AL-Monitor
By Jared Szuba
Dec. 9, 2020
[In a long-ranging interview with Al-Monitor, James Jeffrey looks back
on his efforts to incorporate fragments of Obama-era initiatives into
a cohesive Middle East policy.]
In August 2016, former US Ambassador to Iraq and Turkey James Jeffrey
signed a public letter with more than 50 other veteran national
security officials warning against the election of then-candidate
Donald Trump.
“We are convinced that in the Oval Office, he would be the most
reckless President in American history,” read the letter.
Nonetheless, two years later the career diplomat had come out of
retirement to help the Trump administration incorporate the fragments
of Obama-era initiatives in Syria into a cohesive Middle East policy.
Under the authority of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, administration
officials had devised a plan under which the US military’s
counter-Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) force would remain in Syria at
least until the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad went
through with UN-backed elections. On top of their
Congressionally-mandated mission of fighting IS, US forces would
continue to deny Assad access to Syrian oilfields, which were located
in areas controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters backed by the United
States, and to obstruct the Iranian military’s access to the Levant.
Trump didn’t like it. “The president was very uncomfortable with our
presence in Syria,” Jeffrey told Al-Monitor in a two-hour interview at
his home in Washington last week. “He was very uncomfortable with what
he saw as endless wars.”
But in December 2018, the 45th president blew off his top advisers and
told Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he would withdraw
more than 2,000 US military forces from Syria.
The move would inevitably launch a mad dash across a precariously
balanced battlefield occupied by four major military players and lead
to mass displacement among Syria’s Kurdish population. It also
threatened to upend the international coalition’s sweeping gains
against IS and set back the US-led pressure campaign against Assad.
“We felt very vulnerable and may have been a little bit punch drunk on
fear,” Jeffrey told Al-Monitor last week. “I understand the
president’s concerns about Afghanistan,” he said. “But the Syria
mission is the gift that keeps on giving.”
Opposition from European allies eventually convinced the president to
reverse the order, Jeffrey said. But less than a year later, as
Turkish forces built up on the Syrian border in October of 2019,
Jeffrey and other officials arranged yet another call between Trump
and Erdogan.
When the dust settled, hundreds of people were dead and up to 300,000
others, mostly Syrian Kurds, had fled their homes. Turkey’s military
incursion has since been referred to by Kurdish leaders as an “ethnic
cleansing.”
Jeffrey was left to pick up the pieces. The methods the diplomat had
advocated to assuage Ankara’s aggression failed, drawing heated
controversy in marathon congressional hearings.
Jeffrey says the proposals he pushed — dismantling YPG border
defenses, allowing Turkey’s military into northeast Syria for joint
security patrols, putting Turkish aircraft back on the Air Tasking
Order out of Udeid Airbase — were rooted in his understanding of
domestic Turkish politics and colonial history. Critics say they paved
the way for Turkey’s assault.
Today, Jeffrey speaks of the crisis of Turkey and Syria’s Kurds as if
it has largely blown over, but he offers few specifics on prospects
for securing the future of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in
Syria. He insists the Obama administration’s decision to arm the
Syrian Kurdish-led militia fed into a decades-old existential threat
to Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
For the career diplomat, Ankara’s hostility toward the SDF was just
one troublesome corner of a complex policy structure in which
Washington sought to harness the interests of both Turkey and Israel
to roll back Iran and deal the Assad regime and Russia an unwinnable
hand in Syria’s civil war.
The following interview has been edited for length.
Al-Monitor: Deputy OIR commander UK Maj. Gen. Kevin Copsey last week
said we are entering the “twilight” phase of the international
coalition’s mission against IS. In July 2018, you were brought in as
Special Envoy in part to help fold the D-ISIS mission back into US
regional strategy, particularly vis-a-vis Iran and NATO ally Turkey.
What progress has been made in that?
Jeffrey: The Syria strategy was a stepchild since the Obama administration.
