The Long Game (20 page)

T
HE STRATEGY HAS
been premised on three assumptions. First, Obama remained determined that the US not “own” the ISIS problem outright. That's why there is such emphasis on strengthening partners in Iraq and building them in Syria, as well as bringing European and Arab countries into the effort. That does not mean, however, that the United States steps aside and lets others do the work alone—direct American military action is a vital component.

The second assumption is that the strategy will take time. Success must be measured in years, not days. Patience is key to sustainability. Embedded within this is the belief that, despite the real dangers ISIS poses, fundamentally time is on our side—that the progress the US and its partners can make will outpace ISIS.

Obama sees ISIS as a potent threat, but not an existential one. Sometimes his description of this has been too glib, depicting the threat in a way he certainly regrets (such as once characterizing ISIS as the “JV team”). But the underlying point is valid. ISIS is a huge concern, but it does not threaten the basic security of the United States, like Nazi Germany during World War II or the prospect of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. It is not a serious ideological rival like Soviet communism. It is not winning mass support in the Middle East.

The fact that terrorists are turning to less sophisticated, albeit sensational attacks like mass shootings (which have been happening all too often in America by those who have nothing to do with ISIS), shows how they can adapt. However, as the respected terrorism analyst Peter Bergen observes, the chances are around five thousand times greater for an American to be killed as a result of gun violence unrelated to terrorism than from a terrorist attack.
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For Obama, the greatest threat that ISIS poses is that in responding to it, we lose sight of the Long Game—whether that means “owning” the problem by occupying large swaths of the Middle East or by giving into anti-Muslim xenophobia and undermining our values and civil liberties here at home.
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But it is important always to interrogate the assumption of time, especially as ISIS evolves and finds other havens to operate from. Time is required for balance and sustainability, but time can also allow things to get worse and make the problem harder to solve. Strategic patience can become strategic constraint.

For example, time allowed the Russians to intervene directly in Syria in the fall of 2015, complicating the strategy immensely. After the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and the March 2016 bombings in Brussels, senior US officials found themselves asking whether they in fact had enough time to implement the current approach, or whether the US needed to recalibrate and do more. This does not mean throwing out the strategy for a new one, but it raises
the question of whether the US should accelerate its inputs, with more direct military action and increased effort to build the capacity of partners on the ground.

T
HIS LEADS TO
a third assumption shaping the strategy. From a policymaking perspective, one of the core challenges the administration has faced in fighting ISIS has been finding the right tools to fit the problem. ISIS has no regard for borders—we understood that the problem between Syria and Iraq was contiguous. It is more accurately thought of as “Syriaq, “in which the lines on a map are meaningless. However, the ways we use our tools to fight ISIS are not always the same. In both places US airpower is an important component, and direct military action is degrading ISIS capabilities and destroying its leadership. And in both we need a more capable military partner to confront ISIS on the ground, taking back and holding territory.

Although these efforts operate under a common military banner—“Operation Inherent Resolve”—it is a struggle to implement a one-size answer. In Iraq, the government could be part of the solution, while in Syria the government was part of the problem.

That's why the administration established what it called an “Iraq First” strategy. The Baghdad government was imperfect, but one we could cooperate with; we could share intelligence, coordinate airstrikes, provide lethal assistance, and deploy US troops to help train the Iraqi security forces. The US is working with many other partners—including the British, French, Danish, Australians, and Dutch—who are also on the ground with troops to help train and equip the Iraqis, and join in the air bombing of ISIS. We face very different circumstances in Syria, and therefore a far more difficult challenge. Neither the United States nor our partners has a substantial presence on the ground (although the US military, and that of some European countries, are slowly increasing the presence of special forces).

OPPORTUNITIES MISSED?

Given the threat ISIS poses and how horrific the situation in Syria has become, one must constantly ask what the US could have done differently. Aside from a full-scale intervention, were there alternative courses in Syria or Iraq? The short answer is yes. Yet one must acknowledge that these alternatives would not have been easy, may not have worked, and risked making things even worse.

In addition to arming the Syrian opposition earlier—even though experience shows this likely would not have been dispositive—four possibilities stand out.

The first is whether the rise of ISIS could have been avoided if US troops had stayed in Iraq after 2011. Assuming we could have solved our disagreements with the Iraqi government (or chosen to trust them), it is hard to say whether a few thousand troops primarily on a training mission could have prevented ISIS. Some critics, like Senator John McCain, vehemently believe it would have made a decisive difference. Yet over 100,000 US combat troops could not prevent the rise of the early incarnation of ISIS, al-Qaeda in Iraq. In fact the US presence was a magnet for terrorists.

However, if the US had found a way to keep a small residual force in Iraq, we would have had greater insight into how badly the Iraqi Security Forces were deteriorating, at least giving the administration more time to react. This would not have been risk-free—American troops would have been without legal protections and also likely remained terrorist targets. When US troops returned to Iraq in 2014, they did so within an entirely different context, with a new Iraqi government asking for help and openly inviting the US in. Unlike 2011, Obama believed he had an Iraqi partner he could work with (and the same is true in Afghanistan, where an enduring presence will remain). By 2016, around 3,600 American troops are in Iraq, and they will likely stay for some time.

Second, the US could have initiated airstrikes earlier in the crisis, just as it was prepared to do in order to deal with the specific threat from Syria's chemical weapons. Beyond the red line episode, we had come close to initiating strikes several times in 2013–14, only to pull back. If the United States had acted then, it most certainly would have been alone. From the sidelines many urged us to get in the fight, yet no countries were willing to join—even France, who had been with us to enforce the red line, was unwilling. At one point the US had approached Arab partners with the idea for them to invoke “self-defense” and ask us to act against Assad on their behalf, but no one would do so. This is in contrast to when the anti-ISIS campaign started in 2014, when an Arab coalition and a few Europeans joined the US military in conducting airstrikes.

