Ending “Forever Wars” Produces a Lot of War

This article was published in The Washington Examiner.

In early July, President Joe Biden confirmed his intention to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by September 2021. Biden cited a February 2020 U.S. “agreement” with the Taliban that he had “inherited” from the Trump administration. In truth, President Donald Trump had made no agreement. He had already begun pulling troops out by October 2019 and signed a fig leaf to cover his unconditional withdrawal.

Biden reassessed other Trump policies and could have reassessed this one, not least since the Taliban were in violation even of their vague paper promises — most notably on their commitment to deny space to al Qaeda and negotiate peace in good faith. The truth is that Biden is ideologically committed, as Barack Obama and Trump were, to ending American involvement in “forever wars.” Regardless, this does not mean those wars end or the threats that drew the United States in actually go away.

In the last week, as Biden’s Afghanistan draw-down proceeds, at least nine provincial capitals have fallen to the Taliban. It is quite conceivable Kabul will fall before the year’s end. When asked about any of this (about Pakistan, whose secret police control the Taliban, or about China, a great power rival that stands to gain from America’s retreat), the Biden administration’s statements have been delusional. We should be very worried if administration officials actually believe what they’re saying.

Less noticed amid this carnage has been a major flare-up in Deraa in southern Syria, an area ostensibly pacified by Bashar Assad and Iran in 2018.

Popular unrest and even armed attacks in the wake of May’s rigged elections in the “cradle of the revolution” (the place where the uprising broke out in 2011) have been responded to in the usual way. That is to say, with bombardment and sieges from the regime forces of Assad, Russia, and Iran.

The Syrian rebellion was broken in Aleppo in December 2016. A Russian-Turkish agreement after this was intended to de-escalate the war with the remaining rebels, but the regime coalition used the agreement to pick off the rebel pockets seriatim. Deraa’s turn came in the summer of 2018.

Since 2018, the front lines in Syria have been frozen, and there are broadly speaking three zones, all of them controlled by external forces:

• The northwest, held by Turkey, which directly administers northern Aleppo and Efrin while guaranteeing Idlib — a province dominated by the al-Qaeda-derived jihadist group Hay’at Tahrir al Sham and housing 3 million people, many displaced from elsewhere.

• The northeast down to the Euphrates, protected by the U.S. and controlled by the Kurdish PKK, a terrorist organization that the U.S. has rebranded as the “Syrian Democratic Forces” inside Syria.

• South of the Euphrates and the west, under nominal regime control, which relies on Iran and Russia for survival.

Within this matrix, there are three small anomalies (not counting the rural zones that the Islamic State intermittently holds in the east): one in the PKK zone, where the Turks have a small slice out of the north along the border, and two in the regime zone — in the southeast, where the Americans hold the Tanf base, and in the southwest, where Deraa has a form of “autonomy.”

The other rebel pockets were forcibly defeated, one with chemical weapons, and Idlib was left standing. Deraa, uniquely, negotiated a surrender through the Russians so that “reconciled” rebels, once deprived of their heavy weapons, could effectively act as a local police force for the regime. This settlement has led to trouble.

The regime coalition cannot stand any measure of independent power. It thus works in Deraa to salami-slice its way back into total power, creating friction with the “reconciled” rebels over lines of authority. This fragile, divided authority means criminality flourishes. The population is resentful of regime behavior, having thought they would be spared the reinstitution of direct dictatorship. There is also widespread fury at the “reconciled” rebels for perceived treason. This has combined into a campaign of guerrilla attacks and assassinations, at least some of them by ISIS, which is piggybacking on these popular sentiments.

In the period after the Deraa deal, from July 2018 to March 2020, there were more than 60 protests and at least 425 violent incidents that killed 380 people. The scale of this unrest has only gotten worse in the year and a half since. A recent survey documented that while Syrians all throughout the country experience insecurity, 94% of respondents from Deraa said they feel unsafe, the highest by some margin.

This need never have happened.

Trump signed a guarantee for Deraa in 2017. This proved worthless, but the rebels in Deraa had a backup: They had been receiving support from Israel, acting as a buffer between the Israeli border and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is in command of most of the pro-regime forces. Had Israel simply stood its ground, the Deraa rebel administration could have remained indefinitely. Instead, the Israelis surrendered their rebel assets in exchange for Russian reassurances that the IRGC would be kept away from Israel’s northern border. A promise that was, of course, promptly broken. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, there is no strategic daylight between Iran and Russia over Syria.

Reflecting on Israel’s failure over Deraa, Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari recently lamented, “We will pay for that.” In many ways, one could say the price has already been paid and not by Israel alone. With Deraa’s fall, Iran had control of a third Israeli border (already controlling Lebanon’s and Gaza’s), and any means of direct pressure on the Iranians in Syria were gone. The Israelis were reduced to airstrikes against Iranian bases in Syria, and the fact they have hit the same bases over and over again tells one how effective this strategy has been. The U.S. and other international sanctions are even less effective and, in some significant ways, counterproductive.

In Afghanistan, then, the U.S. has abandoned the country to a jihadist menace and chaos that will not stay there, while emboldening the jihadist cause more generally, which now believes it has defeated two superpowers. America is also giving space to its great power enemies. In Deraa, Israel gave up the territory to Iran’s jihadists; a foretaste of what this allows was seen in May with Hamas’s rocket war. Meanwhile, a predatory chaos in Deraa has let ISIS revive and given al Qaeda and its allies a cause to use.

In both cases, an imperfect status quo was easily sustainable with a “light footprint,” and the costs of pulling the plug have been disastrous — both strategically and from a humanitarian perspective. It is to be hoped these lessons are borne in mind as the U.S. considers what to do about its presence in Syria and Iraq.