accord. Moreover, in Syria, the threat of territorial fragmentation looms far less large than it did in Bosnia, and there isn’t any reason to think that pushing for a negotiated settlement is needed if it is this (low probability)threat that such a settlement is intended to avert (in part). I cannot think of a moment in the Syrian conflict when either side would have found it to be in its interest to accept an agreement that simply ended the violence without addressing issues of governance and political institutions, in other words, of power sharing. There is no question that at some point negotiations will happen. The opposition knows this and is preparing for them. But who they sit across from and what the terms of negotiation are will be critical points, and the opposition should appropriately resist being pressured to enter negotiations until it is assured that these points will be resolved in a fashion that does not undermine the sacrifices that Syrians have made over the past two years. It is all too likely that leading international actors will prefer a quick end to the violence and try to force Syrians into negotiations with too little concern for the longer-term political consequences. I just heard from many Bosnians, including officials in the foreign ministry, who advocated to the Syrians at this conference that they learn from the mistakes of Dayton and avoid such a fate.
I am acutely aware thtat some Bosnians resentment of the peace we imposed on them at Dayton. I would even go further: I myself would have preferred that the war continue for a while, leading to a clear victory for our friends. My pleas to that effect at the time fell on deaf ears. But a negotiated settlement would still have been preferable to the likely non-negotiated outcome: ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs and the associated slaughter (something comparable on a not much smaller scale had occurred in Croatia earlier in the same year).
I agree that territorial fragmentation in Syria is a lesser risk. The greater, and very serious one, is chaos. Chaos armed with chemical weapons is a serious issue.
Of course who they sit across from and the terms of negotiation are critical. That is the point of my piece. The internationals will unquestionably press for earlier war termination than the Syrians are comfortable with, as you suggest. It is up to the Syrians to make the call, but they should not wait forever.
Bosnia’s problem is that the obvious solutions – as implemented in other divided countries like Belgium – are taboo for the US and are thus effectively obstructed. This creates a kind of paralysis.
Syria has different problems. The core of the foreign opposition are the Muslim Brothers who around 1980 waged an ethnic murder campaign for which they never apologized. Inside Syria the main rebel fighting group is Al-Nusra. The uprising was from the very beginning dominated by conservative Sunni’s from the countryside. It seems to me that Assad would prefer to hand over power to the modernized urban Sunni’s.
Whatever the validity of their arguments with regard to other conflict situations, I feel that Saab and Tabler are right with respect to Syria. Your argument depends on the standard formula of the advocates of a negotiated solution: “at some point Bashar al Assad will decide he has had enough … in my view it will be far preferable for him to negotiate his exit and a turnover of power than to depart from the country, leaving the state to collapse”
Six months ago such a claim might have had some credibility. But no longer: if the need to bomb its own capital city has not prompted the regime to rethink its position then where is this evasive “some point” where it will?
Even if the regime were, in extremis, to enter into a negotiation process there is no reason to expect it to do so in good faith. The opposition – both armed and political – will insist that Asad must go(both as a symbol of bona fides and as a practical step towards reining in the regime’s repressive capacity)- and they will be absolutely right to do so. Anything else is a recipe for chaos.
Like most analysts of the Syrian conflict, you leave out of your calculus the potential role of the popular civil opposition, which despite the militarisation of the conflict remains organised and active. From your point of view they are both part of the problem and of the solution: they will not accept any “negotiations” while Asad is in power,whatever the exile groups may be cajoled into; but they can also provide the foundation for a transitional political framework at least in parts of the country (reports suggest that in the liberated zones they have already started building links with the lower echelons of the regime administrative machinery).
Neither side can be assumed to negotiate in good faith. Assuming that that only applies to the government is wrong. However, more problematic is the question whether the opposition can negotiate at all: do they have leaders who are respected enough that they can deliver when they make concessions? The respect among the fighters for the SNC is very low. And it is dubious whether Al Nusra and other Islamist organizations will respect a truce. According to the recently appeared Quilliam report they would prefer for the conflict to continue as it would strengthen their movements – so very likely they will grab any excuse to continue fighting.
The demand for Assad to go is not a demand for “a symbol of bona fides and as a practical step towards reining in the regime’s repressive capacity”. It is an attempt to dismantle the regime. Next you will see demands for “justice”, that will mysteriously find only war criminals at the government side – what will be a nice excuse to exclude many government members from the political process. It would rather be a sign of “bona fides” from the opposition when it finally came with a description of how they want Syria to look like.