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:

1. 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.
2. Trust will be hard to come by, but that is going to be true in the absence of a negotiated settlement as well.
3. 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?
4. 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.