The essential problem with U.S. Syria policy since the start of the crisis has been the mismatch between objectives and means. | ABD DOUMANY/AFP/Getty Images It’s time to rethink Syria For years, I helped advise President Obama on Syria. It’s now clearer than ever that a new strategy is needed.

If somehow the tragic trajectory of the conflict in Syria were not apparent enough, several dramatic developments in recent weeks have come together to make it impossible to ignore. The most obvious is the influx into Europe of tens of thousands of desperate, hungry refugees—so devoid of hope in their homeland or neighboring refugee camps they are willing to risk drowning and starvation in the hope of finding a better life for themselves and their children.

The second is the growing evidence of the failure of efforts to train and equip a moderate, unified opposition capable of pressuring the Assad regime to change. Despite extensive efforts by the U.S. government and its partners to build such a force, the opposition remains deeply fragmented, dominated by extremists and incapable of threatening Assad’s rule or of stabilizing Syria even if the regime did somehow fall. Even the lesser objective of equipping and training a vetted force able to degrade and destroy the “Islamic State” (ISIL) has proven unachievable, as became clear with the recent U.S. announcements that the small initial group of fighters deployed were immediately killed or captured, and that fewer than ten U.S.-trained fighters are fighting ISIL. It should now be clear that while arming and training some opposition forces might be part of a long-term solution in Syria, they will never be a decisive factor in resolving the conflict.

The third sign was the news that Russia has decided to deploy its own forces in Syria—allegedly to fight ISIL but clearly also to bolster the Assad regime. Russia’s move should not have come as a surprise. President Vladimir Putin has for years been deeply hostile to the concept of regime change anywhere in the region, which he believes threatens not only Russia’s vital interests and allies but potentially his own hold on power. Moreover, Russia has long expressed real concern, not unfounded, that Assad’s fall under the wrong circumstances would not bring stability but even more chaos, displacement and extremism, as ISIL or other Islamist terrorists took over Damascus. Russia’s deployment in Syria underscores the reality that the periodic, hopeful reports that Assad regime may finally be crumbling are likely to be mistaken again. Russia, let alone Iran, is not going to allow the regime to fall unless and until they believe that whatever replaces it will not threaten their core interests.

These developments make it increasingly difficult to deny what has should have been apparent for some time—the current policy of the United States and its partners, to increase pressure on Assad so that he “comes to the table” and negotiates his own departure—must be rethought. As the Coordinator for Middle East policy in the White House from 2013 until April of this year, I watched and participated as the administration grappled with what one top official called “the hardest problem we’ve faced—ever,” and I know just how bad all of the options are. But the urgency of the humanitarian crisis, now with the potential to destabilize Europe as well—along with Russia’s dangerous new escalation—means we must revisit some fundamental questions about a conflict that is tearing the region apart. What’s needed is a new diplomatic process that brings all the key external actors to the table and agrees on a messy compromise to deescalate the conflict—even if that means putting off agreement on the question of Assad.

Matching ends and means

The essential problem with U.S. Syria policy since the start of the crisis has been the mismatch between objectives and means—the objective of displacing the Assad regime has proven unachievable with the means we have been willing or able to deploy to achieve it. To correct this mismatch, we have two options: increase the means, with whatever costs and consequences might accompany doing so, or modify the objectives.

Critics of the Obama administration, supported by some of America’s closest partners in the region, appear to favor the former approach. Republican candidates for President routinely castigate President Obama for not taking more decisive action to get rid of the Assad regime and almost unanimously call for more arming and training of the Syrian opposition, no-fly-zones, U.S. air strikes or even “boots on the ground.” Editorials in the Washington Post and elsewhere blame U.S. “inaction” for the tragedy in Syria while calling for “robust intervention” and “more aggressive U.S. effort to bring down” the Assad regime. Former U.S. officials like Robert Ford and Fred Hof denounce “piecemeal” U.S. efforts to support the opposition and call on the United States to sharply ramp up those efforts to help bring down Assad. Many pundits and columnists seem to share essayist Leon Wieseltier’s conclusion that Washington’s unwillingness to act “decisively” is proof that “the United States has abandoned its faith in its power and its duty to do good.”

