In the nearly-a-month since I last wrote here about Syria, not a great deal has changed. The “cessation of hostilities” has been partial at best, with regime forces consolidating gains and maneuvering for advantage around Aleppo and to the west of it, preparing for if and when the next round of fighting begins. Rebel forces, notably groups like Jabhat al-Nusra that were excluded from the deal to begin with, not ignorant of what is going on at their projected expense, have taken to resisting this positioning. Each passing week registers more truce violations and more dead soldiers and civilians alike. A regime attack on a suburb of Damascus in recent days is an interesting case of the creeping escalation back toward all-out civil war, for this took place in a spot where people and cameras could see it. The regime would only do that if it felt it was losing some tactical advantage from restraint. The subsequent rebel downing of a regime fighter jet near Aleppo, just yesterday, has brought the five-week truce to the brink of disintegration.
In the same period since I last wrote, Syrian troops aided by Russians and others, retook Palmyra from ISIS. This made a lot of news in the West, and reporters are even now rushing in to see what’s left of the classic ruins there. But this amounts to a great deal less than meets the eye. Palmyra is not and has not been for a very long time a thriving metropolis. Moreover, stuck out there on the edge of the Syrian Desert, there’s no place to hide in or around it. That makes it a hard piece of real estate to hold by a bunch of swarming irregulars with a highly fragile logistical capability. The recapture made the regime look good. The optic was of a government saving world heritage treasures from very bad guys, and it distracted people who did not know any better from what the regime was really up to further north and west.
The Palmyra business does point to an important observation, however, that most journalistic accounts have failed to articulate. While the order of battle on both sides of the civil war is modest, and while the regime’s numerical advantages are slight in terms of platforms, regime forces nevertheless enjoy what might be called a structural-social advantage. The Syrian Army is a modern army in the sense that it is fully mobile and its mobility is not dependent on civilian support-in-depth. It has its own stocks and its own warehouses and its own system of moving stuff around. Not so the rebels.
There are something like 120 separate rebel groups, and most are locality-bound based on tribal and clan as well as sectarian affinity; even the moderates clustered around the Free Syrian Army never achieved real operational integration. The salafi groups tend to be more mobile in part because of the morale provided by extremism and partly because, in the case of ISIS, its members are often renegades from traditional family links. So while the Syrian Army can surge its forces anywhere in the country it likes and needs to, a cluster of rebel fighters around Dera’a, say, cannot usually just pick up and go to Hama or Aleppo whenever they feel like it. They cannot readily stray far from the community that houses, hides, and feeds them. If they do not have cousins or relations by marriage in other parts of the country, their movement there—difficult as it may be for plain security reasons—is as likely to be looked upon suspiciously by supposed objective allies as it is to be seen gratefully. This rebel limitation enables government forces to pick and choose where to concentrate their efforts, without undue fear of being surprised by rebel maneuver.
The other major thing that has not changed in the past month is the Geneva negotiations. They have not gone anywhere, and they are not likely to go anywhere anytime soon. The rebels are not budging on their demands that Assad go before a hypothetical transitional political plan kicks into operation, and the regime is not budging on the reverse side of that argument. Some observers think that a deal is close because the Russians are ready to throw Assad over the transom. I don’t doubt the Russians would do that, but I do doubt that the sides are otherwise close enough for that gesture to make the decisive difference. As we like to say whenever we really don’t have enough evidence to know, time will tell. As with the cessation of hostilities, we have at best creeping or incremental change, but nothing yet significant.
What has happened during the past month is that the aforementioned clutch of journalists and miscellaneous chatterati have been hatching numerous explanations for the Russian “withdrawal” announced back in late February. Here again we have a lot less than seems to meet the eye.
First of all, descriptions in the journalistic tense tend to be, as Acheson once put it, “clearer than the truth,” but not for the reasons Acheson had in mind. The Russians were there in Syria before the September 30 “intervention,” and they are still there despite the February 27 withdrawal. The supposed clean lines between where the Russians were not and then were, then were and now are not, in Syria, are the delusions of unsubtle minds. The difference between the Russian position before September 30 and today is one of degree, not kind—in between which there was what we call, when we do it, a “surge.” Take the 2007 surge in Iraq, or the 2009 surge in Afghanistan: We were in these places militarily both before and after these two surges. It’s no different in this case.
