The Long Game (19 page)

Still, it would not be enough. Despite the president's decision to increase the “scope and scale” of military support for the opposition, a year later little had changed on the ground. If anything, the opposition seemed in even worse shape. So in the spring of 2014 the administration decided to ratchet up its efforts even further, embarking on a much larger program for the US military to equip and train the Syrian rebels against terrorist organizations, not the Assad regime. Run by the Defense Department, this program would be large-scale—aiming to train as many as 5,000 fighters by the end of 2015—at a hefty price tag of $500 million.

Obama announced this effort in his May 2014 speech at West Point, and its ambition and scope were news to us at the Pentagon. It also surprised the Congress, who would have to write the check. As the US set out to build the program, many members of Congress raised serious concerns about the price tag and how the training would work (raising the same questions we had been asking ourselves). As much as Congress had been advocating for arming and training the rebels, once a program was proposed, it proved not to be very popular.

So why did the president shift from initial reluctance in 2012 to pursue such a program to less than two years later deciding to embark on a much larger, more expensive US military effort? I think for two
reasons. First, our experience providing military support to the opposition had improved our understanding of what was possible. We now had better answers for the president's questions about how precisely this would work. After the smaller effort began in 2013, we proved we could find and train fighters who were at least moderately capable in the fight, scoring some battlefield successes.

And second, the president's risk calculus changed. Whereas arming the Syrian opposition had once been seen as something that could jeopardize our larger interests, now Obama concluded that “contain and mitigate” would not work without it because of the growing threat from violent jihadi groups—most notably, ISIS. Everyone agreed there needed to be “boots on the ground” in Syria, but since the US, Europeans, and Arab countries would not provide any beyond small numbers of special operations forces, there was no alternative to training Syrians.

There was still plenty of reason to doubt whether this would be effective. But we hoped that with significant resources and the US military in charge, the chances of success would make the risks worthwhile. Regrettably, our doubts proved well-founded.

THE TRAINING DEBACLE

The spectacular collapse of the US military program to equip and train the Syrian opposition—with the revelation in September 2015 that just a handful were still in the fight—was as depressing as it was shocking, especially for those of us who had believed in the effort, lobbied for it, and had a hand in building it.
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Reflecting on other US experiences with such endeavors, perhaps we should not have been so surprised—it was clear Obama, while certainly disappointed, felt somewhat vindicated by the doubts he had been expressing all along. “I've been very skeptical from the get-go about the notion that we were going to effectively create this
proxy army inside of Syria,” he told
60 Minutes
in October 2015. Here again, given how important training local forces remains to US strategy in Syria and Iraq, it is useful to reflect on our recent history—and the lessons we should draw.

Working to arm, train, and sustain insurgent or indigenous forces is hardly new, and history offers a few cases showing that it can be effective. The program to strengthen Afghanistan's mujahideen rebels against the Soviets is usually held up as the shining example for how this can work. But that is also a mixed result—after all, one can draw a direct line between the arming of Afghanistan's Islamic fighters in the 1980s and the rise of al-Qaeda terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s. And history is littered with many more examples of when similar efforts have failed or backfired. Think of the Bay of Pigs in the early 1960s. Or the South Vietnamese Army after US forces withdrew in the early 1970s. Or the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s.

This checkered record was certainly on President Obama's mind, and he made no secret of his skepticism. “I actually asked the CIA to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well,” he said in a 2014 interview. “And they couldn't come up with much.”
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Recent experience provided further reason for caution. In Iraq, thousands of American troops occupied that country for nearly a decade, and the US spent billions of dollars training the Iraqi security forces. Despite some successes, those efforts could not prevent a large chunk of the Iraqi army from rapidly collapsing in the spring of 2014 as ISIS stormed Mosul and hurtled toward Baghdad.

In Afghanistan, another country the United States and its allies have occupied for over a decade, building the Afghan Security Forces has been a key pillar of our strategy. Yet as Afghan forces have been out on their own against the Taliban, they have been struggling even to maintain a stalemate. Obama's surge of troops into Afghanistan
did help provide security and achieve the core goal against al-Qaeda, but it is unclear how enduring that will be. When judging how the Afghan forces will hold up after more coalition forces leave, it is safe to say the jury is still out (which is why a smaller contingent of US and allied forces will likely stay there for years).

A
MERICA
'
S EXPERIENCES IN
Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate that standing up local security forces—or, in Pentagon parlance, “building partner capacity”—is hard enough when we are all-in; as the cases of Libya and Syria show, it is even harder when we're not.

In 2013 in Libya, the United States and key partners like the United Kingdom and Italy embarked on a major effort to train a “General Purpose Force” to help strengthen the government against the militias. This effort fell flat, as the Libyans were unable to come up with competent recruits and promised resources (they had agreed to reimburse us for training them). While the British and Italians actually trained a few hundred troops—only to see them return to Libya and instantly disband—Washington's part never even got off the ground before the instability in Libya made it impossible to proceed (and even these efforts were blemished: for instance, the Libyan recruits had been expelled from the UK after some of them rampaged through an English village and assaulted women; and an earlier attempt to train Libyans in Jordan faltered after a group of them set fire to their training facility).

Having worked on the Libyan training program and the early stages of the Syria effort, I know no one ever believed success would come quickly, if at all. In both cases, we had a limited or nonexistent presence on the ground to administer the work, making essential steps like finding and vetting recruits difficult. Given insecurity, the training would have to be done elsewhere, complicating things immensely (we were planning to train Libyans at an unused base in Bulgaria, and Syrians in Turkey). And even if we had successfully recruited and
trained forces, neither Libya nor the Syrian opposition had a capable military command structure they could plug into, raising the question of how these forces would be led, fed, and sustained over time.

