Ahad, 3 Jun 2012

Anwar Ibrahim

Anwar Ibrahim

Syria: A Hasty Intervention Could Be Deadly

Posted: 02 Jun 2012 10:11 PM PDT

The Guardian

The question of what should be done about President Bashar Assad and his brutal Syrian regime is not a new one. For over a year, his security forces and the violent shabiha gangs allied to his regime have carried out killings and abductions with impunity.

What has changed in the last week following the murder of more than 100 people in Houla, including dozens of children, is that a new urgency and disgust has been injected into an escalating crisis that has brought the country to the verge of civil war.

Outrage is the easiest part of responding to Assad’s crimes because what have not altered are the intractable complexities of confronting the issue. The challenges are both specific to Syria and its immediate neighbours. They also reflect a world that is more cautious after a decade of problematic, western-led, military interventions, founded on better and worse premises.

These have led to several hundred thousand civilian lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan primarily and, in Libya; they have resulted in the deaths of several thousand allied troops, and have cost trillions of dollars. The results of these interventions have been disappointing at the very least.

It is not unsurprising then that neither political elites nor their voters is clamouring for another war in a difficult neighbourhood bordered by fragile Lebanon on one side and Iran on the other, and one that would involve a modern army well equipped by its principal ally, Russia.

Indeed, when US secretary of state Hillary Clinton spoke on Syria during a visit to Denmark last week it was as much to stress the difficulties of intervening as to raise the prospect that it might happen.

It is a recognition that while it is easy to demand that “something must be done” in response to the latest horrific bloodletting in Syria, what that something should be is much harder to articulate.

Echoing Clinton, Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, set out conditions for any US-led intervention that might follow the now expected collapse of the Annan plan – notably the agreement of Russia and China on a UN Security Council for military action – which make such an expedition highly unlikely in the present circumstances.

Military sources too have been at pains to point out the differences between Libya – where a western-led coalition did intervene in an air campaign – and Syria. The reality is that in Libya the opposition, which had seized heavy weapons in the first days of the uprising, had quickly secured large areas of territory from which to operate.

An intervention in Syria would be much more difficult. Much of the conflict during the last year has not been in open desert but in large population centres in a state in which the geography of conflict is much more tightly enmeshed. As Israel discovered during its protracted adventure in Lebanon, with its complex sectarian rivalries, which mirror Syria’s to a degree, it is an easy neighbourhood in which to become intractably bogged down.

They are rivalries that feed into wider regional tensions and competitions, not least those involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, a factor that makes many of the west’s leaders even more wary.

If a full-scale military intervention either to topple Assad or protect civilians with ground troops seems off the menu of options for now, a second option – the wholesale training and arming of Syria’s rebels – seems equally problematic. Syria’s opposition is divided and fractious, with the body prosecuting most of the fighting – the Free Syrian Army – at odds with a barely representative and fissiparous Syrian National Council.

The suspicion of the presence of some fighters related to al-Qaida can only reinforce that caution. Indeed, the weapons that would make a significant difference are not small arms, but armour and sophisticated anti-armour weapons.

Another suggestion has been the creation of “safe zones” along the country’s borders, protected by air power. On paper at least, it is an attractive option that would provide safe havens for those fleeing the fighting. But, as the experience of the archipelagos of refugee camps that sprang up in Afghanistan during the first rule of the Taliban and elsewhere has demonstrated, such places can persist for years, creating their own problems. These include the risk of destabilisation of the host state if the existence of such cross-border havens draws neighbours into an expanding war.

Any solution requires the agreement of Moscow without whom there can be no intervention. As Lord Ashdown wrote recently, the west’s history of diplomatic mis-steps in its relationship with Moscow, far from making it harder for Russia to say “no” to a proposed solution, has made it easier.

None of which is to say that perhaps in the future, as occurred in Bosnia after the tipping point of Srebrenica, events might dictate a military intervention.

We are not at that stage and unlikely to reach it while Syrian opposition remains an intractable part of the problem. A mechanism needs to be created for an entity to replace the Syrian National Council that would see the quick departure of its deeply divisive chairman, Burhan Ghalioun, to create a representative and transparent body with direct political responsibility for opposition fighters.

As Lord Ashdown has suggested, international diplomacy needs to become more purposeful, building an effective consensus that includes both Russia and regional players, stripped of moral posturing. That must include an insistence that Russia and other regional players with an influence take on a greater role in the search for an end to the violence, rather than fuelling it.

In this light, the decision to discuss the crisis before the UN’s General Assembly, thereby widening the scope of the debate, is to be welcomed, not least if it leads to even more punitive sanctions against the Syrian regime and a widening of the threat of prosecution to all and any involved in war crimes.

With the growing threat of regional conflagration, a cessation of hostilities and exit strategy will cost fewer lives in the long run than a chaotic slip to an ever-wider war. What is certain is that a rush to military intervention, without an exit strategy or any notion of what might replace the present regime, will kill more children than those who died in Houla last week. For that is the nature of military interventions and why sometimes the most moral solution is the most complex.
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