WORLD_ SYRIA_ Former Ambassador to Syria Urges Increasing Arms Supply to Moderate Rebels

Former Ambassador to Syria Urges Increasing Arms Supply to Moderate Rebels

By MICHAEL R. GORDON 
JUNE 10, 2014
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Robert S. Ford’s misgivings about the Obama administration’s policy toward Syria became so great last summer that he sought to leave his post as the senior United States envoy for Syria.

After arranging a transfer to the State Department’s inspector general’s office, senior officials asked him to keep working on Syria. But with the United States providing only limited military support to the Syrian opposition and the Geneva peace talks in tatters, Mr. Ford finally concluded that he could no longer represent administration policy, and in February, he left without publicly saying why.

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Related in Opinion Op-Ed Contributor: Arm Syria’s Opposition  JUNE 10, 2014

Now that he is free to speak his mind, however, Mr. Ford is no longer so quiet. In his first detailed policy recommendations since leaving the State Department to become a resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, Mr. Ford urged the United States and its allies to substantially step up the supply of arms to the moderate Syrian rebels in order to increase the opposition’s leverage in potential peace talks and combat the rise of extremist groups there.

“The Free Syrian Army must have more military hardware, including mortars and rockets to pound airfields to impede regime air supply operations and, subject to reasonable safeguards, surface-to-air missiles,” Mr. Ford wrote for the Op-Ed page in Wednesday’s editions of The New York Times.

“We don’t have good choices on Syria anymore,” Mr. Ford added. “But some are clearly worse than others. More hesitation and unwillingness to commit to enabling the moderate opposition fighters to fight more effectively both the jihadists and the regime simply hasten the day when American forces will have to intervene against Al Qaeda in Syria.”

What make Mr. Ford’s arguments especially telling is that some officials who are not free to publicly express their own views in the buttoned-up State Department agree with him.

“My strong sense is that the position that we ought to be doing a lot more to support the nationalist Syrian opposition enjoys strong backing among people at the Department of State with any connection to the Syria issue,” said Frederic C. Hof, who worked on Syria issues at the department from 2009 to 2012 and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

During his three decades in the foreign service, Mr. Ford served in Iraq and was ambassador to Algeria. But he is best known for his role as ambassador to Syria as Syrians rose up against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Ford was a sharp critic of the government’s repression. In September 2011, a pro-government mob tried to break down the door when he went to a meeting with an opposition figure in Damascus. It took four hours before the Syrian police arrived on the scene and Mr. Ford was able to make his way back to the United States Embassy.

After the American Embassy was closed in February 2012 because of the deteriorating security in Syria, Mr. Ford became the chief American envoy to the Syrian opposition.

Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story But the past year has been a frustrating one for American diplomacy. In a May 2013 trip to Moscow, Secretary of State John Kerry enlisted Russian support for an international peace conference aimed at ending war in Syria. His goal was to persuade Mr. Assad to hand over power to a transitional administration. But with only limited military support the moderate opposition had little leverage in the talks, especially since Iran and Russia were funneling arms to the Assad government.

The moderate rebels, Mr. Ford wrote in his Op-Ed article, “doubted they could extract concessions given their current level of material support, and the talks in Geneva in January and February proved them right.”

Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, defended the Obama administration’s policy on Tuesday.

“He’s an incredible diplomat,” Ms. Psaki said referring to Mr. Ford. “But there is a difference between being a private citizen and being within the government, and a great deal has changed. Conversations have changed. Efforts have increased since he left the government.”

But the extent of the administration’s support for the opposition remains unclear.

The White House has signaled its support for a congressional provision that authorizes the Pentagon to train and equip “vetted members” of the Syrian opposition — a step that is a supplement to the limited covert program that has been carried out by the C.I.A. But it is not clear when such Pentagon training might begin.

And while the White House will not say what weapons it is willing to provide to the Syrian opposition, it has made clear that it still opposes providing surface-to-air missile, or Manpads, to Syrian rebels, fearing that they might fall into the wrong hands.

In making his case for an increased response to the Syrian military, Mr. Ford underscored that political and military steps need to be used in combination. And while the United States does not need to provide all of weapons to the moderate opposition, he said it should provide some of them.

“What has to be clear is that the Americans are backing the opposition so that other countries get the signal and act,” Mr. Ford said in an interview on Tuesday.

And he cautioned that any strategy needed to be sustained for years, especially since any future negotiations are expected to be long and arduous.

“Even if we do arm the opposition, and I certainly hope we do, it is not going to fix the problem quickly,” Mr. Ford said. “It’s going to be a long-term effort that will probably go through the administration and into the next.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 11, 2014, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Former Ambassador to Syria Urges Increasing Arms Supply to Moderate Rebels. ***



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