Despite such limitations, there was enough reason to try, and in both cases we had reason to hope for success. Libya had a government at the time that was desperate for international help, which promised that the recruits were ample and ready, and pledged full financial support. President Obama was keenly focused on this policy, and pushed the bureaucracy hard to make progress. In the much tougher situation in Syria, the United States had crucial help from partners like Turkey and Saudi Arabia, who also promised to find thousands of recruits, provide locations for the training, and help pay for the effort.

There was also no question the US military was well suited to do this. After years honing its skills in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military developed an impressive capacity to train partner forces, learning a lot of valuable (and hard) lessons along the way. This is what made these setbacks particularly sobering. When it comes to building capable forces in such situations, one can have all the will, skill, money, and allies. But still that is no guarantee. “Is it possible to build an indigenous force that will actually take control of its own destiny?” asked Army General Martin Dempsey, who before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs had spent two years training the Iraqi security forces. “I don't know.”
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Would it have made a significant difference if the US had started training earlier? Even those like me who advocated providing military assistance to the Syrians in 2012 must concede that it might not have changed much. Once the administration decided to provide direct military assistance to the armed Syrian opposition just a few months later, in 2013, it proved not to be enough, leading us to embark on a large-scale, Pentagon-led effort a year later. And then when that failed in 2015, the US returned to a more modest, small-scale effort, providing weapons and guidance from special operations forces.

As Hillary Clinton said in a 2014 interview, long before the military training program collapsed, “I can't sit here today and say that if we had done what I recommended…we'd be in a demonstrably different place.”
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After all, if our massive investments of time, resources, and troops to train forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have delivered mixed results at best, one should have reasonable expectations of what a far more modest investment under more limiting circumstances will bring.

This does not mean that we should throw up our hands and quit. Nor does it mean—as the administration's critics assert—that such failures stem simply from lack of leadership or gross incompetence, and that only if different people were in charge then everything would have worked as planned. Washington finger-pointing aside, the challenge is far tougher.

A core pillar of Obama's Long Game strategy toward the vast swath of crises stretching from Mali to Afghanistan has been to create capable partners to help do the work with us, to expand our reach without stretching us too thin. Obama outlined this policy explicitly in his May 2014 speech at West Point, where he described the goal of creating a “network” of partnerships to deal with these threats.

Yet as the president himself acknowledged, there is good reason to be skeptical this will work. There are no silver bullets: success requires having a large reservoir of patience, resilience to setbacks, and greater appreciation for the limits of what we can do. In some instances, progress will be painfully slow. In other instances, we will be better off scaling back our ambitions to achieve more focused, modest results.

THE ISIS CRISIS

The summer of 2014 witnessed a dramatic and sudden shift in the administration's approach to Syria and the broader crisis in the
Middle East. Driving this change was the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS (or in Arabic, Daesh). The rise of ISIS posed an acute threat to American interests, changing the calculus about what would be required even to achieve “contain and mitigate.” That's why the president decided to launch the Pentagon train-and-equip program. And that's also why he decided to do what his critics (and some senior advisers) had been advocating for years: conduct American airstrikes in Syria and insert special operations forces on the ground. A year after the red line, the United States military was back in Iraq and waging war in Syria.

From the early days of the Syrian war, we had worried that an extremist threat such as ISIS could emerge. Fueled by foreign fighters from Europe and financing from the Gulf, jihadis were gaining ground. We also understood the threat such extremists posed in Iraq. In the spring of 2014, when the Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Falluja fell, the US worked with the Iraqi government to give it support by expediting weapons shipments. Then in June 2014 ISIS captured the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, home to over a million people. Islamic militants were racing toward Baghdad and threatening the Kurdish region.

ISIS's capability surprised us. So did the rapid collapse of the Iraqi Army. We did not appreciate how severely it had deteriorated since 2011. Part of the reason was the fact that the US military was no longer at its side—which not only impacted the Iraqi army's ability to maintain readiness, but also made it harder for us to see how weak it had become.

Another reason we were caught off-guard was that at the time, most of Washington and the world's attention was captivated by the crisis in Ukraine. Russia's military intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea had upended the European security picture and took attention away from the crises in Syria and Iraq. (A small but personal example of this: in March 2014, I testified with other senior officials before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a hearing
that was supposed to be about Iraq and Syria, but senators spent most of their time asking us about Ukraine).

The sense of urgency changed after Mosul. ISIS now had its hands on millions in cash from captured Iraqi banks, along with heavy armor and vehicles and tons of weapons from overrun Iraqi Army depots—most of which had been provided by the US after its forces withdrew. With Iraq seemingly on the brink of collapse and Syria only getting worse, Obama decided it was time for the US to get more involved directly. The goal was to disrupt, degrade, and ultimately defeat ISIS, so it would not be a threat to us, our allies, or regional stability.

The strategy to achieve this goal had several parts: direct military action by the US and its partners against ISIS, mainly through airstrikes; strengthening indigenous forces by surging trainers and special forces back into Iraq, and then into Syria; providing significant military assistance to the Iraqis and opposition fighters in Syria; taking actions to choke off what fueled ISIS (foreign fighters, financing, and messaging); and providing humanitarian support. By 2016, there were over sixty countries involved in various parts of this effort.