In January, in an interview with the New Yorker, Barack Obama said he had ordered a CIA study on the effectiveness of arming and funding rebel groups. Arming rebel groups does not work.
Very early in this process, I actually asked the C.I.A. to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much. We have looked at this from every angle.
Going the Distance, New Yorker
Yesterday, Mark Mazetti in the
New York Times reported more detail on the CIA study. Arming rebel groups does not work.
An internal C.I.A. study has found that it rarely works.
The still-classified review, one of several C.I.A. studies commissioned in 2012 and 2013 in the midst of the Obama administration’s protracted debate about whether to wade into the Syrian civil war, concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces covertly had a minimal impact on the long-term outcome of a conflict. They were even less effective, the report found, when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.
The findings of the study, described in recent weeks by current and former American government officials, were presented in the White House Situation Room and led to deep skepticism among some senior Obama administration officials about the wisdom of arming and training members of a fractured Syrian opposition.
C.I.A. Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels, New York Times
Joshua Keating, at
Slate, points to some academic opinion. Arming rebel groups generally does not work.
The CIA’s assessment jibes with the academic literature on the topic, as George Washington University political scientist Marc Lynch recently wrote on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog:
In general, external support for rebels almost always make wars longer, bloodier, and harder to resolve. … Worse, as the University of Maryland’s David Cunningham has shown, Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective. The University of Colorado’s Aysegul Aydin and Binghamton University’s Patrick Regan have suggested that external support for a rebel group could help when all the external powers backing a rebel group are on the same page and effectively cooperate in directing resources to a common end. Unfortunately, Syria was never that type of civil war.
Does Arming Rebels Ever Work?, Slate
The Mazetti article is being interpreted as pushback from the administration, against recent statements by Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta.
The fact that the president and his advisers are talking about the unreleased document may be part of a plan to counter a line of criticism voiced by, among others, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.
Does Arming Rebels Ever Work?, Slate
Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton made news this weekend by suggesting that the rise of the Islamic State might have been prevented had the Obama administration moved to more aggressively arm Syrian rebels in 2012. Variants of this narrative have been repeated so often by so many different people in so many venues that it’s easy to forget how implausible this policy option really was.
Would arming Syria’s rebels have stopped the Islamic State?, Washington Post
[I]t wasn’t so much Obama was opposed to such an op; he was just opposed to the way Petraeus (who oversaw the latter part of the Libya op) and Hillary implemented it. (Note, Mazzetti specifically notes both Hillary and Leon Panetta’s claims they warned Obama to respond earlier in Syria, so Mazzetti’s piece may be a response to that.)
The Timing of CIA’s Discovery Its Paramilitary Ops Fail, emptywheel
Analysts interpreting Mark Mazetti's article this way include Mark Mazetti.
The debate over whether Mr. Obama acted too slowly to support the Syrian rebellion has been renewed after both former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta wrote in recent books that they had supported a plan presented in the summer of 2012 by David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director, to arm and train small groups of rebels in Jordan.
C.I.A. Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels, New York Times
After receiving the CIA study saying that arming rebel groups does not work, the administration had armed rebel groups.
With help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters in recent months, expanding a secret airlift of arms and equipment for the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, according to air traffic data, interviews with officials in several countries and the accounts of rebel commanders.
The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.
Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A., New York Times
The CIA study claims one instance of success in arming rebel groups: the arming and funding of the Afghan anti-Soviet mujahideen.
The best example they found was the support for the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which eventually forced a Soviet withdrawal from the country. But Afghanistan’s subsequent experience doesn’t exactly make that an encouraging case study.
Does Arming Rebels Ever Work?, Slate
The only “success” CIA could find was the mujahadeen ousting the Russians in Afghanistan.
Goodie.
The Timing of CIA’s Discovery Its Paramilitary Ops Fail, emptywheel
Mazetti concludes his article saying that the administration knows that arming rebel groups does not work, and that the administration is arming rebel groups, with a quote from the Pentagon that it is going to be a long war.
Last month, Mr. Obama said he would redouble American efforts by having the Pentagon participate in arming and training rebel forces. That program has yet to begin.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said last week that it would be months of “spade work” before the military had determined how to structure the program and how to recruit and vet the rebels.
“This is going to be a long-term effort,” he said.
Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A., New York Times