Tag: Al Qaeda
Why get Hezbollah out of Syria
I’ve got a piece in the Washington Post this morning: The right target for the U.S. in Syria: Hezbollah. It starts like this:
The military situation in Syria has turned against the U.S.-supported opposition over the past year, due mainly to Russian intervention. Now, the failed coup in Turkey and subsequent crackdown there stand to reduce the capabilities of a key U.S. ally. Without some rebalancing now in favor of the opposition to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the prospects for a satisfactory negotiated political transition are dim.
In a dissenting internal memo last month, 51 State Department diplomats advocated attacks on Syrian government forces to end their aggression against the country’s civilian population, alter the military balance and bring about a negotiated political solution. President Obama has focused instead on fighting terrorism in Syria, but U.S. targets are limited to Sunni extremists such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliates.
There is also a Shiite terrorist organization in Syria: Lebanon-based Hezbollah. It should not be immune.
That’s all I can reproduce without getting into trouble with the guardians of intellectual property. Go to the link above for the rest.
I don’t advocate an ultimatum backed with the threat of force lightly. But I also don’t see how allowing the Syrian wars to continue can be justified. Doing nothing is also doing something. It has consequences.
The US proposal to cooperate with Russia in attacking Jabhat al Nusra as well as the Islamic State makes the Hizbollah question even more urgent. If implemented, the US/Russia agreement will further weaken the opposition to Bashar al Assad, which relies–like it or not–heavily on Jabhat al Nusra capabilities. While the Americans are proposing as part of the agreement that the Syrian air force be grounded, no restraint on its ground forces (or those of Hezbollah) is proposed. Nor would it be possible to enforce.
So Faysal Itani is correct when he suggests that implementation of the agreement will make things even worse for the Syrian opposition than they’ve been to date, which is pretty bad for the past year. Aleppo is under siege and will likely fall, sooner or later. Idlib is at risk. Barack Obama, who doesn’t think US national security interests are at risk in the fight against Assad, could leave office presiding over mass atrocities the US has pledged to prevent and further undermining prospects for the negotiated settlement the US says it wants.
I am however sympathetic to the Administration’s aversion to taking up the cudgels against Russia, Iran and even the Syrian regime, as it lacks Congressional authorization for that kind of state-on-state fight. But I doubt any Congressional authorization is needed for the fight against a non-state actor like Hezbollah that has killed many Americans. The existing Authorization to Use Military Force, passed to bless the war against Al Qaeda, has already been stretched to cover the Islamic State and Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra, both Sunni extremist organizations. Why won’t it stretch to cover Shia Hezbollah as well?
The main purpose of an ultimatum to Hezbollah would not be to widen the Syrian war. It would be intended to get Hezbollah to withdraw to Lebanon and end its participation in the Russian/Iranian coalition supporting Bashar al Assad, thereby encouraging him to get serious about the UN-sponsored peace talks. Washington would of course continue to have a problem with Hezbollah even in Lebanon, where for decades it has weakened the Lebanese state, distorted Lebanese politics and planned the murder of innocent civilians in half a dozen countries.
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Russian/American cooperation in Syria
My recent travels caused me to miss publication of the draft US/Russian agreement on Syria. You can skip the “Terms of Reference for the Joint Implementation Group.” It contains the nitty gritty details of how Moscow and Washington will choose ISIS and especially Jabhat al Nusra targets while constraining the Syrian air force.
The more interesting part starts on p. 6 in the section on “Practical Approach for Russian-American Cooperation Against Daesh [ISIS] and [Al Qaeda affiliate] Jabhat al Nusra and Strengthening the Cessation of Hostilities.” Even that begins with more Joint Implementation Group stuff, but then goes on to conclude with this:
b) translation of the CoH into a durable, nationwide ceasefire, phased with steps on the political transition, inclusive of provisions on the disposition and separation of forces, control of heavy weapons, regulation of the flow of weapons into Syria , independent monitoring and verification, and enforcement; and
c) a framework on political transition in Syria consistent with UNSCR 2254, to include provisions on how and when a transitional government with full executive authority formed on the basis of mutual consent will be established, security and intelligence institutions will be reformed, and constitutional and electoral processes will be conducted.
