“The Proxy War Problem in Syria”,
Miriam R. Estrin, Jeremy Shapiro,
Foreign Policy, February 4, 2014.
It is hard to look at the Syrian civil war, with over 100,000 people dead and
nearly 9 million others displaced, without wondering how we got here. By now,
history must have taught us how to end civil wars before they rise to this level of
violence. We know, above all, that we are supposed to heed the maxim that those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But the trouble in the
case of Syria is not that we’ve forgotten the past, but that everyone remembers it
differently. Take only a quick title search of opinion pieces on Syria, and you read
not only "How Syria is Like Iraq" but also how "Syria is Not Iraq," and "Bosnia’s
Lessons for Syria" as well as "Moving Past the Bosnia Fallacy."
Every generation has its own particular battle of analogies. For the last
generation, that fight was Munich versus Vietnam; Interventionists hurled the
lessons of Munich –appeasing aggressors just leads to more aggression — against
the anti-interventionists’ shield of Vietnam — overreaction creates needless,
unwinnable wars. For this generation, as the title search suggests, it is Bosnia
versus Iraq. Interventionists deploy Bosnia as an example of successful U.S.
coercion, an operation that, they argue, would have been easier and saved more
lives if it had happened earlier. Anti-interventionists point to Iraq, where U.S.
intervention unleashed a protracted and ongoing violent conflict that it could not
solve. Nowhere has the Bosnia vs. Iraq contest become more heated than in the
arguments for and against intervention in Syria.
The problem is that these analogies are often weapons in a policy struggle,
deployed to support pre-existing positions rather than to illuminate any historical
tendency. This analogical arms race often results in surface-level debates about
whether Syria is more like Iraq or Bosnia or the Third Punic War. In fact, all
analogies are flawed in important ways because every war is, of course, unique. It
makes little sense to fight over which is best. But history can still be useful
because it can demonstrate vividly how certain factors tend to cause certain
outcomes. Analogies are merely communication devices, but important ones for
explaining underlying historical tendencies.
The Proxy War Problem
In Syria, both the Bosnia and Iraq analogies should point us toward a greater
understanding of the proxy war problem in modern civil wars. Civil wars are too
often wrongly conceived as a conflict between — and only between — two
intrastate parties. In fact, modern civil wars are frequently fed by competing
external supporters who use local proxies as part of a larger regional or even
global struggle. As long as outsiders can access the theater, insurgents eager to
fight usually have little difficultly linking up with external supporters willing to
supply them with funds and weapons. And these weapons needn’t be too
sophisticated or wielded by trained armies, since insurgents armed with rocketpropelled grenades, AK-47s, and improvised explosive devices pose a formidable
challenge even to a Western military trying to impose order. These weapons may
not be enough to bring decisive victory, but they are enough to maintain a sense
of disorder and instability. So long as external supporters keep the weapons and
money coming and insurgents stay motivated, a conflict can last essentially
forever. What history does show — in Bosnia, Iraq, and many other places — is
that effective U.S. or Western intervention requires understanding that the proxy
war problem is a recurring feature of modern civil wars.
The Cold War experience bears this out. Two fairly matched external supporters
— the United States and the Soviet Union — supplied their proxies in civil wars in
Angola, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, among many others. No matter the
continent or context, the external supporters had access to the theaters of
conflict, a steady supply of weapons, and populations who were willing to fight
each other endlessly. Indeed, the number of civil wars in the Cold War period
rose "by leaps and bounds," with 18 percent of countries fighting civil wars. Only
after the fall of the Soviet Union did the civil wars gradually come to an end, as
the external supporters lost interest and stopped supplying their proxies. The
massive drop-off in civil wars at the end of the Cold War period is striking, to
such an extent that the Economist concluded that "nothing has done more to end
the world’s hot little wars than winding up its big cold one."
In the post-Cold War period, no external supporters remain willing to finance
civil conflicts across the entire world. But in those regions where external
supporters still support proxies, the same dynamics allow civil wars to fester. In
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, insurgent groups with external supporters were
able to persist in fighting even against the massive military might of the United
States. U.S. planners who thought the invasion of Iraq would be a swift operation
failed to account for many complications, including Iran’s ability to take
advantage of wartime disorder and a porous border to funnel money and
weapons to militant groups. Annual disbursements of just $100 to 200 million to
local insurgents allowed Iran to undercut massive U.S. military power and keep
the Iraqi civil war alive.
