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 Less than a year and a half after President Barack Obama used a
West Point speech to lay out a strategy for relying on local
partners instead of large-scale U.S. military deployments abroad,
there is mounting evidence that the so-called “Obama Doctrine” may
be failing.
Despite the U.S. investment of at least an estimated $90 billion in
these counter-terrorism efforts, Obama has found few reliable allies
to carry the load on the battlefield - and he seems to have few good
options to fix the situation.
Obama also appears hemmed in by his deep aversion to seeing America
drawn back into unpopular Middle East wars after pulling U.S. forces
out of Iraq in 2011.
Russia’s sudden moves to seize the initiative in the Syria and Iraq
crises in recent weeks have stunned U.S. officials and laid bare the
erosion of Washington’s influence in the region.
Faced by the mounting setbacks, Obama will probably only make modest
changes in strategy, according to current and former U.S. officials.
That strongly suggests that Obama will leave some of the world’s
most intractable conflicts to his successor when he leaves office in
January 2017.
“Things aren’t looking good in these places and they’re not getting
get much better anytime soon,” said Douglas Ollivant, former senior
U.S. National Security Council official on Iraq for Obama and his
predecessor George W. Bush.
“That’s the problem of working through partners. They’re not always
capable.”
Options could include stepping up support for Kurdish fighters in
Syria, cooperation with Russia to seek an end to the conflict there,
and a slowdown of the planned U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The
administration is also weighing a proposal to scale back its failed
$580 million program to train Syrian rebels to battle Islamic State,
U.S. officials said.
The Obama doctrine has floundered partly due to weak national
governance in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the failure of moderate
Syrian opposition groups to overcome their rivalries.
Still, many critics put the blame squarely on Obama for what they
see as an overly cautious approach that has given the perception of
a White House lurching from crisis to crisis.
The image of Obama as a sometimes passive world leader has been fed
by perceptions that he has allowed the civil war in Syria to fester
and has not acted forcefully enough to halt Islamic State’s
onslaught there and in neighboring Iraq.
Fresh concerns about Obama’s Afghanistan policy have been ignited by
the fall of the northern city of Kunduz to Taliban fighters this
week.
U.S. officials say the Taliban's sudden gains against Afghan forces
add a new dimension to discussions about whether to upend current
plans and instead keep a sizeable force in Afghanistan beyond the
end of 2016.
Obama and his aides have staunchly defended his approach even as
problems have escalated on multiple war fronts.
 “We've never been under the illusion that our strategy of
partnerships would be a short-term fix,” a senior administration
official told Reuters. “In fact, we've always been clear this will
need to be a long-term commitment.”
The official took Obama’s critics to task for failing to offer good
alternatives.
“Is the solution to every Iraq and Syria to insert 150,000 U.S.
troops? That is not something this president will do, nor is it
something the American people want,” the official said.
"CORE INTERESTS"
Undergirding Obama’s overall strategy is a speech he gave to
graduating West Point cadets on May 28, 2014.
There he carefully circumscribed the rationale for use of U.S.
military force – only “when our core interests demand it” – and made
clear his effort would be to “partner with countries where terrorist
networks seek a foothold.”
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That has proven far from a fool-proof method in the fight against
Islamic militancy.
On Syria, the failure of the U.S. effort to build a rebel fighting
force became clear this month when the Pentagon acknowledged just
four or five of the fighters were in combat.
The White House insisted that Obama was not to blame since he had
always been reluctant while others, including Republican critics,
had pressed him to approve the training program.
“The train and equip program was never anything but a box-checking
exercise by a White House eager to be seen as ‘doing something’,"
said Frederic Hof, a former State Department adviser on Syria now at
the Atlantic Council. “’The devil made me do it’ is this
administration's response to policy failure.”
Russia's swift build-up in Syria stands in contrast to what Obama's
critics say is a reluctant, slow-moving U.S. military strategy in
Syria.
“In an absence of American leadership, the vacuum is going to be
filled by bad people,” said Republican U.S. Senator John McCain, a
frequent critic of Obama’s foreign policy, referring to the gains
made by militants across the arc of conflicts.
In Iraq, the Shi’ite-led government, locked in sectarian tensions
with the country’s Sunni minority, is still struggling to make
headway against Islamic State. The security forces are trying to
rebuild after melting away last year in the face of a militant
offensive that captured Mosul, the country's second-largest city.
U.S. officials privately have voiced frustration with the pace of
Iraqi operations, including preparations for a campaign to retake
the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi, which Islamic State seized
in May.
U.S. officials have pointed to more positive results from military
support given to Kurdish peshmerga forces in Iraq as well as Syrian
Kurdish fighters on parts of Syria’s border with Turkey. Another
bright spot, they say, is progress made with local partners fighting
the violent extremist group Boko Haram in west Africa.
However, in Afghanistan, the loss of Kunduz dealt another blow to
Obama’s policy and raised questions whether Afghan forces will be
able to secure the country on their own, despite the $65 billion
invested by Washington to build them up.
Critics say a 2016 withdrawal plan may be premature.
Some analysts suggested that even though U.S. warplanes had begun
bombing Taliban targets in an effort to take back Kunduz, the U.S.
military may not have provided enough support early enough,
particularly for airlifting in troops.
Even if Kunduz is recaptured from the Taliban, “the damage is done,”
said James Dobbins, Obama’s former Special Representative for
Afghanistan and Pakistan and now a senior fellow at the RAND Corp.
think tank. “Everybody living there now knows they’re vulnerable.”
(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle and Warren Strobel;
editing by Stuart Grudgings.)
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