The Europeans are said to be circulating a paper with more substance on this last point. The failure of the US to put the issues of ceasefire and political transition up front, and to leave them in this rudimentary afterthought, reflects the Administration’s priorities. It wants to focus on killing extremists, not on stabilizing Syria or ending the war.
Steve Heydemann has already blasted this approach, which has no hope of achieving its counter-terrorism objectives without focusing also on displacing Bashar al Assad, whose efforts to maintain himself in power feed extremism in Syria and ensure the war will continue. But President Obama has made himself eminently clear: he has no intention of displacing Assad, fearing what might come next.
That’s where the Syrian opposition needs to focus: on convincing the US that it can offer a viable governing alternative, at least in those areas where ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra are not present and the cessation of hostilities can be made to hold. The US is providing resources to police, schools, civil defense, local councils and nongovernmental organizations in these areas, but everything is done piecemeal, without any central direction or oversight.
Kurdish “cantons” along Syria’s northern border with Turkey have already achieved a large measure of what is required. They have chased extremists out and established fairly effective governing bodies. But they also collaborate with Assad, thus avoiding attacks, and have ethnically cleansed Arabs from some areas, in order to establish Kurdish dominance. The Kurds may merit the US support they are getting to fight ISIS, but only if they stop the ethnic cleansing and end their collaboration with the Assad regime.
The non-extremist Arab opposition has been far less successful in ensuring security in the areas it controls, due to continued regime and Russian bombing and shelling. If an agreement with the Russians can stop those attacks and allow humanitarian relief to flow, there will be some hope that opposition authorities can begin to govern more effectively.
But the fragmented approach the US has taken so far seems guaranteed to be ineffective in helping the opposition to establish legitimacy with the populations in areas it more or less controls. Washington has already abandoned several efforts at building a unified Syrian opposition: the Syrian National Council, the Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (Etilaf) and the Syrian Interim Government. The landscape is littered with other piecemeal efforts: the Assistance Coordination Unit, the Local Administrative Councils Unit and the Syrian Recovery Trust Fund, to name a few.
Washington needs to get serious about constructing a viable governing alternative to the Assad regime. This should be thought of as the nucleus of a transitional governing body, one capable of implementing the cessation of hostilities, reforming the security and intelligence services, and organizing the constitutional and electoral processes (see b and c above). The High Negotiations Committee, which has represented the opposition in recent UN meetings, would be my current candidate to take charge of these preparations. But to be effective it will need more structure and organizational integrity than it has today. Washington should try to ensure it gets what it needs.
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Liberal democracy at risk
The handwriting is on many walls. Liberal democracy and the world order it has built since World War II are at risk. Equal rights, political pluralism and rule of law are being challenged from several directions.
We see it in Brexit, which aims explicitly to restore borders, reject immigrants and implicitly to end the liberal democratic establishment’s monopoly on governing power. We see it in Trump, who aims at similar goals. We see it in Putin, Erdogan and Sisi, who are selling the idea that concentrated power and restrictions on freedom will deliver better and more goods and services. We see it in China, which likewise aims to maintain the Communist Party’s monopoly on national political power while allowing markets to drive growth. No need to mention Hungary’s Orbán, Macedonia’s Gruevski, Poland’s Szydło and other democratically elected leaders who turn their backs on liberal democratic values once in power, in favor of religion, nationalism or ethnic identity.
Among the first victims are likely to be two bold efforts at freeing up trade and investment and promoting growth by removing barriers and encouraging globalization: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the US as well as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was intended to do something similar in the Pacific Basin. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have said they are opposed to TPP. It is hard to picture TTIP proceeding while the EU is negotiating its divorce from the United Kingdom.
