We’re still suckers, Mr President – but that could change

Donald Trump should have linked his Syrian pullout and Afghan drawdown to moves towards stabilisation.

Donald and Melania Trump at al-Asad base in Iraq on Boxing Day. Picture: AFP.

At al-Asad air base in Iraq this week on his first visit to a war zone, Donald Trump defended his decision to withdraw from Syria and pull half the US force from Afghan­istan.

The US President seemed less concerned about facts on the ground than political theatre, telling troops: “We’re no longer the suckers, folks … Our presence in Syria was not open-ended, and it was never intended to be permanent. Eight years ago, we went there for three months, and we never left.”

To paraphrase former Democratic senator and diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the President is entitled to his own opinion on Syria but not his own facts. And facts matter to the troops, who have to face the reality of war, not just its theatre.

Most soldiers at al-Asad would know that eight years ago — Dec­ember 2010 — was well before the war in Syria even started and years before US forces became involved in it. In truth, US troops have been in Syria in small numbers for little more than three years, in slightly larger numbers for 18 months, and an enduring engagement is precisely what the President’s aides had been describing until the day before his announcement (which is precisely why several of them, notably Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and special envoy Brett McGurk, promptly quit).

The Syrian conflict started in March 2011, when pro-democracy protests progressively turned into an armed uprising by June that year. Jihadists quickly co-opted segments of the originally secular rebel movement. Tribal and Kurdish militias joined the rebellion in early 2012, Sunni rebel groups swelled with sponsorship from neighbouring states, while Iran and Hezbollah intervened on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, turning Syria into a full-blown regional proxy war. By 2013, Islamic State had emerged, playing a key role in the conflict even as it used Syria as a base for its eventual break back into Iraq in 2014. All of this happened well before the US became involved on the ground.

If anything, the initial international response was too timid — including the diplomatic failure to engage early to protect civilians and prevent unrest escalating to full-scale war, and US president Barack Obama’s August 2013 failure to enforce his “red line” after Assad gassed people at Ghouta. It was more than a year later, in late September 2014, when a US-led coalition including Australian aircrews began bombing Syria, and these strikes were tightly focused against Islamic State.

Apart from two small special forces raids in July 2014 and April 2015, the first US military boots on the ground in Syria belonged to 50 trainers who did not deploy until October 2015, more than four years after the war began. Their numbers increased to 300 in April 2016, with other coalition partners contributing trainers, advisers and forward controllers for airstrikes.

Civilian organisations — aid agencies, humanitarian non-governmental organisations and intelligence services — had been on the ground longer, but with little success. I know this history intimately as my research firm provided teams that performed on-the-ground reporting for aid agencies and NGOs in Syria from early 2012, a full 3½ years before the first US troops arrived.

But you don’t need to have been a participant to know this history. Anyone following the news in recent years knows as much.

That Trump is rewriting this history doesn’t invalidate his decision to withdraw. As I wrote last week, his instinct is defensible on strategic grounds, as a step towards an offshore balancing strategy that holds the slim but real promise of letting the US and its allies disengage from two decades of occupation in the greater Middle East. But, as I also noted last week, the way that decision was communicated matters, and its consequences will be real and ugly for partners such as the Kurds and the secular Syrian rebels.

The facts also matter because if Trump does want to move to an offshore balancing strategy — working with and through local partners to do the heavy lifting on the ground, while providing advisers, funding and other “enablers” such as airstrikes, drones and special operations forces to support them — then he needs to understand the history of these conflicts, or start listening to remaining advisers who understand it.

To uninformed observers, the past 18 years of war may seem like an unrelieved series of exhausting and frustrating failures. To be sure, many of the largest-scale efforts — the occupation of Iraq, say, or the surge in Afghanistan — have been costly and protracted out of all proportion to their benefits. But alongside this series of large-footprint failures, there have been several resounding successes, each with something in common: a light-footprint approach combining small, specialised civil-military teams on the ground with airborne firepower, sea-based forces and, critically, a large local ground force doing most of the fighting.

The first was in Afghanistan in 2001. When the last Taliban stronghold, the city of Kandahar, fell on December 7, 2001 — less than eight weeks after the invasion — there were only 110 CIA officers and about 300 special forces troops in Afghanistan. A slightly larger force of US marines — under the command of Brigadier-General Mattis — also had launched from ships and flown hundreds of kilometres inland to seize a southern Afghan base.

This tiny coalition ground force was backed by overwhelming airborne firepower from the US Air Force and navy, launching an average of 110 airstrikes every day, as well as surveillance satellites and drones. But (and this is the key) there were also more than 50,000 Afghans fighting with us against the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, and it was the combination of this highly motivated Afghan ground force with a small number of Western advisers, airpower, intelligence support and the occasional sea-based raid that routed the enemy.

Likewise, in Iraq in 2007, after another large-scale fiasco, the success of the surge depended not so much on the 30,000 additional US troops in country as on the so-called “Awakening” — 110,000 Iraqi tribal fighters who took up arms and worked with us against al-Qa’ida and the forerunners of Islamic State. Because these Iraqis otherwise would have been part of the insurgents’ recruiting base, their switching sides was a double whammy for the guerillas.

