David Rohde

Next week in the Mexican resort town of Los Cabos, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin will meet on the sidelines of the G20 summit. Mitt Romney and his aides say that after 15 months of dithering on Syria, it is time for Obama to confront Putin on an increasingly brutal conflict that has left 10,000 dead.

“President Obama’s ‘reset policy’ toward Russia has clearly failed,” Romney said in a statement this week. “Russia has openly armed and protected a murderous regime in Syria, frustrated international sanctions on Iran and opposed American efforts on a range of issues.”

In an interview on Thursday, Richard Williamson, a senior foreign policy adviser to the Romney campaign, argued that the White House should stop naively hoping the Russian leader will end his support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Since when is it the U.S.’s job to sublet its interests to an authoritarian leader in Moscow?” Williamson asked. “What world do they think they live in?”

Election-year hyperbole aside, the Romney camp is right. Moscow is not going to give the U.S. an easy way out of Syria.

From the cold, calculating viewpoint of Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, the Syrian conflict is actually a boon for Russia. For the last year, a former superpower that had lost virtually all of its relevance in the Middle East has been the focus of global attention.

“When you look at it from the Russian point of view, they have actually felt that they have a winning strategy,” Carroll Bogert, a senior official with Human Rights Watch who recently visited Moscow, told me. “They have forced the world to beat a path to their door, that they hold the trump card, that they are the most influential over the Syrian regime.”

And yet, Russian and the American views on Syria could hardly be further apart. In a world where technology should make facts clearer, delusions fester in Moscow. Bogert said some Russian media outlets have reported that the NATO bombing campaign in Libya killed 10,000 civilians. Western journalists and human rights groups put the number at roughly 70.

Some in the Russian foreign policy establishment admit that Assad’s forces are carrying out human rights abuses, but most Russian analysts accept the Assad regime’s claim that it is crushing an al Qaeda-backed Islamic insurgency. Most importantly, it is unclear that Moscow has the influence it claims over Assad. Instead of putting the Kremlin’s perceived power to the test and potentially failing, dragging out the conflict is in Putin’s interest.

Assad, meanwhile, is slowly escalating his attacks and betting that Washington’s tolerance will rise as well. The Syrian leader knows that a major U.S. military intervention is unlikely in an American election year.

“Right now, the regime is testing the U.S. resolve, slowly but surely escalating its violence to see if Washington responds,” said a Damascus-based analyst who asked not to be identified. “It’s been doing this for 15 months and hopes to go all the way. They believe they have much more to do on the scale of horror.”

So far, the Obama administration has adopted a series of easy – and often contradictory – approaches in Syria. It is letting Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar arm the Syrian opposition. At the same time, it claims to support a diplomatic solution.

The result is that the Russians believe the American support for diplomacy is insincere. And the Syrian opposition believes American officials are not seriously backing them. Meanwhile, Islamists are a growing force in the Syrian opposition.

In a telephone interview from Turkey this week, Mahmoud Mosa, a civilian member of the Syrian opposition said U.S. officials had pledged to provide non-lethal aid earlier this spring. Today, he is still waiting.

“They promised me they would provide us with communications and some medical equipment,” he said. “But it has not happened.”

In his meeting with Putin next week, Obama should set a deadline for one final diplomatic push. It is unlikely that it will happen, but the so-called Yemen option – in which Assad departs Syria as Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh left his country – should be tried.

After that, the Obama administration must finally make a hard choice – and take a political risk. It must either turn its back on the horrors the Assad regime metes out against its own people and be hammered by Romney, or use American air power to help Turkey and the Arab League establish safe zones in northern Syria.

The Obama administration must be willing to use force in Syria. The risks of inaction now outweigh the risks of action.

A bloody stalemate has emerged. As the opposition receives more arms, it is slowly gaining control of rural areas but unable to seize cities. Government forces and militia, in turn, have grown more brutal.

Bosnia and other conflicts show that the longer the fighting drags on, the more bitter the postwar divide. More important, as the Sunni-Shia fighting escalates in Syria, it is destabilizing Iraq, Lebanon and other neighboring countries. The risks of a regional conflagration are growing.

If a final attempt at diplomacy fails, American air power should be used to help Turkey and the Arab League create safe havens in northern Syria along the Turkish border. The use of force should be limited. No American ground troops should be sent to Syria. And no American military action should take place without the full support of the Arab League.

The creation of safe havens will save civilian lives and reduce the influence of Islamists in the Syrian opposition. It will show the Syrian elite that the Assad regime is finished. And it will end Putin’s perverse free ride.

PHOTO: Demonstrators hold an illustration depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Russia’s national flag and the Syrian opposition flag, during a protest against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Kafranbel, near Idlib June 12, 2012. REUTERS/Shaam News Network/Handout

By David Rohde
The views expressed are his own.

This is a response to Rory Stewart's book excerpt, "My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention."

The most important phrase in Stewart’s essay is his statement that a “light, long-term footprint” should be adopted in Afghanistan. I agree but he paints a dark picture of all Western efforts in the country.

While Stewart is correct in many of his arguments, he presents a seductively simplistic picture of abject failure. Unquestionably, Washington has focused too much on the military effort. And Stewart is right to argue against a policy of simply pouring in more foreign troops. Yet his portrait of foreigners achieving nothing in a decade stokes a dangerous isolationism gaining credence in both liberal and conservative circles in the West.