We have seen assaults on liberal democracy and its associated world order in the past. Arguably that is what World War II was about, at least in part. Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Mussolini’s Italy offered Fascist, autocratic responses to relatively liberal democracy in Britain, France, Germany and the United States. The Soviet Union, which fought with the Allies against Fascism, offered a Communist alternative that survived the war and engaged in the Cold War standoff with liberal democracies for almost 45 years thereafter, one that involved proxy wars, Communist and anti-Communist puppets, and the enormous risk of nuclear holocaust. The history of fights between liberal democracy and its antagonists is fraught with war, oppression, and prolonged authoritarianism.
It wasn’t that long ago, when the Berlin wall fell, that liberal democracy seemed overwhelmingly likely to win worldwide. The end of history didn’t last long. The two big challenges liberal democracy now faces are Islamist extremism and capitalist authoritarianism. These are both ideological and physical challenges. Putinism is an authoritarian style of governance that sends warplanes, naval ships and troops to harass and occupy its neighbors and adversaries. The same can be said of Xi Jinping’s China, which is making the South China Sea into its backyard and harassing its neighbors.
The Islamist extremist challenge comes above all from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which are competing with each other even as they destroy fragile states like Libya, Yemen and Syria. Iraq appears to be winning its fight, though it is likely to face a virulent insurgency even after it ends Islamic State control over parts of its territory. The outcome is unlikely to be liberal democratic. Many other states face that kind of insurgent Islamist threat: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Somalia, and Tunisia, to name but a few.
But the biggest threat to liberal democracy today comes from inside the liberal democracies themselves. Islamist terror has killed relatively few people, apart from 9/11. Popular overreaction to Islamist threats, immigration and globalization could bring to power people with little commitment to liberal democratic values in the United States, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. They will seek to reestablish borders, slow or end immigration, impose draconian laws to root out terrorists, and restore trade barriers in the hope of regaining lost industries.
Another challenge, peculiar to the US, seems to be emerging: black insurgents with guns who think they are retaliating against police for abuse of black citizens. This is bound to elicit a law and order response the could even bring a real threat to liberal democracy in Washington: Donald Trump in the presidency. If the protests in Cleveland this week are not disciplined and peaceful, it could put real wind in his sails.
The menace to liberal democracy is real. If we want pluralism, human rights and the rule of law, we are going to have to take some risks. I find it an easy choice, but many of my compatriots seem inclined to lean in the other direction.
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Don’t forget Hezbollah
Here is the draft of the State Department dissent message on Syria, on which the New York Times based its coverage yesterday. So far as I can tell the final version is not publicly available, but this draft is polished. The argument is basically that the US has sufficient moral and strategic reason to attack Syrian government forces with stand-off weapons with the goal of getting President Asad to abide by the internationally mandated cessation of hostilities and initiate serious negotiations on a political transition, as required by the Geneva I communique and numerous subsequent international decisions. The dissent memo admits some downsides: a deterioration of relations with Russia and possible “second order” effects.
Those downsides require more consideration. There is no international mandate to attack Syrian government forces. Intervention in this case would in that sense have even less multilateral sanction than the NATO attack on Qaddafi’s forces in Libya, where there was a UN Security Council mandate, albeit one that authorized “all necessary means” to save civilians rather than to change the regime. Asad has not directly attacked the US, even if his reaction to Syria’s internal rebellion has created conditions that are inimical to US interests by attracting extremists and undermining stability in neighboring countries.
The Russia angle is also daunting. Moscow may well react by intensifying its attacks on the opposition forces the US supports, who are already targeted by Russian warplanes. Unilateral US intervention against Syrian government forces would also help Moscow to argue it is doing no worse in Ukraine, where it supports opposition forces behind a thin veil of denials that its forces are directly involved. The US is not ready to respond in kind to Russian escalation in Ukraine, if only because the European allies would not want it. Kiev might be the unintended victim of US escalation in Syria.
Second order effects could also include loss of European, Turkish and Jordanian support, because of an increased refugee flow out of Syria, as well as increased Iranian support for the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, destabilization of Bahrain and Shia militias in Iraq. Greater chaos in Syria could also help ISIS to revive its flagging fortunes and al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra to pursue its fight against the Syrian government.
