Tatters

American policy in Syria has supported the “moderate” opposition and sought the removal of Bashar al Assad. Four and a half years into the rebellion there, extremists have largely sidelined the moderate opposition in the center of the country. Russia and Iran are doubling down on their support for Bashar al Assad, who is well on towards fulfilling his prophecy “either me or the jihadis.”

Washington has also wanted to protect Syria’s neighbors from its civil war. Efforts to contain the war’s effects have been no more successful than the efforts to win it. With more than 4 million refugees unsettling Syria’s neighbors and 7 million displaced inside the country, it will take decades to restore the region to some semblance of order. The Islamic State has taken over one third of Iraq. The war has embroiled Turkey in renewed conflict with its own Kurds. Lebanon and Jordan hang by threads to a semblance of order. Israel faces extremists just a few miles from the Syrian territory it occupies on the Golan Heights.

Attention in the press is focused on the Pentagon’s failed efforts over the past year to train and equip viable “moderate” forces to fight against the Islamic State in Syria. Few Syrians sign up. They prefer to fight Assad. The vetting process is long and arduous. Of the few who have gone back to Syria, most have ended up dead, captured or intimidated into turning over equipment and weapons to extremists. The rebalancing of the military equation that John Kerry had rightly recognized as necessary to altering the outcome in a direction the US would find agreeable is simply not occurring.

Enter the Russians. Moscow’s deployment of fighting forces, including attack aircraft, to Latakia would not be necessary if the Assad regime were doing well. Moscow’s immediate military goal is to block the advance of opposition forces towards western Syria, where both the heartland of the Alawite population and Russia’s naval base lie. Its bigger purpose is to protect the regime and foil America’s intention of replacing it with something resembling a democracy. Moscow won’t distinguish in its targets between extremists and moderates but will seek to rebalance the military equation in a direction opposite to what Kerry had in mind.

The advancing opposition forces in the center of the country are mostly Sunni extremists, not moderates. Extremists have agreed to a population exchange with Hizbollah that will clear Sunnis from near the strategically important border with Lebanon and Shia from extremist-held areas farther north. Population exchange aids cantonalization: Syria will soon be a patchwork of areas of control: the regime in Damascus and the west, Kurds along much of the northern border with Turkey, relatively moderate opposition in the south and some Damascus suburbs, assorted Islamist extremists in the center and the Islamic State in the center east. Enclaves will be overrun or traded. Confrontation lines will congeal. Stalemate will ensue.

None of this is good news for either Syrians or Americans. But it is not the worst news.

The viability of the patches will depend on two factors: the strength of the military forces that control them and how effectively they are governed. The regime has been protecting and governing the areas it controls well enough that they have attracted a significant inflow of people, including many whose sympathies are with the opposition. The Islamic State governs brutally in the territory it controls, but has lost some in the north to Kurdish forces, who have set up representative governing structures that include Arabs and appear to be functioning relatively well, their lives made easier by the de facto truce between the Kurds and the Assad regime.

The relative moderates have arguably been less effective than the regime, the Islamic State and the Kurds in governing the areas they control. This is important. The war can be lost on the battlefield. But it has to be won in city hall. The local councils that have formed more or less spontaneously in many “liberated” areas are not doing well. Strapped for cash and untended by the opposition Syrian Interim Government, in many areas they are unable to deliver much except political squabbling among themselves. While unquestionably better than nothing, they lack both legitimacy and technical capabilities as well as connections to a broader political framework. Western aid to local councils has sometimes done more harm than good.

The US military effort in Syria is visibly in tatters. But it won’t matter much if the less visible civilian effort conducted in areas controlled by relative moderates doesn’t improve  dramatically.