It is presented in subtle terms, but Stewart’s argument of cultural differences plays into an ugly, colonial-era view that Afghanistan and the greater Middle East are inherently backward. The region’s people, culture and faith, an extreme interpretation of the argument goes, have nothing in common with the West.

The region is not inherently backward, nor anti-Western. It is enduring a long and bloody conflict between religious conservatives and urban liberals. Instead of walking away, the United States and Europe must find a more effective way to back those liberals over the long-term.

The notion that the west can simply walk away from Afghanistan is an appealing fantasy.  A hasty American withdrawal and rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will strengthen the Pakistani Taliban's effort to seize control of Pakistan and its nuclear weapons. A nuclear-armed Taliban state will destabilize the greater Middle East, a region the world economy still depends on for oil. Unless Washington adopts radically new energy policies and stances toward Israel, the U.S. will need stability in the Greater Middle East for decades to come.

In recent testimony before the U.S. Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “an entire year of civilian assistance in Afghanistan costs Americans the same amount as 10 days of military operations." Stewart is correct in declaring such an imbalance a core failure in Afghanistan, but he goes too far. His portrait of virtually all aid projects failing is one dimensional.

Since 2002, the number of children in Afghan schools has soared from 900,000 to 7 million. Thirty-seven percent of students are girls. A vast improvement in healthcare has emerged, with the percentage of population enjoying access to basic health care rising from 9% to 64%. Infant mortality has declined by 22 percent. Over 5 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan, increasing the country’s population by 20 percent.

In many ways, the country’s cities are thriving, with Kabul’s population tripling from an estimated 1 million in 2002 to 3.5 million today. Young urban Afghans relish mobile phones, access to the Internet and a flood of Afghan-produced popular culture. Many see comparatively liberal Dubai or Turkey as their role model, not conservative Saudi Arabia. At the same time, the Taliban retain support in the rural south and east, the country’s traditionally conservative areas.

Overall, it is simply untrue to suggest that nothing has been achieved in Afghanistan or that the western presence has only made things worse.

Yes, too many aid projects were short-term efforts designed to meet political needs in Washington, London and other foreign capitals. More than any other factor, short time frames and a lack of Afghan involvement doomed projects. Development programs have succeeded in other countries, but they spanned decades.

The core failure of the western effort in Afghanistan has been the inability to produce security across the country. Without security, all efforts at political, economic and social reform will fail, whether they are Afghan or American led. That fueled a belief that more troops were the answer.

When I covered Afghanistan from 2001 to 2008, Afghans and American officials both believed that foreign troop levels were too low. With roughly 25,000 American troops in Afghanistan as compared to 140,000 in Iraq through 2007, many hoped more foreign troops would finally increase security. The Obama troop surge raised the level of U.S. troops to 100,000 in 2010.

It was not wholly ineffective, as Stewart contends. The surge greatly weakened the Taliban in their strongholds in the south, bur failed to stop high-profile suicide bombings and assassinations. Clearly, maintaining such high American troop levels is financially unsustainable over the long-term. Afghans must lead the fight, not Americans.

The presence of foreign troops alone has not led to failure in Afghanistan, as Stewart argues. Two other dynamics doomed the effort as well. Pakistan’s continued support for the Afghan Taliban - particularly the Haqqani network - gives them a sanctuary to plan high-profile attacks in Kabul. At the same time, President Hamid Karzai’s inability to ease the country's deep ethnic tensions, endemic corruption and weak governance hampers Afghan security efforts. Yes, there has been failure in Afghanistan, but the fault lies with Pakistani generals, President Karzai and American officials.

The assassination this week of the head of the Afghan government’s peace council shows that the Taliban are a ruthless movement that will not easily reconcile with Afghan moderates. The presence of foreign troops does aid Taliban recruitment, but hardline Taliban will not suddenly moderate if American forces withdraw. The retaliation they will mete out to their Afghan opponents will be savage.

Sadly, intensifying civil war is likely Afghanistan’s future. The Pakistani military's policy of backing the Afghan Taliban, which Admiral Mike Mullen confirmed in unusually blunt Congressional testimony today, will continue. Hardliners in New Delhi, in turn, will back the Northern Alliance. India and Pakistan will engage in an unnecessary and pointless proxy war whose primary victims will be Afghans.

The U.S. must gradually withdraw its forces while continuing a long-delayed process of training Afghan security forces. Afghan President Hamid Karzai must be forced to keep his promise to leave office when his term expires in 2014. And American military aid to Pakistan must be cut off as long as its generals continue to back the Taliban.

If an Afghan government emerges that is committed to reconciling with Taliban moderates, fighting Taliban hardliners and continuing to rebuild the country, Washington should back it with large amounts of American aid, not large deployments of American troops.

All Western effort in Afghanistan is not folly. The United States and Europe must develop a long-term strategy that backs local moderates as they lead the fight against hardline Taliban. Stewart is correct that the effort since 2002 served Afghan moderates poorly. Simply abandoning them would be an even greater disservice.

PHOTO: Student leaders of the first grade class at the Gandanak Girl's School participate in a visit by the regional command's cultural advisor, in Daykundi province, June 8, 2011, in this photo provided by ISAF Regional Command (South). REUTERS/U.S. Army Sergeant Sam P. Dillon/Handout