These downsides are all too real, but so is the current situation: Russia, the Syrian government, Iran and Hezbollah are making mincemeat of the US-supported Syrian opposition while more extremist forces are gaining momentum. President Obama is reluctant to attack sovereign states that have not attacked the US directly without an international mandate of some sort. That is understandable. But doing nothing military to respond to a deteriorating situation is a decision too, one with real and unfortunately burgeoning negative consequences for US interests.
Hezbollah is the way out of this quandary. It is not a state. It is a designated terrorist group that has killed hundreds of Americans, and many others as well. The Americans say they are fighting terrorist groups in Syria. Why not Hezbollah? Its ground forces there have become increasingly important to the Syrian government’s cause. Getting Hezbollah out of the fight would arguably have as much impact on the military balance as strikes on the Syrian army, which is already a declining and demoralized force.
Washington need not start with military action. It could lead with diplomacy, telling Moscow and Tehran that we want Hezbollah to leave Syria tout de suite. If it fails to leave by a date certain, we could then strip it of its immunity and treat it like the other terrorist groups in Syria. Moscow might even welcome such a move, since Hezbollah efforts in Syria strengthen Iran’s hold, not Russia’s.
Tehran would be furious, claiming Hezbollah is in Syria at the request of its legitimate government. Hezbollah would likely try to strike US, Israeli or even Jewish targets in the region or beyond. It has managed in the past to murder Jews as far away as Argentina. Doing so would confirm the thesis that Hezbollah is a terrorist group and redouble the need to act decisively against it.
No suggestions for what to do or not do in Syria are simple. The situation has gotten so fraught that any proposition will have complicated and unpredictable consequences. But the State Department dissenters missed an opportunity to duck some of the President’s objections and strengthen their own argument by focusing on a terrorist group, rather than the regime’s own forces. Don’t forget Hezbollah.
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Trump’s defeat
With Hillary Clinton clinching the Democratic nomination, it is time to consider the far more likely scenario: that she will win the November election, become the first Madame President, and return to the White House in January. What are the implications for America and its foreign policy?
Trump’s defeat, the third in a row for Republicans, will leave the party weakened and possibly divided. It could well lose control of the Senate if not the House. Blame for this will be heaped on those who backed Trump, a blatant racist, misogynist and xenophobe. Balancing acts like this one will look ridiculous in the aftermath of an electoral defeat:
Those who did not support Trump will try to resurrect the direction the party thought it had chosen after the 2012 election: towards becoming more inclusive rather than less. That will be a hard sell once more than 70% of Hispanics (and 90% of African Americans), similar percentages of gas and lesbians, and a majority of women have chosen Clinton. Some of the defeated will try to launch a new party or join the Libertarians. Diehard Trumpies will head off into the white supremacist/neo-Nazi corner of American politics.
The Democrats will seek to exploit their moment of triumph. I imagine top of their priorities will be “comprehensive” immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people. This would solidify their Hispanic support. I doubt Clinton will reverse her position on the Transpacific Trade Partnership (TTP), but she might well quietly encourage Barack Obama to get it done in the lame duck Congress, before she is sworn in, with some improvements. I hope she will back the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which raises fewer hackles that TTP.
Clinton will want to reassure America’s allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. She will look for ways to sound and act tougher on the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Russia, Iran and China, which have each taken advantage of Obama’s retrenchment from the over-extension of the Bush 43 presidency to press the envelope on what Washington will tolerate. She will maintain the nuclear deal with Iran and likely try to follow a similar model with North Korea. She opt for a no-fly zone in northern or southern Syria, hoping to stop at that.
Clinton will try to sustain Washington’s tightened relationship with India, Vietnam and other Asian powers as well as ongoing moves towards democracy and free market economies in Africa and Latin America. She’ll try to avoid sinking more men and money into Afghanistan and will try to get (and keep) Pakistan turned around in a more helpful direction. Israel/Palestine will be low on her priorities–why tred on turf where others have repeatedly failed?–unless something breaks in the positive or negative direction.