Such calls for decisive action are understandable. But they vastly overstate the prospects for success of greater military intervention and understate the costs and risks it would entail. It is important to remember that for Assad and those who support him, the “political transition” we seek is a euphemism for removing him and all those around him from power, leaving them and the Christians, Alawites and other minorities who support them at the mercy of vengeful Sunni extremists. With Russia and Iran also willing to bear significant costs to protect what they consider to be their strategic interests, no one should underestimate the effort that would be necessary to actually topple the regime. Simply talking tough, or even a limited use of force, is unlikely to get Assad, Iran and Russia to back down. Those who threaten escalation need to be prepared to follow up and consider the consequences, both likely and unintended, of doing so.

Some previous applications of military force—with goals more limited and against dictatorships more isolated than Assad—are relevant in this regard. In Operation Desert Fox in 1998, the United States hit Iraq with hundreds of airstrikes and air- and sea-launched cruise missiles with the objective of degrading Iraq’s weapons capabilities and “sending a message” to Saddam Hussein. The operation had little impact on the overall conflict or Saddam’s hold on power, which only ended when the United States invaded with over 150,000 ground troops five years later. In Kosovo the following year, the United States and its NATO allies flew 38,000 sorties and launched thousands of airstrikes with the objective of driving Serbian security forces out of the breakaway province. Serbia resisted even this limited goal for 78 days, and only then gave way in Kosovo once a credible threat of a ground invasion became clear—regime change in Belgrade would have presumably taken an effort of much greater intensity and duration. Then there is the more recent case of Libya, which started with a humanitarian operation to protect civilians but only ended with ruler Muammar Gaddafi’s violent overthrow after seven months of sustained NATO bombing and arming of rebels and was followed by the country’s descent into civil war and terrorism. None of this means the United States and its allies could not get rid of Assad with military power. These cases do suggest, however, that it is fanciful to imagine limited airstrikes, arms to the opposition, or the establishment of a no-fly-zone would lead Assad to behave differently from Saddam, Milosevic or Gaddafi. And that if and when Assad were violently overthrown, the prospects for stability in his wake would be poor, even if the United States were willing to deploy troops.

Many of those who accept that direct U.S. use of force may not be the way forward still look to increased arming and training of opposition fighters as the best way to increase pressure on the regime. But it should by now be clear how difficult it was always going to be for the United States and its partners to identify, arm and train a “moderate” opposition that would violently wrest power from a standing army backed by Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. And how unlikely it was that if such an opposition did take power it would manage to govern decently and impose stability on an ethnically and religiously divided country after a savage civil war. We will never know if earlier support to the armed opposition would have led to a rapid regime-change and spared Syria from civil war; but it is logically difficult to understand why efforts to overthrow the regime then would not have led to the same degree of relentless counter-escalation we saw later, or why it would have been more successful when the regime forces were fresh and the opposition was in its infancy than they have been since.

When I started at the White House in March 2013, I was among those who advocated increased assistance, including military assistance, to the Syrian opposition. Secretary of State John Kerry led the diplomatic effort to rally and unify our key partners, who all pledged to support the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC) as the legitimate representatives of Syrian people and to channel military support to the Supreme Military Council (SMC), then led by General Salim Idriss. It was not long, however, before it was apparent—at least to me—that this approach would not work. The SOC was weak and out of touch and the SMC unable to control extremists or bring disparate factions into line. The pledges of our partners to help only moderate opposition forces were never upheld, notwithstanding extensive efforts to get them to do so.

The lack of success of these efforts led President Obama in May 2014 to step up our efforts by proposing a new program that would include a $5 billion Counter Terrorism Partnership Fund to strengthen Syria’s neighbors and $500 million for a train and equip program under the Department of Defense. Under the direction of experienced and capable military leaders such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, Central Command head General Lloyd Austin and Special Operations Commander General Michael Nagata, that program has had little impact—not due to the lack of resources, poor execution or will, but because of the enormity of the task and an absence of acceptable and capable recruits.

