No narrow way out

This rare interview with Salim Idriss, who (sort of) commands the forces in Syria that call themselves the Free Army, is telling.  It demonstrates three things:

1. The rebels are still in need of weapons.
2. Their fragmented structure makes supplying them a dicey proposition.
3. Disunity is a serious impediment to their military progress.

This is not an unfamiliar situation.  It is comparable to the Bosnian army during the first year of that country’s miserable war, which started more than twenty years ago and went on for three and a half years before the Federation forces started winning and the Dayton accords ended it.

By then, the Bosnian (ABiH) was unified under General Rasim Delic and fighting in tandem with the Croat Defense Force (HVO) and the Croatian Army (HV) against the Republika Srpska army (VRS).  But things hadn’t started that way.  The HVO and the ABiH had even fought with each other in 1992 and 1993, just as some rebel forces inside Syria have in recent months.

Likewise in Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army was not completely unified at first and fought occasionally with the Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo (FARK), a less well-known group that also fought against the Yugoslav security forces.

The Syrian rebel forces will need greater unity if they are to make further progress against the Syrian army, which has been gaining ground in the past few weeks.  That is at least in part due to Iranian and Lebanese Hizbollah forces fighting inside Syria.  The regime’s objective is to relieve Damascus and secure the route to the Alawite-populated areas of the northeast, where ethnic cleansing of Sunnis has been proceeding apace.

The rebel forces are also going to need more international help, at the very least arms supplies, but some want a much narrower focus.  Aram Nerguizian wants American intervention to focus exclusively on chemical weapons and extremists among the rebels:

How U.S. military power could be used is to selectively target risks tied to proliferation of chemical weapons and other strategic capabilities in Syria. It could be used to contain and curtail the expansion of al Qaeda in the Levant and to prevent the preeminence of radical forces in the region.

The chemical weapons seem to me strategically irrelevant.  If used, they have killed a tiny fraction of the more than 80,000 dead. It can still be argued that the President’s “red line” has to be enforced, lest failing to do so sends the wrong message to Iran.  Certainly a credible threat of military force to block Tehran from getting nuclear weapons is vital to the diplomatic strategy the President is pursuing.  But the notion that chemical weapons, like nuclear bombs, are “weapons of mass destruction” is hyperbole.  Syria’s use of chemical weapons has nothing like the implications of Iran gaining nuclear ones.  Finding and destroying Asad’s stocks of sarin and other poisons would be a major military enterprise, not the limited intervention some may imagine.

Extremists are likewise a difficult target to engage.  Muslim extremists also emerged in Bosnia and Kosovo but were quickly undone once the fighting was over.  That will be a far more difficult process in Syria, as it will not be getting the tens of thousands of NATO peacekeeping forces that made it happen quickly, and in retrospect easily, in the Balkans.  But how, precisely, does one target Jabhat al Nusra in Syria?  Do we really want to be hunting them down with drones while they are fighting the Asad regime?  Or encouraging the Free Syria Army, which is less than fully effective against the regime forces, to engage against them while the extremists are fighting Asad?  We have made it clear that Jabhat al Nusra is not acceptable to the international community, something the UN reinforced last week with financial sanctions.  But do we really need to do more than that right now?

The higher priority is to focus on protecting civilians in Syria.  The regime is targeting civilians in rebel-held areas daily, trying to make life there unbearable and governance impossible.  The purpose is to get the civilians to expel the insurgents, in the hope doing so will provide some measure of relief from artillery and air bombardment.   Protecting Syria’s civilian population from these ravages should be our priority concern.

The costs of failing to do so are high.  US humanitarian relief in Syria could total $1 billion by the end of this year.  Unless we focus on civilian protection we are not likely to recover some measure of confidence in Syria’s Sunni Muslim population and prevent its youth from further radicalization.  A post-Asad Syria dominated by extremists will be a problem for the Middle East and the US for decades into the future.  We should want a Syria that respects the rights of its citizens (regardless of sect or ethnicity) as well as its borders with Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon.  That will take time and effort.  There is no shortcut.  A narrow focus on chemical weapons and extremists will not serve these broader strategic purposes.  There is no narrow way out.