In Afghanistan, external support from Pakistan allowed insurgent groups to grow
even as the U.S. military fought to root them out. Indeed, one of the central
insights of the Obama administration’s 2009 Afghan strategy review was that
Pakistan presented the most serious threat to the U.S.-led mission. Bruce Riedel,
chair of the review committee, has observed, "Pakistan is the country most critical
to the development and survival of al Qaeda. It is the eye of the storm." General
Stanley McChrystal’s independent review of the situation in Afghanistan also found
that "Afghanistan’s insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. Senior leaders
of the major Afghan insurgent groups are based in Pakistan … and are reportedly
aided by some elements of Pakistan’s ISI." The review concluded that Pakistan’s
external support could not defeat the U.S. military, but it meant that the United
States also could not end the Taliban insurgency.
It is axiomatic in war that the enemy gets a vote. But so do the enemies’ external
supporters, who will certainly respond to any moves by the United States to
change the nature of the war and may also escalate their support. But the
persistence of the proxy war problem does not mean that U.S. military
intervention can never succeed in ending civil wars. It simply means that success
depends on properly sizing up and dealing with the other external supporters of
civil war.
That is why the Bosnia case is so important. The lesson of Bosnia is that U.S.
intervention can succeed in putting an end to a violent civil war, but only after the
competing external supporters are neutralized either militarily or diplomatically.
In Bosnia, both Serbia and Croatia served as external supporters. The success of
the U.S. strategy was predicated first on making a deal with Croatia and then on
separating Serbia from its Bosnian Serb clients. This was done in the first
instance by training up the Croatian army and helping it demonstrate its
capability in retaking the Serb Krajina in Croatia and in threatening the largest
Serb-occupied city in Bosnia.
As the military balance turned against the Serbs, the United States and its
partners renewed their offer to Serbia for an ethnic enclave in Bosnia that might
satisfy Serbia’s core interests even if the Bosnian Serbs could not accept it. As is
usually the case in proxy wars, Serbia did not have the same interests as its
Bosnian Serb proxies, and the key was finding the seam through both coercion
and accommodation. Once that was done, the United States and NATO were able
to turn to airstrikes to coerce the Bosnian Serbs to lift the siege of Sarajevo and
settle for what would be offered at Dayton. What the Bosnia case shows is that
neutralizing external supporters is necessary to enable outside intervention to
succeed.
Implications for the Syrian Civil War
The proxy war problem highlights that, for the United States, ending civil wars is
not merely a question of political will, but also a question of capacity. It is true
that the U.S. military is the most powerful in the world, but it is not the case that
U.S. military intervention will always tip the balance toward peace. Civil wars
supported by external backers on all sides can persist for years, as the Syria
example all too painfully shows.
And once civil wars are viewed through the lens of the proxy problem, it becomes
easier to appreciate the great and multiple challenges of military intervention,
which must not only deal with insurgents on the ground but also their powerful
backers outside the battlefield. Interventions that do not cut these external
supporters from the theater or persuade them to compromise will be unable to
break out of a civil war stalemate.
The Syrian civil war is a particularly noxious brew of external supporters and
their proxies. For intervention to succeed, the United States would not only have
to neutralize the Assad regime’s external supporters — Iran, Hezbollah, and
Russia — but also gain the backing of other external supporters of the fragmented
opposition — particularly Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, each with distinct
proxies within the Syrian opposition and distinct goals that do not always align
with U.S. policy. Only then could U.S. military power hope to have a decisive
effect on the conflict between Assad and the Syrian opposition. In this context,
the ongoing "Geneva II" process has started off in the wrong place: the internal
conflict in Syria. When it comes to proxy civil wars, working from the inside-out
is counterproductive and will likely have the perverse effect of prolonging the
war. Instead, the Geneva process should work first to establish agreement among
the various external supporters about a compromise that they can all accept.
Syria, of course, belongs to the Syrians, and they properly bristle at the notion
that outsiders should determine their fate. But the realities of geopolitics are
never fair and rarely kind. External supporters of both sides have the power and
the will to continue the Syrian civil war until the very last drop of Syrian blood is
shed. For the United States, fighting the Assad regime directly without cutting off
his external supporters will not bring peace. To the contrary, it will only inspire
competing external supporters to increase their aid so no one side can win
decisively. That outcome will be of little benefit to the Syrians who are currently
suffering.
This lesson does not flow from a strict comparison with Iraq or Bosnia — but it is
informed by both cases, and it flows from a broader examination of modern civil
wars. Battles over analogies only illuminate the bitter debates of the present;
history, more broadly understood, always has subtler lessons.
Miriam R. Estrin is a postdoctoral associate at Yale Law School. Jeremy Shapiro is a
visiting fellow with the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. From 2009
to 2013, he served in the U.S. State Department on the policy planning staff and in the
bureau of European and Eurasian affairs and currently consults for the policy planning
staff. The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do
not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.