By BENNETT RAMBERG | 8/22/12 4:30 AM EDT
The Middle East: flash forward four years to 2016. President Obama, still president or not, visits a memorial in or near Syria commemorating the tens of thousands of innocents who died in war that pitted the Assad regime against its people. Obama conveys his regrets: “We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred.”
Plausible? Think back to 1998 and the apologia of another president who presided in a time of mayhem. When Bill Clinton made the above remarks, the Rwanda civil war had come and gone four years earlier in a sea of 800,000 dead. Today, with all we know about events in Syria, it would be inexcusable for another president to make a similar comment sometime in the future.
But this need not be. Despite all the killing, the battle for Syria’s future remains to be written. This gives Washington and allies time to reduce the carnage and salvage a tattered reputation as fence sitters. This will require a military commitment, but not boots on the ground.
Two military templates exist to reverse matters - the Libya/Kosovo air war and foreign supported Afghanistan/Vietnam guerilla models stand out. Although imperfect, both remain superior to steps tried, ongoing and others on the shelf to bring the Syrian tragedy to an end.
We already find limited application of the first in the infiltration of men and equipment from Turkey and Lebanon. But for the effort to mimic the successful North Vietnamese and Afghan mujahedeen stories, the foreign military aid must increase dramatically. Even at that, the regime change could be long and painful.
NATO’s Libya and Kosovo air campaigns provide alternatives, arguably more effective but also more intrusive. Kosovo remains the classic air power success story. There, the Western alliance’s air forces beat the Serbian government into submission without any foreign and few competent local ground forces, granted without having to eliminate the Serbian regime. In Libya, air power broke Moamar Khadafi’s military capacity allowing the regime’s ragtag opponents to prevail.
Would Syria offer a parallel opportunity? Yes and maybe. Certainly NATO would dominate the skies as it sought out and destroyed Assad’s command and control, defenses and vital infrastructure. Growing opposition on the ground can seek to hold what is bombed. But unlike Libya, which is appears to rebuilding without foreign peacekeepers, Syria’s far larger and divided population would require insertion well beyond the 17,000 deployed in much smaller Kosovo to prevent a bloody revenge civil war and to help develop civil society.
But why these templates as opposed to alternatives? Simply, earlier coaxing and sanction tactics fell far short while others will not make a difference. The shame of Syria was the failure of the international community to grasp early the Assad regime’s determination to use all means to stay in power. With the failure of the Security Council to agree on an action plan, the Syrian government had carte blanche to go after the rebels. And while the infiltration of personnel, small arms and communication equipment from neighboring countries more than pricked government security forces and encouraged defections, the Assad government has held on to its security command structure sufficiently to mount ever greater military operations and kill more of its people.
By now it ought to be clear that the Syrian leader is more Moamar Khadafi, willing fight to the end, than Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine ben Ali, prepared to flee into exile.
Of course we can still hope that the corrosive effects of the opposition’s resistance and the domestic revulsion to regime’s tactics will garner increasing popular support to prompt government collapse or a military coup. But, if not, then what? Should the international community continue to largely sit on its hands? Does international inertness make the community complicit in the regime’s killing?
The proposed military templates provide an alternative.
Bennett Ramberg (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins, J.D., UCLA) served as a policy analyst in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the George H.W. Administration.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79954.html#ixzz24JKHcRsL
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