Arming Our Present And Future Enemies

Feeling war weary after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States saw in the Syrian civil war both the need to stop a brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad, while it also recognized the danger of putting American lives at risk in another country's civil war. 

Thusly reasoned, the long and storied tradition of proxy warfare that served the United States in Vietnam and the Afghanistan of the 1980s, was put to practice again. 

Never mind that it was the United States that armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan against Russia who would later launch global jihad on America and bring down the Twin Towers. 

No, that couldn't happen in Syria this time because history doesn't repeat itself. Except that it did.

For a brief history on what is a maddeningly confused conflict with dozens of armed factions forming often brief coalitions before turning on one another, one should start with the Free Syrian Army or FSA and its start as a part of the Arab Spring movement that attempted to bring democracy al-Assad's Syria. 

Yet the United States' dream of a free and secular Syria was only ever a fantasy and the weapons delivered to these rebels were soon in hands of either al-Qaeda, the Islamic State or any one of dozens of radical Islamic rebels dotting the region. 

With the original plan to train and arm at first 5,000 rebel troops and then expand the support in the following year, it seems farcical to recognize that no more than five (yes, just 5) of the trained and armed fighters, at a total cost of $500 million, actually fought for a free and democratic Syria while the rest have defected to the various factions of radical Islam and have taken their American supplied weapons with them. 

To add insult to injury, after recruiting more to their cause, these five soldiers were attacked by Islamic suicide bombers in the small patch of land they held in Southern Syria and nearly wiped out.

The Kurdish forces have been excluded from the Geneva negotiations at the insistence of Turkey, yet the Kurdish fighters are the faction receiving the most support in war material and even embedded US special forces now. 

The United States has no choice since the equipment it supplied to the Iraqi Army has provided the Islamic State with the heavy weapons it needs to wage war and against which unaided Kurds stand little chance. 

Joshua Landis, a University of Oklahoma expert on the Syrian conflict, estimates that "Probably 60 to 80 percent of the arms that America has shoveled into the region have ended up gong " to IS or al-Qaeda-linked groups. 

According to conservative estimates, around $150 million tax dollars per year have flowed into the Syrian conflict, much of it through the CIA and through the labyrinthine politics of the region, have found their way into the hands of radical Islamists of one faction or another, either through false promises or the dubious channels of the Saudi government that supports Wahhabi style Islam in Syria.

The Free Syrian Army has almost as a whole defected by now to form parts of either al-Qaeda or IS, though the United States has clung to supporting them with war material despite having renounced democracy or pledged themselves towards genocide and Islamic supremacy. 

The generous gifting of TOW anti-tank munitions able to oppose the heavy armor of the Syrian regime's Russian main battle tanks recalls the stinger missiles supplied to the mujahideen of Afghanistan in the 1980s to counter Russian air power. How long until these anti-tank rockets are used against Americans?

Trying to untangle a messy web of alliances and agendas in a culture and political system Americans simply do not understand has resulted in arming a myriad of enemies in a fractured civil war that has already claimed more than 300,000 lives and given rise to ever more dangerous foes such as the Islamic State, the Army of Islam, al-Nusra Front and a dozen others. 

It is time to end the cycle of reckless proxy warfare and stop arming our enemies in the next conflict just as we fan its flames.