The Strategic Suicide of Aligning With Russia in Syria

[Boats]

The Strategic Suicide of Aligning With Russia in Syria
BY HAL BRANDS, COLIN KAHL
RE: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/07/...ssia-in-syria/

Donald Trump wants to make a partner of Russia in Syria. One of Trump’s most consistently expressed foreign policy ideas, both during the campaign and now since his election, is that the United States and Russia are natural counterterrorism allies, and that the obvious place to begin such cooperation is in Syria, against the Islamic State. Both the United States and Russia are waging war against the Islamic State, Trump’s reasoning goes, so the best way to hasten the defeat of that organization, and perhaps to launch a broader U.S.-Russia rapprochement, is by bringing Russia into the counter-Islamic State fold and undertaking more coordinated military action targeting the group. In a recent Fox interview, in which Trump controversially drew a moral equivalence between the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, he said “it’s better to get along with Russia than not and if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS which is a major fight, and Islamic terrorism all over the world, major fight, that’s a good thing.”

Trump’s sentiments on this score are not new. But in the past four weeks, there have been repeated hints that such cooperation might simply be part of a larger U.S.-Russia “grand bargain,” in which Moscow agrees to provide enhanced cooperation on counterterrorism and counter-Islamic State operations, and Washington does away with economic sanctions related to Russian aggression in Ukraine. On Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence suggested that the Trump administration’s decision on sanctions would depend on whether “we see the kind of changes in posture by Russia and the opportunity perhaps to work on common interests,” including making common cause against the Islamic State.

This idea fits squarely within the overarching themes of Trump’s grand strategy, which we described in a previous article. The idea that the conflict with “radical Islamic terrorism” is all-consuming and existential; the willingness to cut transactional deals with any actor with whom the United States shares even the most passing interests; the aspiration to get other countries to do more in the world so that the United States can slough off some of the burdens of superpowerdom — all of these concepts are at play in Trump’s advocacy of a counterterrorism partnership with Putin. But hopping in bed with Russia in Syria is an ill-considered and potentially dangerous proposition, and trading away Ukraine-related sanctions for this cooperation would be an even worse idea, for several reasons.

Contrary to what Trump has often asserted, the fact is that Russia’s military campaign in Syria — the campaign that Trump essentially wants to marry with U.S. military efforts against the Islamic State — has never actually been about counterterrorism. Its overarching goal, and one that it has been fairly successful in achieving, is to fortify the Assad regime in power and thereby protect Russia’s strategic position in Syria and the broader Middle East. This means that the vast majority of Russian airstrikes and other operations have not targeted extremist groups, whether the Islamic State or the Nusra Front (al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, which now calls itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham). Rather, Moscow has most aggressively targeted the non-extremist opposition to Assad (and civilians in opposition-held areas), in an effort to eliminate any sort of politically plausible and internationally acceptable alternative to the regime. From the outset of the Russian intervention in September 2015, in fact, as much as 85-90 percent of Russian airstrikes have targeted this moderate opposition. Russia is fighting a war in Syria, all right, but it certainly isn’t our war.

Accessory to a crime

Cooperating with Russia would also likely mean allying with Assad — Russia’s junior partner in the conflict — and thus partnering with a regime that is responsible for the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century. Just this week, Amnesty International reported that 13,000 people have been hanged in Saydnaya military prison since 2011, in addition to countless others who have died from torture or inhumane conditions. This probably doesn’t bother Trump — he has asserted (mostly erroneously) that “Assad is killing ISIS,” and he has made clear that he believes the United States needs to be willing to play rough, perhaps to the point of committing war crimes, in the struggle against jihadist terror groups. But the dangers of allying, whether explicitly or tacitly, with Assad go far beyond humanitarian concerns.

If the United States casts its lot with forces that are killing countless Syrians, mostly Sunnis, in the context of the Syrian civil war, that will only foster more extremism — directed at America — over the long-term. The next time Russia and Assad pull an Aleppo (in Idlib province, for example), by bombing and starving a vulnerable civilian population into de facto surrender, the United States will be complicit, and it will eventually reap all the ideological blowback that comes with such complicity. Moreover, it will also be complicit in behavior that is likely to worsen the ongoing migration crisis, which continues to destabilize Europe politically, and which Trump himself has blamed for the spread of Islamic radicalism on the continent.

If Trump wants to intensify the campaign against Islamic State, he will need Saudi Arabia, the other Persian Gulf monarchies, and Turkey to intensify their own efforts.

That’s not the only way in which partnering with Russia and Assad will undercut, rather, than enhance, U.S. counterterrorism efforts. This approach is likely to alienate precisely the Middle Eastern allies the United States needs in the counter-Islamic State fight. If Trump wants to intensify the campaign against the Islamic State, he will need Saudi Arabia, the other Persian Gulf monarchies, and Turkey to intensify their own efforts. But many of those countries loathe Assad — so much, in fact, that they have been supporting Syrian opposition forces for several years. If the United States effectively joins forces with Putin and Assad in Syria, it runs the risk of undercutting cooperation with these Middle Eastern partners. If a U.S.-Russian partnership in Syria also leads to a further weakening of the non-extremist opposition — as it almost certainly will — the Gulf countries and Turkey (which already back a number of hardline Islamist opposition groups) might also respond by becoming even less discriminating with respect to which groups they support in Syria, thereby fueling rather than extinguishing the forces of extremism in that country.

As this danger implies, the most likely beneficiaries of a U.S.-Russia compact are the exact same extremist groups against which that partnership would ostensibly be directed. For if the remaining moderate Syrian opposition groups perceive that the United States has abandoned them and made common cause with Moscow, they will have no incentive to resist aligning with Nusra and other extremists, if only as a means of survival. The result is that Nusra and other extremist groups will become even more deeply woven into the fabric of the Syrian opposition than they already are, giving them greater political and military leverage down the road. Extremist groups are most easily targeted and defeated when they are isolated; partnering with Moscow would have precisely the opposite effect.