Domestic issues will take priority, including fixes for Obamacare, increased infrastructure and education funding, reductions in student loan debt, criminal justice reform, corporate tax reform and appointment of at least one Supreme Court justice (unless Merrick Garland is confirmed in the lame duck session) and many other Federal judges at lower levels. She will support modestly increased defense funding and tax cuts for the middle class, funded by increases on higher incomes. She will tack slightly to the left to accommodate Bernie Sanders’ supporters, but not so far as to lose independents.
In other words, Hillary Clinton is likely to serve Barack Obama’s third term, correcting the relatively few mistakes she thinks he has made, slowing retrenchment and adapting his pragmatic non-doctrine foreign policy to the particular circumstances and events as they occur. It will take some time for the Republicans, or whatever succeeds them as the second major party, to figure out whether they are protectionist or free traders, anti-immigrant or not, interventionist or not.
Trump’s defeat will be momentous for the Republican party, but it will leave the country on more or less the same trajectory it has followed for the past 7.5 years. If she can keep it pointed in that direction for four more, we should be thankful.
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Resolve
With dozens of attacks on Aleppo Sunday and more yesterday, Syria’s President Assad has made it perfectly clear he regards the cessation of hostilities as ended. There will now follow a few days of diplomatic efforts to restore it, with Washington bringing serious pressure on the High Negotiation Committee to return to talks in Geneva and Russia pretending to pressure Assad. There is no telling whether those efforts will be successful, though The Economist is surely right that the talks are doomed so long as they don’t deal with the issue of Assad himself. A transition away from his rule is the only thing that will get much of the opposition to lay down its arms.
That is not however what is killing the cessation of hostilities at the moment. The immediate issue in Geneva has been Assad’s refusal to release detainees and permit serious humanitarian deliveries in most opposition areas. If there had been progress on those “files,” the opposition would not have left Geneva. Despite occasional reports of relief supplies getting through, the overall picture is grim. Millions remain in need and the regime has besieged hundreds of thousands. Tens of thousands of prisoners are incarcerated in regime prisons (the opposition holds a tiny fraction of that number).
The Americans remain not so much indifferent as unwilling to do what is needed to compel Assad to do what the cessation of hostilities was supposed to do. Even a few antiaircraft weapons would send a strong signal to the regime and its pilots. President Obama however remains unwilling to take the risks involved: the weapons could fall into extremist hands, they could be used against commercial aircraft, or they could bring down Russian planes and helicopters. These risks are real, though reducible to relatively low levels.
The Russians and Iranians are not showing any comparable hesitation. Whatever drawdown Moscow conducted last month, this month they are beefing up again and moving artillery so that it can bombard Aleppo. Iran’s forces in Syria go up and down, but there is every indication Tehran will do whatever it thinks necessary to prevent a political transition that inevitably will end its carte blanche in Syria. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has a lot to lose if its link to Hizbollah in Lebanon is weakened or even broken.
The cessation of hostilities proved to have great virtues: it relieved a lot of pressure on civilians in opposition-held areas, it gave those civilians an opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to extremists associated with Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra, and it showed that relatively moderate rebels could make headway against the Islamic State if they didn’t have to also fight the regime. Re-initiation of the fighting will weaken relative moderates and drive some into the arms of extremists.
I continue to hope that Barack Obama, whom I voted for twice and support in many things, will realize the error of his ways and intervene in Syria in ways that communicate to the regime, the Russians and the Iranians that they have something to fear. Hizbollah is a terrorist group responsible for killing hundreds of Americans. If we are attacking terrorists in Syria, why not Hizbollah?
But that is a pipe dream. President Obama is highly disciplined and does not want to go down that slippery slope, which could end with an expensive and difficult effort to rebuild a Syria that has suffered enormous physical and psychological damage. All his predecessors since the end of the Cold War have felt the same way about rebuilding collapsed states, a category Syria certainly belongs in. But none of them had his iron will. It makes me laugh when my Republican colleagues say he lacks “resolve.” That is certainly not the case. But his resolve in this case is applied in what they and I regard as the wrong direction.
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