A little more than a day ago, rebels in northern Syria crossed the boundary between themselves and government forces, launching what appears to have been a surprisingly successful offensive, the first in years, their first successes in a long time. Indeed, at least in Canada, the Syrian Civil War has not been much in the news, overshadowed by other conflicts. One could even argue that this offensive is the product of those other conflicts, one of their knock consequences, as it were. Why is this important? What does it tell us about the state of foreign policy.
Foreign policy is a complicated thing that is subject to a range of contingencies. There are appreciable differences in the way different scholars and political figures view foreign policy and think about what their country should be doing on the international stage. My intention is not really to get into that and I don't want to turn other people's tragedies -- people caught up in the fighting -- into my own soapbox.
The rebel offensive was not, in fact, new. Its size, scope, and objectives seem to be new but even while most of our media were ignoring it, fighting has been going on in Syria. We should also have no illusions about the rebels. They do include pro-democracy forces. But, they also include Islamicists with whom the supporters of democracy and equality might otherwise have little truck or trade.
What is interesting to me is the scope and depth of this offensive. Rebel forces contend that the offensive itself is a response to government and Russian (I mention Russia for a reason) bombings aimed to destabilize redevelopment in rebel controlled parts of the country.
Livemap, a good place to get relatively current information, shows the rebel offensive across large swath of the border previously separating them from government forces. Moreover, rebel forces seem to be gaining ground rapidly, sweeping past check points, overwhelming what appear to be relatively limited government forces and taking control -- according to some news reports -- of significant military equipment.
What happened? How could the rebels have been so successful and what does this mean? The Syrian Civil War, we need to remember, is a multi-front, multi-force war with extensive foreign intervention. Iran and Russia have supplied forces and significant military equipment and expertise to the Syrian government. Without this support, it is likely that it would have collapsed. The Islamic State, at one point, controlled large swaths of Syrian territory -- although few significant population centres -- while Kurdish and other forces control other parts of territory. Some rebel groups "reconciled" to the government and their forces now fight on the government side and Turkey directly intervened, creating a security border, of some sort, in the north supposedly protecting against Kurdish inclusion. There are also shifting alliances. Kurdish forces allied to other democratic forces have worked with government forces to prevent further Turkish intrusion while both sides fought against the Islamic state, tending to stay out of each others' way, rather than working together.
Syria became a proxy war of sorts in the reconfiguring power relations of the Middle East. Iran and Russia backed the government Assad regime while Turkey and the US backed some of the rebel groups. The end result is a fractured and divided country, a massive refugee problem, and an incredible death toll.
It would be difficult to pin down all the different interests. I don't think Turkey is, for example, looking to dramatically expand their sphere of interest in Syria, at least that is the noise they are making while Russia and Iran (also working together against Ukraine) do seem to want to expand their authority and prop up their allies in the government. Because of the manifest threat from the Islamic state, other countries -- such as the US -- were willing to play a more limited role, supporting some groups and having some modest military presence. Syria might also not have been viewed as an area of pressing US concern or interest, as well, with the US at the time bogged down in its failed intervention in Afghanistan and the morass that became Iraq.
For its part, Russia seems to have been OK with a piece of the pie, as it were, and a frozen conflict. A frozen conflict is a conflict that continues with either limited or low level fighting, few gains by anybody, but no peace. For a range of reasons, Putin-era Russian foreign policy was OK with frozen conflicts. It has a number: Transnistria, Georgia, the Donbas and Crimea, along with Syria. Russia also propped up (under the guise of peacekeeping) Armenia in its conflict with Azerbaijan.
There may be advantages to frozen conflicts from a Russian perspective. Russia is interested in extending its power and hard power is one of the few weapons it has at its disposal. It is on the wrong side of international law in most of these conflicts (say, in Georgia, the Ukraine, Transnistria) and so international mediation that respected international law is a no go for them. In addition to that, the governments of a range of country (China, India, Israel, the central Asian republics) were willing to ignore international law or at least look the other way because they had self interested reasons to maintain some kind of positive relationship with Russia. While democratic countries in the west had either (1) little interest in these parts of the world or (2) in the case of Syria, were willing to let Russia and its proxies bring down a huge hunk of the Islamic State.
The problem highlighted by what is going on in Syria is that this approach to foreign policy -- to live with frozen conflicts and resolve problems through hard power -- might have reached its limits. It failed completely in Nagorno-Karabakh. It took the Azeris ten years, but they had ten years because it was a frozen conflict. Armenian forces collapsed and Russia was in no position -- with about 90% of its forces engaged in Ukraine -- to do anything. The result was that Armenia now no longer wants to be part of the Russian orbit. Likewise, the pro-democratic forces in Georgia don't seem willing to go down without a fight. They might not win, but the process is not going to be easy or smooth. And, the Syrian government now seems to be caught flat footed and, at least right now, don't have a response. Their main arms suppliers (Russia and Iran) have to direct their arms supplies elsewhere with Hezbollah having taken a pounding from Israel and the Russian offensive in Ukraine requiring more and more weapons.
Russia and Iran have been, so far, able to fight multi-front conflicts because of vast energy wealth, but the ability to fight a conflict is different from winning it. The rebels in Syria are showing that.
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