Brett McGurk: Οι σκληρές αλήθειες στη Συρία - Η Αμερική δεν μπορεί να κάνει περισσότερα με λιγότερα και δεν πρέπει να αποπειραθεί να το κάνει

Hard Truths in Syria

America Can’t Do More With Less, and It Shouldn’t Try

By Brett McGurk

Over the last four years, I helped lead the global response to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS)—an effort that succeeded in destroying an ISIS “caliphate” in the heart of the Middle East that had served as a magnet for foreign jihadistsand a base for launching terrorist attacks around the world. Working as a special envoy for U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, I helped establish a coalition that was the largest of its kind in history: 75 countries and four international organizations, their cooperation built on a foundation of U.S. leadership and consistency across U.S. administrations. Indeed, the strategy to destroy the ISIS caliphate was developed under Obama and then carried forward, with minor modifications, under Trump; throughout, it focused on enabling local fighters to reclaim their cities from ISIS and then establish the conditions for displaced people to return.

From the outset, the strategy also presumed that the United States would remain active in the region for a period after the caliphate’s destruction, including on the ground in northeastern Syria, where today approximately 2,000 U.S. Special Forces hold together a coalition of 60,000 Syrian fighters known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. But in late December 2018, Trump upended this strategy. Following a phone call with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump gave a surprise order to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, apparently without considering the consequences. Trump has since modified that order—his plan, as of the writing of this essay, is for approximately 200 U.S. troops to stay in northeastern Syria and for another 200 to remain at al-Tanf, an isolated base in the country’s southeast. (The administration also hopes, likely in vain, that other members of the coalition will replace the withdrawn U.S. forces with forces of their own.) But if anything, this new plan is even riskier: it tasks a small cohort of troops with the same mission as the current U.S. deployment in northeastern Syria, which is ten times as large.

Much remains uncertain about the U.S. withdrawal. But whatever the final troop levels turn out to be, Trump’s decision to significantly reduce the American footprint in Syria is unlikely to be reversed. The task now is to determine what should come next—what the United States can do to guard its interests in Syria even as it draws down its military presence over the coming months. The worst thing Washington can do is to pretend that its withdrawal—whether full or partial—does not really matter, or that it is merely a tactical move requiring no change in overall objectives. The strategy that Trump dismantled offered the United States its only real chance to achieve a number of interwoven goals in Syria: preventing an ISIS resurgence, checking the ambitions of Iran and Turkey, and negotiating a favorable postwar settlement with Russia. With U.S. forces leaving Syria, many of these goals are no longer viable.

Washington must now lower its sights. It should focus on protecting only two interests in Syria: preventing ISIS from coming back and stopping Iran from establishing a fortified military presence there that might threaten Israel. Without leverage on the ground, reaching even those outcomes will require painful compromises. But the alternative, in which the United States pretends that nothing has changed, fails to achieve even these modest goals, and further undermines its credibility in the process, is far worse. This is a bitter pill to swallow after the progress of the last four years. But stripped of other options, the United States must swallow it nonetheless.

DEFEATING THE CALIPHATE

In September 2014, ISIS was on the march. The group controlled nearly 40,000 square miles of territory in Iraq and Syria, an area roughly the size of Indiana and home to some eight million people. With over $1 billion per year in revenue, the group used this self-described caliphate as a base to plan and execute terrorist attacks in Europe and urged its sympathizers to do the same in the United States. Closer to home, ISIS murdered, raped, and enslaved those it considered heretics or infidels: Christians, Kurds, Shiites, and Yazidis, and also Sunnis who disagreed with the group’s ideology. Despite this brutality—and in part because of it—the group exerted a powerful pull. Between 2013 and 2017, more than 40,000 people from over 100 countries traveled to Syria to join ISIS and other extremist groups fighting in the Syrian civil war.

I was on the ground in Iraq in the summer of 2014, when ISIS took the city of Mosul and then advanced on Baghdad. Even as the U.S. embassy began evacuating staff in preparation for the worst, American diplomats were getting ready to help the Iraqis fight back. Over the ensuing months, we assembled a broad coalition of governments united in their opposition to ISIS. The coalition’s plan was to combine military operations against the group with innovative humanitarian and stabilization initiatives, which would ensure that those displaced by ISIS could obtain basic shelter and return home after the fighting had ended.

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