“Even with fighting raging in Syria and President Bashar al-Assad digging in, the State Department and Pentagon are quietly sharpening plans to cope with a flood of refugees, help maintain basic health and municipal services, restart a shattered economy and avoid a security vacuum in the wake of Mr. Assad’s fall, administration officials say.”
“Mindful of American mistakes following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, both agencies have created a number of cells to draft plans for what many officials expect to be a chaotic, violent aftermath that could spread instability over Syria’s borders, even though no official could predict whether Mr. Assad’s demise was weeks or months away.”
“The administration’s efforts have been driven by a bleak prognosis shared by most officials: Mr. Assad’s fall would be likely to set off a grave, potentially violent and unpredictable implosion in a country strained by even more tribal, ethnic and sectarian divisions than Iraq, possibly in the midst of a presidential election campaign at home.”
“The State Department and Pentagon planning efforts became more systematic last month after hopes for an internationally brokered resolution faltered in the face of Russian and Chinese opposition in the United Nations Security Council. The planning is being closely coordinated with regional allies like Turkey, Jordan and Israel, and it coincides with an expansion of overt and covert American and foreign assistance to Syria’s increasingly potent rebel fighters.”
“While the administration has ruled out arming the rebels directly, the administration has authorized $25 million in direct assistance for medical supplies and communication equipment to help the fighters and civilian opponents of Mr. Assad coordinate their activities and, crucially, disseminate reports about the fighting to the rest of the world.”
“Other countries, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are providing weapons, assisted by a small number of officers from the Central Intelligence Agency who are vetting the fighters receiving them and working with State Department officials trying to unify the fighters with political leaders inside and outside the country. Last month, the Treasury Department granted a waiver to let a new American organization, the Syrian Support Group, raise money for the rebels despite the sanctions that prohibit most financial transactions in Syria.”
“The range of plans being drafted, however, underscored the gravity of the risks. Atop the list is protecting Syria’s chemical weapons, which its leaders acknowledged possessing when vowing last month to use them only in the event of a foreign invasion. “That would be a purely military-type mission, and so we have to think about contingency planning for safeguarding these stockpiles,” one official said.”
“Some experts and some lawmakers on Capitol Hill have criticized the administration for not devoting more effort and money to assist Mr. Assad’s opponents, including the rebel fighters and emerging political leaders inside and outside the country.”
““This is certainly a useful exercise,” James Dobbins, the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center of the RAND Corporation, told the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, referring to the State Department’s planning. “Yet planning divorced from resources and power, as these efforts necessarily are, will have only limited impact on actual events.””
Read more: State Department and Pentagon Plan for Post-Assad Syria (archived)
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