Fixing this problem by lowering the vetting standards for arming and training the opposition is not an attractive remedy. Assad is a cruel dictator whose brutal crackdown on his own people has fueled extremism throughout the region and beyond; but many of the groups fighting him are at least as bad or worse. The barbarity of ISIL has been apparent for all to see in use of slavery, rape, beheadings and terrorist attacks throughout the world. The al-Nusra Front is an al-Qaeda affiliate whose objectives include attacking the United States, imposing Sharia law on Syria and fighting a sectarian war throughout the region. Joining forces with these groups to defeat Assad at all costs would be to truly lose sight of our actual interests and objectives. In the best case, it would replicate the only place where one could argue such a program has “worked” in the past—in Afghanistan, where an armed Islamist opposition succeeding in toppling a regime, but also gave us the Taliban, al Qaeda and eventually 9/11.

Some would say the discussion of direct U.S. military action or major war is a straw man and instead we should focus on more limited goals like the establishment of “safe areas” or “no fly zones.” Given the extent of the humanitarian catastrophe, such measures should absolutely be considered. We did so regularly and seriously while I was at the White House and we should renew efforts to find an option that could save lives. But these proposals also raise serious questions that cannot be overlooked. Who would police the zones, and how would they prevent clashes among the hundreds of different armed groups currently fighting in Syria? When our partners within the zones committed human rights abuses, partnered with extremist forces or went on offensives we did not approve, would we cut them off or get drawn into their escalation? If Assad attacked the zone, rightly seeing it as a place where an armed opposition could regroup, what would be our response? If striking Assad in response led to ISIL or the al-Nusra Front advancing on Damascus, would we strike our own proxies? If action against the Assad regime led Iran-backed Shia militias to start attacking U.S. troops in Iraq as they did during the Iraq war, would we escalate against them as well, alongside their ISIL enemies? Could we agree with the Turks on how to manage a zone along their border, given their hostility to the Kurdish fighters in that zone, who would likely be among America’s strongest partners? And of course even if we managed to set up and successfully police such zones, doing so would not resolve the fundamental source of the conflict in Syria—Assad’s determination to remain in power and large numbers of Syrians determined to violently remove him.

A different approach — diplomacy and de-escalation

If enhancing our means to achieve our objectives is not a viable option, the alternative is to alter our objectives, based on an understanding that at this point simply stopping the conflict is a far greater U.S. and global interest than anything else. It is the conflict that is killing and displacing millions, destabilizing Syria’s neighbors, fueling extremism, exacerbating sectarianism and inspiring terrorists around the world. There may have been a time when it seemed that violence—an insurgency to overthrow the Assad dictatorship—was worth the lives it would cost in an attempt to produce better and more humane governance in Syria. That time has long past. There is now virtually no chance that an opposition military “victory” will lead to stable or peaceful governance in Syria in the foreseeable future and near certainty that pursuing one will only lead to many more years of vicious civil war. Stopping the conflict will require all the regional powers that are currently fueling it—including Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States—to come to terms with the reality that their maximalist objectives cannot be achieved, and that the result of trying to achieve them will mean only more misery and conflict throughout the region—at high cost to them all.

Bringing together countries with such diametrically opposed views on the conflict will obviously require a Herculean diplomatic effort—beyond even what the United States did in Bosnia in the mid-1990s—and may not succeed. But the Bosnia precedent, for all its differences with Syria—is instructive. There, after four years of ethnic cleansing, displacement and genocide, the United States formed a “contact group,” including all the most powerful outside actors, and engineered a messy diplomatic agreement that required painful compromise on all sides. It coordinated with Russia, compromised with unsavory nationalistic leaders like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman who were responsible for much of the killing, and—having sworn never to ratify the results of ethnic cleansing—agreed to the creation of a “Republika Srpska” (RS) in Bosnia, which was founded on the expulsion and death of Muslims and Croats. Twenty years later, Bosnia is still dysfunctional, RS leaders are corrupt and nationalistic, and the original objective of a united Bosnian democracy is still far from achieved. But the killing and displacements have stopped, and Bosnian children are able to grow up in relative peace.