Again, advisers and trainers, along with small raiding groups, heavy airpower from land-based planes and aircraft carriers, and a series of light-footprint enablers, allowed the Awakening to decimate terrorist networks and vastly reduce civilian casualties and sectarian killings within months.

In 2014, when Islamic State quickly overran multiple cities and seized a third of Iraq and about the same proportion of Syria, Obama’s most important decision was to go with a light-footprint approach. A few thousand trainers and advisers (this time including a significant Australian component), plus small numbers of forward controllers directing drones, airstrikes and artillery, provided the enablers that allowed Iraqi and Kurdish forces to recapture a string of cities from Islamic State in 2015-16. Again, the light footprint approach worked — at negligible cost to the coalition — because we were working with a large and highly motivated local partner ground force.

The same synergy was evident in Syria in 2016-17, when the Syrian Democratic Forces, along with a southern rebel coalition and Kurdish forces in Syria’s northeast, successfully crushed Islamic State’s territorial caliphate, recapturing key cities including the terrorists’ de facto capital at Raqqa, and scattered the group. Again, a few hundred advisers and controllers working with a large local partner force performed extraordinarily well at very little cost.

It will not have escaped anyone’s notice that none of these episodes resulted in an enduring, stable peace. In each case, a brief period of success was followed by political disengagement and a return to instability.

But to expect the military (rather than civilian political leaders, or conflict-affected communities themselves) to deliver such outcomes is to misunderstand the nature of military force, the purpose of which is to create the conditions under which a peaceful resolution becomes possible, not to deliver that resolution itself.

At some point, political leaders need to take responsibility for war termination and conflict resolution. The failure of military forces to deliver something that is actually the responsibility of elected leaders should not be a criticism of the military but, rather, of their political masters and ultimately of us who sent them to do the job.

And as far as military techniques go, if the goal is to create the conditions for conflict resolution at minimal cost, then the evidence is clear: the light-footprint approach does so at far lower cost, with many fewer casualties (including far fewer civilian deaths) and on a far more sustainable basis than large-scale, long-term wars of occupation.

That Trump seems to understand that no American (or any citizen of Australia, Britain, Canada or any of the other coalition countries) has endorsed an open-ended, functionally unlimited war against all enemies, everywhere, all the time — or approved permanent campaigns of occupation in places such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan — is to his credit. That he clearly does not know the history of what has worked or failed in those campaigns represents a failure of his understanding, and perhaps of his advisers — including Mattis, who understands these issues — to get through to him.

As I wrote last week, Trump’s strategic instinct to disengage from large-scale, long-term occupation campaigns in favour of offshore balancing is sound. The irony is that the operation in Syria (and to a lesser extent in Afghanistan) provides the template — a small-scale approach, working through local partners supported by enablers — that would allow him to achieve his strategic goal. During the discussion about options for Syria, military officers in the Pentagon allegedly made exactly this point to the President.

Likewise, Syria and Afghanistan, in strictly military terms, are perfectly sustainable campaigns for the coalition. The problem is political — turning military success into the leverage needed to consolidate peace. And this is the final irony in the way Trump communicated his decision to leave Syria and halve the force in ­Afghanistan.

In announcing it the way he did, without preconditions, with no quid pro quo from other players and no prior co-ordination with allies, the President squandered any leverage he might have gained. Imagine, for example, if Trump had told Syria, Iran, Turkey and Russia that he was prepared to fully withdraw all US forces from Syria within the next six months, but that in return they must cease barrel-bombing Syrian civilians and engage in genuine peace talks.

Imagine if he had directed his negotiating team to tell the Taliban that he was willing to halve the US presence in Afghanistan and examine the need for any further long-term presence, provided they ceased disrupting next year’s elections, helped the coalition against Islamic State, and agreed to talks on a power-sharing arrangement under international supervision.

The result — US troops out — would have been the same. But the impact on the ground could have been dramatically different, with all belligerents encouraged to make peace. There’s no telling whether such an approach would have worked. It may well not have succeeded. But it would have had a far greater chance than a unilateral, hands-in-the-air pullout.

Light footprint, local partners and political leverage: the lessons aren’t that complicated to understand, even if they are fiendishly difficult to put into practice.

For all the soundness of Trump’s strategic instinct, as Mattis and McGurk depart, his remaining advisers now need to focus on ensuring he understands the real history of what actually has and hasn’t worked since 9/11, and the role of political theatre — at which he clearly excels, as this week’s events again demonstrated — in translating battlefield success into peace and stability.

If the President can get that right, or even do a somewhat better job than his two immediate predecessors, he could claim a remarkable achievement: we would indeed no longer be the suckers.

David Kilcullen was a senior adviser to US general David Petraeus in 2007-08, when he helped to design and monitor the Iraq war coalition troop surge, and was a special adviser for counter-insurgency to US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. His most recent book is Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror (Black Inc).