{"id":64114,"date":"2015-09-21T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=64114"},"modified":"2015-09-21T04:12:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T03:12:54","slug":"our-high-priced-mercenaries-in-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/09\/our-high-priced-mercenaries-in-syria\/","title":{"rendered":"Our High-Priced Mercenaries in Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"A<\/a>

A U.S.-coalition aircraft attack in Syria. Credit Photo by Veli Gurgah \/ Anadolu Agency \/ Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

17 Sep 2015 – <\/em>The U.S. campaign to create a new ground force to fight the Islamic State appears to be a flop. The program<\/a>, designed to train some fifteen thousand Syrians in the course of three years\u2014at a cost of five hundred million dollars\u2014has only a handful of fighters in Syria. \u201cWe\u2019re talking four or five,\u201d General Lloyd J. Austin III told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday. Austin heads Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East and South Asia, a position made famous by former General David Petraeus. Austin conceded that the rebel program is \u201coff to a slow start.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a joke,\u201d Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire Republican, responded.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis certainly isn\u2019t \u2018Charlie Wilson\u2019s War,\u2019 \u201d Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told me after he testified, at a separate hearing, for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Wilson was the Texas congressman who helped to mobilize covert funds to arm and train more than a hundred thousand Afghan rebels to successfully oppose the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (Tom Hanks portrayed Wilson in the 2007 movie.)<\/p>\n

Exactly a year ago, President Obama announced<\/a> a new \u201ccomprehensive and sustained\u201d strategy to \u201cdegrade and ultimately destroy\u201d the Islamic State, which became known as Operation Inherent Resolve. In Syria, the operation centered on a train-and-equip program for rebels in a \u201cNew Syrian Force\u201d to fight on the ground, complemented by American air strikes on ISIS weaponry, facilities, and leaders, and by a social-media campaign to counter ISIS propaganda.<\/p>\n

A U.S.-led coalition has now carried out more than twenty-five hundred air strikes on Syria, according to Central Command data, and another four thousand in Iraq. But U.S. officials acknowledge that air power cannot alone destroy ISIS. The cost<\/a> of all U.S. military operations against the Islamic State\u2014in both countries\u2014has reached about four billion dollars, or more than ten million dollars a day, the Pentagon said last month. The New Syrian Force, meanwhile, barely exists\u2014and has done nothing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we\u2019re counting on our fingers and toes at this point\u2014when we had envisioned fifty-four hundred by the end of the year,\u201d Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said, referring to the rebel fighters. She seemed astounded. \u201cIt\u2019s time for a new plan.\u201d*<\/p>\n

The Pentagon claims some success in halting the pace of the blitz that took the world by surprise in June, 2014. ISIS has since been forced into defensive combat. Central Command now hopes to \u201ccapitalize on lessons learned\u201d about how to deploy its new rebel allies, Austin told the committee.<\/p>\n

But both Democrats and Republicans expressed distress about the U.S. program. \u201cI\u2019ve been a member of the committee for nearly thirty years, and I\u2019ve never heard testimony like this\u2014never,\u201d John McCain said. \u201cBasically, General, what you\u2019re telling us is that everything\u2019s fine, as we see hundreds of thousands of refugees leave and flood Europe, as we\u2019re seeing now two hundred and fifty thousand Syrians slaughtered.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the past year, McCain noted, the Islamic State has also expanded globally, with operations or alliances in Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, and Somalia. \u201cOne year into this campaign, it seems impossible to assert that ISIL is losing and that we are winning,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The hearing took place amid reports<\/a> that a whistle-blower within Central Command filed a formal complaint this summer charging senior officers with skewing intelligence data to portray false progress. The Islamic State still holds roughly a third of both Syria and Iraq. Last week, General Martin Dempsey, the retiring Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged<\/a> that the war against the Islamic State is \u201ctactically stalemated,\u201d with no dramatic gains on either side.<\/p>\n

The rebel training program has been troubled from the start. Recruiting has been hard, as has vetting for past political and family connections. U.S. plans have been clumsy. The recruits, who trained in Turkey, were not always reliable or fully committed. A number of them left without completing the course. In July, shortly after returning to Syria, many of the program\u2019s fifty-four graduates were killed or captured by an offshoot of Al Qaeda. Others simply fled, leaving only the handful in the fight. Another class that is currently training has just more than a hundred new recruits, the Pentagon policy chief Christine Wormuth told the Senate hearing.<\/p>\n