The hardest issue in any attempt to bring regional powers together on Syria would be the question of the fate of Assad. For Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the other Sunni states supporting the Syrian opposition, his immediate departure has been a sine qua non for even talking about ending the conflict, whereas Iran and Russia refuse to accept his ouster, let alone to promote it. To get around this so far insurmountable obstacle, it might be necessary to put off agreement on Assad’s fate until the end of the process, rather than insisting on it being resolved at the beginning. The United States and others will not and should not drop their position that there will never be a stable Syria under Assad and that ultimately he must go. But they should aggressively explore steps that could be taken in the meantime to reduce the fighting.

Instead of insisting on Assad’s immediate departure as a prerequisite to any agreement, a U.S.-led contact group could explore measures including the establishment of local and regional ceasefires; radical decentralization that would empower local authorities and get the regime out of agreed parts of the country; the cessation of regime air attacks in exchange for an end to opposition offensives; constitutional reform; the establishment of entities that would include representatives from the government and opposition and provide a basis for initial dialogue; eventual elections in which Assad might or might not be allowed to run; and potentially even safe areas that would negotiated between the regime and the opposition. A transitional agreement backed by the outside powers that included some of these steps would fall short of the “transitional governing body with full executive authority” called for in the June 2012 Geneva communiqué. But it could start a process and would be far preferable than the elusive pursuit of that unattainable goal. An accord reached among the outside powers could also be more credibly backed by the threat of force than a plan that some key actors vehemently oppose.

Some would ask why Iran and Russia would ever agree to such a compromise, without the “enhanced pressure” or more direct military intervention. The answer is that we would no longer be asking for their immediate acceptance of an outright victory for their enemies but for steps that would help achieve our core interest—ending the war—while preserving theirs—avoiding an extremist takeover and maintaining some influence in the country. And no one should think Iran and Russia are not under significant pressure already, even without direct U.S. intervention. They have no particular attachment to Assad personally, and maintaining the Syria regime is a costly burden to both countries. Its perpetuation only fuels the regional Islamist extremism that threatens their long-term interests. In that sense, the United States, Iran, Russia and the Gulf states that support the anti-extremist opposition all share at least that core interest, which is what might be the basis for an interim solution along these lines. Feeling such pressure in 2014, Iran put forward a Syria plan that would involve a ceasefire, constitutional reform and eventual elections—why not explore such a package as a starting point and press the Iranians to define those elements in a way that can offer Syrians a better future? And make clear to Iran and Russia that their failure to do so will only perpetuate their costly quagmire and lead to the growing extremism that threatens us all?

A negotiated interim solution in Syria—if it could be achieved—would obviously require painful compromise and entail lowering the bar from what has been our political objective so far. But the current realistic choice is not between “deferring the question of Assad” and “getting rid of Assad.” It is between “deferring the question of Assad” and “not getting rid of Assad” while Syria burns and the conflict spreads. In the longer run deferring that question may well be more likely to lead to his departure than insisting on regime change up front. With the enemy at the gate, Assad’s supporters cannot afford the risk that his demise would also be theirs. In the context of a negotiated settlement backed by outside powers, however, Syrians and the regime’s sponsors might well come to realize they are better off without a leader they rightly despise—and that their institutions could survive his ouster.

Changing our political objective, deferring the question of Assad’s fate, and getting all of Syria’s neighbors on the same page is an enormous task, unlikely to result in agreement anytime soon. Even if an agreement along these lines could eventually be achieved, it would be far less satisfying than Assad’s immediate ouster and replacement with a decent, moderate opposition that can keep the country stable and intact. But the prospects for the latter disappeared a long time ago, if they ever existed. And not even “decisive action,” however much we might wish it to be otherwise, can change that fact.



Philip Gordon is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2013-2015 he was White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region.