On Thursday, Sept. 22, hopes of renewing the U.S.-Russia brokered ceasefire agreement in Syria were erased as Russian and Syrian incendiary bombs devastated swaths of rebel-held eastern Aleppo. Syria’s most populous city is now under the most intense bombing since the beginning of its civil war, with the Assad regime employing recently acquired bunker buster bombs that turn concrete buildings into craters. The ceasefire seems to have provided the lull the Assad regime needed to gather its forces for a renewed push. With Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the UN, condemning Russian and Syrian “barbarism” on Sunday at a special meeting of the UN Security Council, it is important for the international community to understand why the ceasefire agreement was almost bound to fail from the start, and where we might go from here.
The agreement revolved around an unlikely quid pro quo between the United States and Russia. If Russia managed to get its patron the Assad regime to stop bombing rebels and civilian centers over a seven-day period to allow humanitarian aid in, the United States and Russia would share targeting data and coordinate airstrikes against both ISIL and al-Nusra, the former Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate. For its part, the United States would bring pressure to bear on the rebel groups it and its regional allies sponsor to separate themselves cleanly from al-Nusra in an effort to de-radicalize the opposition. For U.S. policymakers the ceasefire was meant to stem the humanitarian crisis and to bolster whatever moderate elements of the rebels remain on the battlefield in Syria. Secretary of State John Kerry had argued the negotiating process in Geneva would have more solid political footing, and that the egregious humanitarian crimes committed over the last few years would abate.
The criticisms of the deal that surfaced almost immediately after its terms became clear help to explain why the ceasefire failed so spectacularly. “De-radicalization” is easier said than done. Jabhat al-Nusra, which recently renamed itself the Front for the Conquest of the Levant to project a more moderate image abroad, is one of the strongest and best-funded opposition group on the ground in Syria, and
this is representative of the paradigm across Syria’s theaters. Over the course of a five-year war of attrition, consolidation and internecine conflict have empowered the extremist Islamist and jihadi elements of the opposition. With this deal, the United States was forcing many of its sponsored rebel groups into a difficult, if not existential, position. A permanent political and military break with Nusra and other extremist fighters might well have meant being overrun by the Assad regime’s allied forces. Given the circumstances on the ground, the American effort to provide the stick of coordinated strikes against Nusra and the carrot of further funding and assistance to rebel groups who dissociate themselves from Nusra would have failed to produce any measurable moderation.
The terms of the ceasefire were also hotly contested within the Obama administration. The U.S. military expressed profound reticence over the prospect of sharing targeting information with its Russian counterparts. If the United States and Russia had begun coordinating strikes against Nusra positions that the United States has mostly spared, it inevitably would have been at the expense of the rebels and in alignment with Assad’s interests.
For Assad, the terms of the deal were equally difficult. An integral part of the ceasefire agreement, the flow of humanitarian aid to besieged areas of Syria is perceived by the regime as providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Each aid package provided by the UN contains about a week’s worth of food, all of it non-perishable. These packages can sell for $50 each on the black market, which translates to a week’s pay for an insurgent fighter. The Assad regime thus sees aid packages in strategic terms and as an indirect means of financing the opposition, and not as a humanitarian consideration divorced from the calculus of war. In addition, resolving not to bomb civilian centers in rebel-held territory ignores the regime’s base military strategy. The Syrian government pursues counterinsurgency warfare by choking opposition areas through a “submit or starve” siege approach dependent on inflicting mass casualties and making life unbearable. In light of these structural issues, the only incentives that the Russians and Syrians had to strike the deal was the potential use of American airpower on their behalf against Nusra targets.
The tactical and strategic stumbling blocks to this deal were numerous and weighty, and Secretary Kerry sold it by asking what the alternative was. America’s Syria policy is characterized by a dearth of imagination and an abundance of desperation and hand-wringing. But despite what strategic Hail Marys like the recent ceasefire agreement may indicate, the Obama administration view of Syria is anchored in a comprehensive analysis of its complexity. Inaction on Syria for a lack of options is an exceedingly difficult decision to come to because it demands the hardest thing of a messianic superpower: to recognize its limits. America is founded on the belief that it can make the world over again. In Syria, we encounter the bleak and demoralizing truth that some developments have outcomes that the United States cannot readily shape to its advantage at a reasonable cost.
Olivier Weiss is a Viewpoint writer.
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