Introduction

“Our [United States] Government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas remote from its own territory. Our actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities.” – George Kennan, Baghdad, 1944.¹

“This whole operation [is] under the tweet of Damocles” – U.S. Special Operations Forces Commander, April 2019.²

“[…] It is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home. WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.” – @RealDonaldTrump, 7:40 AM, October 7, 2019.³

On October 13, 2019, United States Secretary of Defense Mark Esper appeared on Face the Nation, a U.S. television program, to discuss the U.S. troop withdrawal from northern Syria. “It’s a very terrible situation over there,” he explained, “we have American forces likely caught between two opposing advancing armies and it's a very untenable situation.”⁴ But the two forces that Secretary Esper mentioned were hardly “advancing armies:” they were proxy forces supported by foreign sponsors. The proxies were on the frontlines; the regular armies were well behind them.

The first “army” was the Syrian Arab Republic’s armed forces—Bashar al-Assad’s military, which, according to a recent assessment, is effectively several special forces units supplemented by irregular militias organized and led by Russian and Iranian officers.⁵ As of October 2019, some of these light infantry troops were moving into northern Syria from the south to locations like Raqqa and Manbij in dump trucks and agricultural transport vehicles.⁶Others were establishing blocking positions along the M4, the lateral east-west highway that defines the southern edge of Turkey’s self-declared security zone.

The second “army” was the Syrian National Army (SNA), an anti-Assad Syrian force backed by Turkey. This force comprises up to 30 different factional brigades, mostly of ethnic Arab Syrian background, ranging from allegedly former CIA-funded moderates, to former secular nationalist fighters of the Free Syrian Army, to former members of Islamic State (IS) and Al Qaeda, according to some experts.⁷These forces seek to depopulate the Turkish-Syrian border region and expel Kurdish militias, in order to pave the way for the resettlement of up to 2 million Syrian Arab refugees in line with their Turkish sponsor’s strategy.⁸

Between these two advancing proxy forces lay not only the U.S. military, but another proxy force, the Syrian Kurds who the United States had armed and trained as part of its counter-IS strategy. It is a “very terrible situation over there,” as Secretary Esper said. This is not only because of the humanitarian catastrophe threatened by these advancing forces, nor is it because their divergent interests continue to complicate Syria’s battlespace. It is a terrible situation because what happened in northeastern Syria highlights the limitations of America’s ability to work with partner forces and proxies in the Middle East. In acting so irresponsibly in northeast Syria, the United States jeopardized its own troops, its strongest allies in the Syrian war, and its potential partnerships with proxies in the future. Those future proxies are likely to view a U.S. partnership with the following question: will we also be abandoned like Syria’s Kurds?

The withdrawal of October 2019 and resultant crisis may have been sparked—in the immediate sense—by President Trump’s particular style of diplomacy. On October 6, 2019, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan convinced U.S. President Donald Trump over the phone that Turkey could stabilize northeastern Syria and address any of the issues keeping approximately 1,000 U.S. troops in the country.⁹ Later that same day, the White House issued a press release explaining that the U.S. forces “will no longer be in the immediate area.”¹⁰ Trump further announced the new policy over Twitter, declaring, “it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars.”¹¹ Yet the crisis that followed Trump’s announcement also reflected deeper challenges at the root of American proxy warfare strategy in the Middle East.

The U.S. partnership with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) represented the best possible relationship the United States could have had with a non-state partner in the Middle East. There was a clear mission, strong international support for that mission, and a low-cost U.S. presence that could mentor and train SDF forces to carry out operations. American air superiority enabled coalition aircraft to provide robust close air support and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) support to proxies on the ground, enabling their operations, while SDF ground forces spotted targets and controlled airstrikes, enhancing the efficacy of air operations.

Even so, America’s uncertainty about its strategic aims in Syria helped generate a crisis in the proxy relationship, highlighting the pitfalls of even successful relationships, as compared to the staying power of adversaries like Iran, Russia, the Syrian government, and fundamentalist groups like Al Qaeda. Brett McGurk, former Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, reacted to President Trump’s October 6 withdrawal announcement by wishing “my former SDF colleagues the best as they find new patrons.”¹²

Proxy warfare is addictive in part because it can be successful in advancing U.S. interests while protecting American lives. David French of the National Review offered a powerful illustration of how proxies can help U.S. forces: during the 2003-11 Iraq war, a two-month U.S.-led assault on Fallujah in 2004 involved 10,000 U.S. troops and resulted in 82 soldiers killed and 600 visibly wounded.¹³In contrast, the entire five-year, U.S.-backed counter-IS campaign in Syria involved 2,000-3,000 U.S. troops deployed and only nine killed, with three dying from non-combat causes and only six killed in action.¹⁴

The model of training local forces to fight wars with support from U.S. air power, advisers, and “enablers” such as equipment, weapons, and ISR support, variously called the “light footprint” or “by, with, and through” model, lets the United States work with partners in conflict zones who are willing to put themselves in harm’s way to protect their interests and thereby save American lives.¹⁵ These kinds of conflicts fought by proxy or surrogate forces are likely to continue, because while only 27 percent of Americans support military interventions, 59 percent support counterterrorism efforts in the Middle East.¹⁶ This discrepancy is why proxy war is politically popular: Americans want to continue fighting terrorists, just not at the expense of American lives.