The failure reflects a pervasive flaw in U.S. efforts across the Middle East and South Asia\u2014many involving U.S. Central Command\u2014to create friendly forces to fight its causes on the ground. For many Syrians, the U.S.-trained rebels are perceived as little more than guns-for-hire, Robert Ford, the former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, told me. \u201cAmerican mercenaries, that\u2019s what I\u2019d call them. They\u2019re trained by Americans. They\u2019re paid by Americans. They\u2019re supposed to fight for American goals\u2014which are out of synch with local priorities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mandate of Operation Inherent Resolve is to confront the Islamic State, but the Syrian opposition wants, first and foremost, to oust President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces are far deadlier. In the first six months of this year, they killed more than six times the numbers of Syrians killed by the Islamic State, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Syria specifically, there\u2019s no convergence on who the enemy is,\u201d Fred Hof, a former State Department Syria specialist in the Obama Administration, told me. \u201cThere\u2019s a general tendency to come up with ideas that may sound good in an inter-agency meeting, that check every box, and that scratch everybody\u2019s itch, but then have no bearing to what\u2019s going on on the ground.\u201d Hof left the government out of frustration in 2012 and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. \u201cAs a rule, you can\u2019t create a foreign army to carry out your own mission,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Bush Administration faced a similar problem when it tried to create the Free Iraqi Forces before its 2003 invasion. Congress allocated ninety-five million dollars for a training program by U.S. troops at Camp Freedom, in Hungary. The Iraqi opposition, led by Ahmed Chalabi, pledged to recruit thousands of exiles. In the end, it mustered about ninety-five men. Some U.S. officials nicknamed<\/a> it the \u201cmillion-dollar-a-man army,\u201d and acknowledged that it would probably be insignificant in the war against Saddam Hussein. In one class of twenty-one recruits, many had paunches and gray hairs in their mustaches; the average age was forty-two.<\/p>\n

The United States failed on a much bigger scale in rebuilding the Iraqi military after Saddam\u2019s ouster. In 2004, Petraeus boasted of U.S. progress in recreating the Iraqi Army from scratch to confront extremists. \u201cIraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously in the face of an enemy that has shown a willingness to do anything to disrupt the establishment of the new Iraq,\u201d he wrote<\/a> in the Washington Post. <\/em>But that army disintegrated overnight after the Islamic State invaded, in 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe witnessed the collapse of the Iraqi security forces, in which the United States invested twenty-five billion dollars over an eight-to-ten-year period,\u201d Katulis said. Billions of dollars\u2019 worth of U.S. military equipment was abandoned on the battlefield and became instrumental to subsequent ISIS military gains. \u201cNow we\u2019re back to square one,\u201d Katulis added. \u201cAnd the same thing has happened with the Afghan Army, and rebuilding it in fits and starts.\u201d (Similar programs, to train the Vietnamese military, in the seventies, and the Lebanese Army, in the eighties, also failed. The United States was forced to hurriedly withdraw its forces from both countries.) \u201cMuch of our debate on the Middle East, about what tools will be effective, has failed,\u201d Katulis said. \u201cWe have not produced sustainable solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this comes at a time when Syria\u2019s future borders, and viability, are at stake. Under the pressure of its multifaceted war, the country, widely considered to be the strategic center of the Middle East, has all but disintegrated. Eighty per cent of Syrians now live in poverty. Life expectancy has plummeted by twenty years.\u00a0 Unemployment is nearly sixty per cent. Syria\u2019s economic infrastructure and institutions have been \u201cobliterated,\u201d the Syrian Center for Policy Research reported earlier this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The humanitarian crisis is the gravest since the Second World War. Seven million Syrians have been displaced<\/a> from their homes and their sources of income inside the country, according to the United Nations. More than four million<\/a> refugees have fled Syria altogether, straining resources in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. And now, with some three hundred and fifty thousand refugees<\/a> fleeing to the West, the Syrian crisis has become Europe\u2019s crisis, too.<\/p>\n

_________________________________<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Correction: Claire McCaskill is a Democrat, not a Republican as originally stated.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 newyorker.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. campaign to create a new ground force to fight the Islamic State appears to be a flop. The program, designed to train some fifteen thousand Syrians in the course of three years-at a cost of five hundred million dollars-has \u2026 ‘We’re talking four or five,’ General Lloyd J. Austin III told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday [16 Sep].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}