So what is the difference in degree? The Russian footprint is larger thanks to an expansion and modernization of Tartus, and it has a logistical capacity to receive and maintenance military aircraft at Khmeimim that it lacked before. There are reports, too, that the Russians are examining real estate to set up a second air base near the Turkish border; that has not yet happened but it may. In addition, the emplacement of sophisticated surface-to-air missile defense batteries now functions in the north of Syria as a blocking move against pro-rebel initiatives to set up some sort of humanitarian keep-out zone on the Syrian side of the border. It doesn’t make doing that impossible, but it does make it complicated and more dangerous.
Several other explanations have been proffered for the Russian withdrawal-that-isn’t. One is that the Russians have fallen out with Assad, who supposedly refuses to purchase his own burial plot without muss and fuss, and so the Russians are leaving in pique. Another is that the Russians have fallen out with their erstwhile Iranian allies and have decided to let the mullahs carry Assad’s burdens unaided. One reason adduced for this is that Iranian expeditionary ground forces performed poorly and hence “wasted” a lot of Russian air support. Another is that the Russian leadership wanted the Iranians to restrain their expansion of oil sales in the wake of sanctions relief in hopes of depressing supplies and raising the price—which the Russians are desperate to do in light of Moscow’s dire economic situation. And when the Iranians, hungry for more money fast, refused, the Russians got uppity and left them holding the Syrian bag.
Some of this holds a little water as explanations go, and some of it doesn’t. Maybe the oil explanation is accurate to some degree, but it’s not obvious how the Russians could have missed the fact that Iranian contributions to keeping the oil market depressed for the sake of the price are very slight compared to Saudi behavior. Saudi production is the swing production that modulates price, so any Iranian promise, even if kept, would not mean much if the Saudis took a different attitude.
What all these explanations have in common, even if partly true, is that they are seeking to explain an overdetermined outcome. The Russians withdrew, to the marginal extent that they have, for a much simpler reason: Their goals had been largely achieved.
Back in September I enumerated these goals and then elaborated their implications in October. I posited three basic goals and three ancillary ones, the former three nestled inside one another like matroshka dolls.
The first, most basic and most conservative, was saving the Assad regime from imminent collapse. The Russian surge achieved that in about two months. It helped that the Obama Administration was willing still to put no skin in the game and so demoralized the rebel opposition. But whatever the reason, we can check that box.
The second, somewhat more ambitious goal was to put Russia in the diplomatic catbird seat, making it primus inter pares when it came to shaping a potential settlement, or so arranging the diplomacy that even the lack of a settlement would play to Russia’s interests. That has been achieved too, again in large part because U.S. policy took Washington voluntarily off the field of play in the belief that as far as vital interests are concerned—as James Baker famously said in a different context—“we don’t have a dog in that fight.”
The third interest was to gain leverage over the European Union and the key state actors within it by deliberately exacerbating the migrant crisis. The purpose of doing this was for its own sake but also to accelerate EU sanctions fatigue with regard to Ukraine. When I first broached this possibility, some observers did not credit it, giving the Kremlin far more benefit of the doubt than its general behavior warranted; but before long most European officials came to assume it. That box may be checked as well, although here Moscow’s ally has been not the United States but the pathetic excuse for a government that lives in Kyiv.
As to the three ancillary aims, one was distraction from Ukraine. Check that box. Another was to demonstrate Russia worthy of remaining a major arms merchant. With the announcement of major sales to Iran this past autumn, with other regional sales likely to follow, we can check that box, too. And third, Putin’s aim was to restore Russia’s status as a great power, one coequal with the United States insofar as possible at least in the Levant, and to demonstrate that while Russia stands by its allies, the United States is a fickle and feckless friend, indeed. Whether fair or not, that is the impression left standing today by the events of the past six months. So check that box, too.
As indicated before, the Russians never had any intention of landing and sustaining a large ground force in Syria—because they can neither do nor afford it. They never had any intention of going after ISIS, whether in Raqqa or anywhere else, because that is very hard and the specter of ISIS makes Assad look like a better bet than a mass murder ought in normal times to look. They would much prefer to sucker us into doing that on behalf of their own and their clients’ interests, and we might well foolishly oblige early in the next administration.
In short, if one restrains oneself from misunderstanding the status of the Russian presence in Syria—and stops calling a surge an intervention that has since been withdrawn—then one finds willy-nilly that one needn’t strain to explain things, like a phantom withdrawal, that don’t need explaining in the first place. What we’ve really been witness to lately is the strange phenomenon whereby some people manage to misunderstand things are aren’t even happening.