But proxy warfare is fraught with challenges to U.S. policymakers, and this paper will describe some of the lessons learned from U.S. involvement in the Syrian war. The paper will be divided into two parts:

Part One will analyze how U.S. efforts failed to develop effective proxies in the Syrian war from 2011-2014. Proxy warfare is complicated, as the hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops from northeastern Syria illustrates. Our assessment of U.S. involvement in Syria’s war will distill the complexities of working with proxies into three questions:

• Does the sponsor have a political strategy for what it wants to accomplish?
• Do the capabilities of the proxy match what it is being expected to do?
• Has the sponsor mitigated the problems it faces managing its proxies?

Sponsors can craft a political strategy for proxies that addresses these questions fairly easily if the goal is simply disruption. With minimal sponsor commitment and support, proxy forces can pressure a state actor or disrupt terrorist and insurgent groups. But if the goal of partnering with a local proxy force is to change the political and social dimensions of a war, or to restructure the balance of power inside a state, then that proxy is not just going to have to fight wars, but also control and govern territory to achieve the sponsor’s aims.

To have the capability to control and govern territory, a proxy needs to have coercive power, the type of authority that leads to a monopoly on the use of force that can impose laws and a logic of violence in a given area. But to control and govern territory over an extended period of time, a proxy also needs to have administrative capacity, the ability to provide key (albeit often minimal) governance services for a population, and persuasive power, the ability to convince communities that their interests are best served by its continued control.

In addition to the need to align sponsor political strategies and proxy capabilities, it is essential to manage the problems that arise in proxy relationships, specifically information deficiencies, principal-agent problems, and coordination problems. A sponsor with a clear political strategy that is well-aligned with the capabilities of its chosen proxies can still fail if it is unable to manage those proxies well.

Part Two will use the three lessons identified above to evaluate three other cases of proxies currently fighting in the Syrian war.

The first case is the U.S.-led counter-IS coalition’s support for the SDF after 2014. In this case, we find that the United States successfully addressed the three key questions for the time period in which the relationship’s primary objective remained the defeat of IS. The United States set a clear objective, the destruction of IS as a territorial entity in Iraq and Syria. The SDF had both persuasive and coercive power, and minimal but effective administrative capacity. It not only seized territory after fighting IS, but also governed and controlled that territory and its population long after capturing it. The United States mitigated proxy management problems by embedding forces within the SDF structure, reducing principal-agent problems and information deficiencies.

As a result, the United States effectively destroyed IS’s self-declared territorial caliphate in Syria. Yet, internal divisions among U.S. policymakers on the first key question—the political strategy of working with the SDF—doomed the partnership once IS’s physical self-declared caliphate disappeared. While this effort resolved the immediate military objective, it brought divisions over the longer-term political strategy back to the forefront.

The second case examines Turkey’s Syrian proxies. The Turkish Armed Forces (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri, TSK) are similar to the U.S. armed forces in that both are NATO members, and they are similarly trained. Like American forces with the SDF, Turkey is physically present along with its proxy forces, reducing the costs associated with managing its proxies. But TSK does appear to allocate discrete operational areas to its proxies,¹⁷ with regular Turkish forces in support, rather than conducting integrated operations as U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) did when embedding partnering and mentoring teams within the SDF.¹⁸ Turkey does have a political strategy for its self-declared security zone in northern Syria, should it accomplish its military objectives. However, the extent to which Turkey’s stated strategy coherently resolves Ankara’s strategic dilemma of an insecure border with Syria is questionable.

Turkey’s most significant strategic challenges, however, lie not with its political strategy, but with the capability of Turkish proxies and Ankara’s ability to manage them. While Turkey, like the United States, has sought to address the second and third key questions by using its own forces alongside proxies, it struggles with principal-agent problems with regard to its management of proxies. In addition, Turkey’s proxies lack persuasive and administrative capabilities, instead relying on a combination of coercion and kinship with local Arab or tribal populations, rendering their control brittle, creating challenges with regards to Turkey’s resolution of the first key question.

The third case is the fundamentalist insurgency, which has survived in Syria’s war despite efforts to confront and defeat it.¹⁹ The fundamentalists may be the least proxy-like forces in Syria’s foreign sponsor-dominated civil war. They are included in this paper as a contrast to foreign-backed insurgents: fundamentalist groups emerged with a distinct focus on building persuasive, administrative and coercive capabilities that would give them resilient control over population and territory for an extended period of time. They were distinguished from other groups in the early years of Syria’s war, not necessarily because they did not accept foreign money, although the proportion of their income from foreign funding was likely lower.²⁰ Rather, they were distinguished from other militants at the outset of Syria’s war because they maintained a diversified set of unrestricted funding sources whether local sources or external funders who tended to share their ideological goals and strategy and thus acted more as donors than external sponsors. As a result, when foreign donors gave fundamentalist insurgents money, those insurgents tended to use that money for governing and not just fighting. Because some of their foreign donations helped them govern, and because they focused on both governance and military operations from the outset, foreign money had the effect of improving fundamentalists’ ability to endure in Syria’s war, rather than increasing their dependence on foreign money and the complexities associated with the proxy relationship described above.²¹ Foreign money combined with locally generated sources of revenue to create a diverse and robust set of resources that fundamentalist militants could rely on to support operations and recruitment.