Why Syria is the new Afghanistan and Turkey is the new Pakistan
The Russian ground technicians in khaki shorts and summer hats could have been straight out of Afghanistan’s Bagram airbase in the 1980s as they refuelled and rearmed fighter jets. But the pictures were recently taken in the Syrian air force base of Latakia and released by Russia as the "Bear" flexed its muscles around the Mediterranean Sea. Since September 30, Russia has launched an aerial bombing campaign pounding opponents of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The Russian ground attack jets, Su-25 "Frogfoots" and the Su-24 "Fencers", were identical to the ones that the Soviet Union used to bomb and strafe the CIA-supported mujahideen during its nine-year-long military campaign in Afghanistan. Further evidence of deja vu came from US statements that Russia was bombing "CIA-trained fighters", as opposed, presumably, to the vicious Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS). "That’s why the Russian position is doomed to fail," US defence secretary Ashton Carter said in Washington on September 30.
The Soviet Union’s nine-year-long military campaign in Afghanistan, a historically implacable battleground 3,700km east of Syria, was the world’s last superpower proxy war. It was also one of the factors which accelerated the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The Syrian campaign, in another historical crossroad, is the first deployment of president Vladimir Putin’s resurgent Russian military machine (not counting the brief five-day incursion into south Ossetia in August 2008). The intervention has taken attention away from Russia’s precarious economic position — its energy export dependent economy contracted by 3.5 per cent this year after oil prices crashed to $50 dollars-a-barrel last year — and boosted Putin’s approval ratings.
Hundreds of Russian special forces, tanks and fighter aircrafts have created a ring of steel around territories held by president Assad’s forces and allowed the Syrian army to go on the offensive against the rebel forces. A four-year-long civil war saw rebel groups like the Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat Al-Nusra and ISIS bite away vast swathes of government-held territory, leaving Assad in control of less than a third of his country, mostly the Alawite-dominated coastal areas.
Even a month ago, Assad’s survival was in question, as he had lost 15 per cent more territory and his army was unable to mount ground offensives against the rebels. Putin's blunderbuss against anti-Assad rebels — the newest barrage of 26 cruise missiles fired against rebel targets from warships moored in the Caspian Sea more than 1,500km away — have now given his Syrian ally a breather.
Reports suggest the Russian intervention was at Iran’s behest — general Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Republican Guards’ Al Quds Force, is believed to have visited Moscow in July and sought assistance to bolster Assad’s tottering forces. Iran knows how precarious the military situation in Syria is. It has propped up the Assad regime since 2011 at a great cost, losing three brigadier-general ranked officers at the Syrian battlefront. The loss of senior Iranian officers — one each to strikes by the Al Nusra Front, Israel and ISIS — illustrates the bewildering complexity of the Syrian war. The country is now a witches’ brew of foreign fighters and a multinational bombing range. Fighter aircrafts from four of the five P5 countries are now in the air over the shattered country. Russia and the US are now trying to ensure their bombers don’t clash in Syrian airspace just as Soviet and Pakistani fighter aircrafts did, shooting each other down, during Afghanistan’s equally complex nine-year-long insurgency.
The mujahideen, as the disparate coalition of guerrillas strung across the Afghan countryside were called, were armed, trained and equipped by a grouping of Western nations, primarily the US and the UK, fronted by the CIA, which pumped in cash and arms through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI); China whose ordnance factories churned out the assault rifles and artillery pieces used by the mujahideen, and Saudi Arabia which also funded the guerrillas and contributed thousands of "Arab legion" fighters, including the son of a billionaire Saudi Arabian construction magnate, Osama bin Laden. Pakistan bore the immediate brunt of the Afghan War: Three million Afghan refugees and the corrosive flow of drugs and weapons from the Golden Crescent.
Thirteen years after the Soviet pullout, the dregs of the Afghan war hit the US. Al Qaeda terrorists, trained in camps that once housed the mujahideen, plunged hijacked airliners into the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon, heralding the beginning of the first wave of Islamist terror. The "War on Terror", a US coinage, found distant echoes with terror attacks in Bali and Madrid - a war which, in 2003, inexplicably lurched in an unexpected direction with the US invasion of Iraq. The US-led invasion destroyed Iraq as a cohesive entity, cracked open its centuries-old ethnic divide and spawned the even more vicious ISIS. The new group, built by Sunni Arabs and Saddam's former Baathists, quickly shook off their Al Qaeda mentors to launch the second phase of the Islamist terrorism, one in which the insurgent group captured and administered a territory as large as the UK.
The ISIS was emboldened by the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars in these two countries, a 2013 calculation by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of government reckoned, had cost the US more than $6 trillion dollars. The US which lost more than 6,600 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, was unlikely to commit "boots on the ground" in Syria. Neither will Russia for that matter. President Putin said in a October 11 interview to a TV channel that there was "no question" of committing ground troops to Syria. Russia, he said, was committed to a political solution.
The Syrian war, one of three still-raging Arab Spring conflicts, now into their fifth year, has meanwhile spilled into Turkey with which Syria shares a 400km border and onto Europe. As of February this year, the UN declared Turkey to be the world’s largest refugee-hosting country. It has spent $6 billion to host 2.1 million Syrian refugees.
On October 10, twin suicide bomb blasts in Ankara killed 128 persons. These were the deadliest attacks on Turkish soil. The attacks, believed to be masterminded by the ISIS, have brought the focus back to the murderous Islamic State.
This July, US army’s outgoing chief general Ray Odierno said that the fight against the ISIS would last for decades, which is a stunning expansion of older timelines suggested by the Obama administration. "In my mind, ISIS is a 10-20 year problem. It’s not a two year problem," General Odierno said in Washington. That was before Russia’s military surge into Syria. The dramatic Russian entry could possibly shorten the war but as with Syria’s distant echo, Afghanistan, the blowback on the rest of the world cannot be predicted.