The White House ordered a small group of Special Operations troops to Syria last week. Although President Barack Obama has said that the deployment is an extension of what the United States already has been doing in Syria, many have accused him of breaching his promise to keep American boots off the ground in Syria.
George Washington Today assistant editor Julyssa Lopez spoke with Professor of Political Science and International Affairs Stephen Biddle who analyzed the president’s decision and shared what other military actions could unfold in the region.
Q: President Obama has tried not to drive U.S. involvement deeper into Syria and has promised no U.S. ground troops. Why did President Obama decide to deploy Special Operations troops to the area, and did he break his promise?
A: The larger strategic issue is that the United States has real interests in Syria, but limited ones. Securing those interests, however, would require a lot more than limited military involvement. Not many Americans think those limited interests are worth what destroying the Islamic State would cost.
That leaves the president in a real bind. What he’s been trying to do for over a year now is to find some real-but-limited means for securing real-but-limited interests, and the trouble is that such means aren’t sufficient to defeat enemies whose stakes aren’t limited in the ways ours are.
The result has been a whole series of small, incremental escalations that the president has resorted to because the previous level of force wasn’t enough; the deployment of special operations troops to Syria is just the latest iteration. When getting all the way out isn’t politically viable but doing enough to actually destroy ISIL is way too expensive, the President has instead chosen a series of efforts to do a little more but not enough, and this deployment is another one of those.
Q: What does the Obama administration think the special operations troops can achieve, and how effective might their presence be?
A: A: I don’t think they’ll achieve very much. The U.S. troops will train and advise allied military organizations on the ground in Syria. And this will surely improve those allies’ skills to at least some degree. But the political barriers to real success here are very high, and the most important of these barriers is interest misalignment between ourselves and our allies.
The United States is the only actor in Syria for whom destroying ISIL is the first priority. Everybody else has some other interest they think is more important. And they understandably tend to pursue the interests they think are most important rather than the goal we Americans have.
For example, the Special Forces troops will probably be training a variety of Sunni rebel groups that we hope will ally with the Kurdish militia YPG and march on Raqqah, the ISIL capital. The Kurdish YPG, however, is much more interested in establishing an independent Kurdish state than in destroying ISIL. They tend to be pretty effective when what they’re asked to do is consolidate terrain that is a plausible part of a future Kurdish state. They tend not to be very effective in conquering areas beyond that. Raqqah is beyond that. It’s very unlikely that adding a handful of Special Forces advisers will change the political interest calculus of the Kurdish YPG and cause them to risk their lives, their troops and their military power in pursuing an American goal they don’t share.
Q: How has the conflict in Syria escalated? What drove Obama to send Special Forces troops?
A: Part of it was the failure of the previous training and advising effort based outside Syria—it didn’t make much headway against the Islamic State.
Another big part of the decision was the Russian escalation. There is a perception on the part of some Americans that Putin has transformed Syria in a way that could change the tide of battle in favor of his ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, at our expense and the expense of the rebels we’re allied with. The belief was that the administration wasn’t doing enough to respond to this. I tend to think the Russian escalation is closer to a looming quagmire for them than it is to a game-changer that can win the war for their ally Assad, but I think the Administration felt it needed to do something in response, and given the constraints they’re operating under the result was a move to do a little more, but only a little.
Q: What other military actions could be taken in Syria?
A: There are a lot of other variations on the theme of limited military action that could be tried but haven’t yet. Many have proposed a no-fly zone, and that could be tried. We could establish a safe zone near the Turkish border for protecting refugees. We could increase the sophistication or the lethality of the weapons we provide to rebel groups. For example, we could give them anti-aircraft weapons to defend themselves against Syrian and Russian government airstrikes. We could have American Special Forces troops on the ground in Syria participate in combat, in the form of directing airstrikes.
There are dozens of different ways you could do a bit more, and my guess is we’ll see a fair fraction of these tried over the course of the next few years – but without a lot more success than the ones we’ve seen so far.
Q: Could our strategy of limited military action change if the conflict worsens?
A: We’re likely to continue mission creep, so we will probably become more involved, but I expect our involvement to remain limited all the same, and I doubt it will suffice to destroy ISIL any time soon.
If we were really serious about defeating and destroying ISIL in the reasonably near term, we would have to send well over 100,000 American troops into Syria. Look at the analogy to Iraq. An American military that had over 100,000 troops in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 was not able to defeat an insurgency that included ISIL’s predecessor organization Al Qaeda in Iraq. That was with a large Iraqi military that was nominally helping us and a much larger program of airstrikes than what we’re currently flying in Syria. It took a surge on top of that, plus some good luck in the form of the Anbar Awakening, to stabilize Iraq in 2007-8. The idea that we’re now going to stabilize Syria with a smaller effort than that is pretty unrealistic.
But the whole challenge here is that very, very few Americans think it’s worth sending 160,000 American troops to Syria. There’s no meaningful support for anything remotely like that on either side of the aisle in Congress or in the public. But simply to withdraw would be to admit failure and to sacrifice a stake that, while limited, is nevertheless real. That’s why the administration is stuck in this conundrum where what it takes to secure our stake costs a lot more than what the stake is worth, but getting out doesn’t seem viable either. The result is a true dilemma that we’re likely to be living with for quite a while.