Since August 2014, US and coalition forces have bombed Syria every day—as of this writing, over 3,700 strikes—without any consultation or coordination with the Assad regime (there have been over 7,600 coalition airstrikes in Iraq), hitting more than 22,000 targets combined. To put it another way: where the United States flew, it owned the airspace. Given this, in retrospect perhaps conducting airstrikes in Syria was not the grave risk that we feared.

Once the US began attacking ISIS, Assad's air defenses never even challenged American aircraft. Perhaps his unwillingness to confront us was because we were bombing his enemies; maybe the reason was because by that point his forces were degraded and exhausted. Given how rapidly the situation in Syria spiraled out of control—and how hard “contain and mitigate” proved to implement—we should have tested Assad earlier.

Third, once the US started conducting strikes in August 2014, it could have taken greater risks in the targets it hit, which could have done more to make Assad wonder whether eventually he would be next. The political and legal basis for the air campaign was that it was against ISIS, not Assad. But even within those parameters, the US
could have chosen targets that were near Syrian positions, or operated closer to regime-controlled territory while warning Assad not to engage us. We found that in the places we were bombing, Syrian planes mostly stayed away, establishing a de facto no-fly-zone over parts of the country. So we could have widened the aperture of the strikes to areas where the regime was fighting the moderate opposition. This would have increased the pressure on the regime—but it also would have exposed us to such risks as civilian casualties and escalation.

Obama acknowledges that perhaps he does not do enough to exploit ambiguity, but remains very skeptical that one can do so while maintaining escalation control. Since it would not be in our interest to escalate, he did not want to put Assad in the position of calling our bluff. Senior military officials were also firmly against this idea. Like the president, they asked what would come next, warning of the threat to US pilots and the likelihood of civilian casualties. Yet while we were all wary of mission creep, so was Assad; we should have run the risks and done more to eat away at his sense of security, perhaps gaining some leverage.

Another idea we should have explored more seriously was the “discrete” use of force at regime targets—not some massive, “shock and awe” air campaign, but precise, tit-for-tat actions against things Assad valued (such as his presidential helicopter fleet, or a favorite residence). This could have been done without attribution. For example, it has been widely reported that on multiple occasions the Israelis proved successful at taking actions against regime targets to eliminate specific threats without escalation. They never claimed credit, but Assad knew what had happened and got the message.

T
HE ADMINISTRATION
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S INCREMENTAL
approach to military involvement in Syria was driven by a desire to avoid mistakes. Thinking of the lessons of the Iraq War—and the imperatives of the Long Game—not doing “stupid stuff” made sense (after all, who actually supports doing “stupid stuff?”).

But it is worth asking whether the costs of incrementalism have been worth it, and whether by acting in these relatively modest ways—starting the Syrian training a few months earlier, maintaining some presence in Iraq after 2011, initiating airstrikes sooner and, once the bombing began, being a little more creative with targets—the US could have avoided (or at least had a better chance to “contain and mitigate”) the massive Syrian refugee crisis or wielded more influence over Russia not to escalate as it did in 2015. None of these steps would have been the kind of game-changer many critics suggest, but even a modest improvement would have been good enough. And in retrospect, they were probably achievable while not undermining the president's larger goals.

Finally, one must ask if the administration erred by focusing so much on Assad's departure—and if, as with Qaddafi in Libya, Obama set for himself the kind of a rhetorical trap he tries hard to avoid, placing too much emphasis on the fate of a single leader, and would have been better off with more flexibility.

As the crackdown in Syria intensified in 2011, the administration initially resisted pressure to call for Assad to step down. Part of this stemmed from the fact that we held on to the hope that Assad would relent on his own. After all, during the previous few years we had experienced a warming in relations with Syria and had just returned the US ambassador to Damascus. In these early days, Assad was still considered by some as a reformer, or at worst an amiable dunce, and hardly viewed as a vicious madman in the mold of Saddam or Qaddafi. By the spring of 2011, the administration had spent two years trying to negotiate a deal between Syria and Israel, and when the protests first erupted it was still considering whether the “Syria Track” of the Middle East peace process was viable.

Such hopes were extinguished by the summer of 2011, when it became clear we had underestimated Assad's brutality and concluded that the opposition would never take a deal with him still in
power. Once the administration decided that Assad needed to “step aside,” but do so in a way that was managed, it recognized that it would create a gulf between expectations and reality.

The president still believes that calling for Assad's departure is about asserting America's moral authority, and the idea that “if you weren't going to overthrow the regime, you shouldn't have said anything” strikes him as a “weird argument.”
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Yet looking back, some of Obama's top advisers wonder whether they had moved too fast to call for Assad to go—asking if the US would have been better off (and perhaps have had more policy flexibility) if it had stayed silent on the question. Some of my former colleagues now say that, as a practical matter, the US needs to steer away from this kind of “Roman Coliseum” impulse, in which American officials render a thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdict on other leaders.

However even if the administration had remained on the fence about Assad, the opposition inside Syria, as well its regional patrons, would not have. It is for that reason that the Assad regime is the essential driver of the conflict, and why one can't pretend that Assad is part of the solution. Which brings us back to the original dilemma in Syria: the question is not whether Assad should go, but how—and who should take responsibility for the outcome.

W
HEN DESCRIBING
A
MERICA
'
S
role in the world, Obama has often pledged that the “tide of war is receding.” He has also frequently declared the war in Iraq as “over” and committed to bring the US military role in Afghanistan to an “end.” So as American military forces returned to Iraq in 2014 and intensive US airstrikes continued, many argued that Obama had been finally mugged by reality.