According to recent press reports, we should all be encouraged about the prospects for peace in Syria. Major powers there that were diametrically opposed to each other’s policies are now talking about the country’s future.
Turks and Americans have agreed on a protected zone in the north, even if it is not clear who will do the protecting. Saudis and Russians are consulting, now that each realizes its own favorite proxies in a war that has killed 250,000 and displaced 12 million have their own major vulnerabilities.
Perhaps the Geneva process that US Secretary of State John Kerry and UN envoy Staffan de Mistura have nursed along for months will finally bear fruit, and a new government of national unity will be formed, first to replace President Bashar al-Assad, then go after ISIL?
If it all sounds too good to be true, that’s because it almost surely is. At best, the peace process remains a distant longshot. At worst, it could do more harm than good by distracting us from more promising policies to address this terrible conflict, or by producing a peace that quickly falls apart.
To bring peace to Syria, we need to focus not just on who is negotiating, but on who will enforce any possible deal. That will help sober us up about one thing right away: any such deal will probably require an international peacekeeping force that includes American troops. By working backward, from the future possible deal to current policy, it could also help us deduce a more promising and realistic path.
It can also help dispel the new and incorrect conventional wisdom in Washington that argues messy ground operations are a thing of the past for the US military, and thus we can disproportionately downsize the Army in future budget cuts.
Here’s why an international force will someday likely be required. In conflicts like this, when hatreds have been so inflamed by brutality on all sides, when distrust is rampant, when many so-called moderates have been either killed or radicalized, and when there is likely to be no clear battlefield winner anytime soon, any deal written on paper could easily collapse. To avoid such a fate, the deal needs to be well crafted — and effectively enforced.
But who will do the enforcing? The Syrian Army, formerly more than 200,000 soldiers, is now a shell of itself, and al- Assad has admitted to severe manpower shortages. Most of his current recruits probably come from fellow Alawites, as well as Christians and perhaps some Kurds, which collectively make up only a third of the nation’s population.
This Army cannot reunify Syria. It has an enormous amount of blood on its hands, having fired countless artillery shells and dropped hundreds of barrel bombs in areas populated by suspected insurgent sympathizers. Fighting for its life, and facing foes that include jihadist groups like the al-Nusra Front and ISIL that consider Alawites and Christians to be apostates worthy of death, it has pulled out all the stops. And moderate opposition forces are far too few in number to handle such a task.
Much more realistic is something like a Bosnia model of federalism, along the lines of what Joe Biden proposed for Iraq in 2006. Syria would have a central government, but a weak one. Al-Assad would be gone, and ISIL as well as the al-Nusra Front defeated.
Most governance would occur regionally. The Kurds would have a zone in the northeast; Alawites would create an autonomous area where many live now along the Mediterranean coast. Two or three Sunni-majority regions would form in the nation’s south as well as its north/central zones.
A final region, and the most difficult to police, would include much of the intermixed population belt running from Damascus through Homs and Hama up to Aleppo. Ideally, most parts of it would remain intermixed, with Sunnis and Alawites and Christians living together, though some soft partition might become necessary.
International peacekeeping forces could concentrate their efforts along the borders separating the autonomous zones and within that central multi-sectarian area, where they would seek to build a new Syrian security force.
The Bosnia mission started with some 60,000 NATO troops in a country with one-fifth Syria’s population. But it was almost surely oversized, since NATO militaries had few competing demands at the time. So a Syria mission might require 100,000 or so foreign peacekeeping troops at first. Perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 of the troops would have to be American, in order to provide adequate military muscle and logistical capabilities.
We have been hoping for a miracle from the Syrian peace process too long. It is time to ground our thinking in basic realities about power and security on the ground. Envisioning an enforceable peace deal based on the declared goal of confederation makes more sense than throwing another Hail Mary in the peace talks in Geneva.
Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “The Future of Land Warfare.”