The Trump administration saw one of the major flaws in the Obama
administration: that it treated Iran as a nuclear weapons problem a la
North Korea. They saw Iran as a threat to the regional order. So they
wanted a Syria policy building on the bits and pieces of the Obama
policy. So the Trump administration came up with that policy in 2017.
Secretary Pompeo and I convinced people in the administration of this:
If you don’t deal with the underlying problem of Iran in Syria, you’re
not going to deal in an enduring way with IS. We saw this all as one
thing.
We then also had the Israeli air campaign. The US only began
supporting that when I came on board. I went out there and we saw
Prime Minister Netanyahu and others, and they thought that they were
not being supported enough by the US military, and not by
intelligence. And there was a big battle within the US government, and
we won the battle.
The argument [against supporting Israel’s campaign] was, again, this
obsession with the counterterrorism mission. People didn’t want to
screw with it, either by worrying about Turkey or diverting resources
to allow the Israelis to muck around in Syria, as maybe that will lead
to some blowback to our forces. It hasn’t.
Basically, first and foremost is denial of the [Assad regime] getting
military victory. But because Turkey was so important and we couldn’t
do this strategy without Turkey, that brought up the problem of the
Turkish gripes in northeast Syria. So my job was to coordinate all of
that.
So you throw all those together — the anti-chemical weapons mission,
our military presence, the Turkish military presence, and the Israeli
dominance in the air — and you have a pretty effective military pillar
of your military, diplomatic and isolation three pillars.
So that was how we put together an integrated Syria policy that
nestled under the overall Iran policy. The result has been relative
success because we — with a lot of help from the Turks in particular —
have managed to stabilize the situation.
The only change on the ground to the benefit of Assad has been
southern Idlib in two and a half years of attacks. They are highly
unlikely to continue, given the strength of the Turkish army there and
the magnitude of the defeat of the Syrian army by the Turks back in
March.
And of course, we’ve ratcheted up the isolation and sanctions pressure
on Assad, we’ve held the line on no reconstruction assistance, and the
country’s desperate for it. You see what’s happened to the Syrian
pound, you see what’s happened to the entire economy. So, it’s been a
very effective strategy.
Al-Monitor: The US has been supporting the Israeli air campaign and
enacting sanctions on both the Assad regime and Iran. Are we any
closer to an Iranian withdrawal from Syria?
Jeffrey: Well the Iranians have withdrawn a lot of their people. One
reason is they’re financially under a great deal of pressure, and
Syria is very expensive for them. More and more the Iranians are
divesting that back to the Syrians. And they haven’t been able to bail
the Syrians out, other than some — under adventuresome conditions —
shipments of oil supplies, which sometimes make it, sometimes don’t.
I’ll just leave it at that.
Al-Monitor: Can you elaborate on those “adventurous conditions?”
Jeffrey: I’ve told you as much as I’m going to tell you on that. The
Iranian ability to truly establish a southern Lebanon-style threat to
Israel by long-range systems has also been blocked by the Israeli
strikes, which are enabled, to some degree, by US diplomatic and other
support, which I won’t go into in more detail, but it is significant.
We have basically blocked Iran’s longer-term goals and put its present
presence under pressure. Is that enough pressure to get Iran to leave?
I don’t know. Whether we can actually roll them back, I don’t know.
But I do know that it is absolutely an essential part of any larger
agreement. Whatever level of pain we are inflicting on the Iranians,
the Russians, and the Assad regime is not going to go away until Iran
leaves.
Al-Monitor: A major objective of the sanctions is to force the Assad
regime to change its behavior. Have you seen any signs of change in
the regime’s calculus as a result? Is there any prospect of US-Russia
accommodation on Syria’s political process, or is it fair to say the
Geneva process has been co-opted?
Jeffrey: Well, we saw the Rami Makhlouf thing, we saw other leaders.
We don’t know, because you really have to know what’s really going on
inside a police state, how much impact that’s having. But it’s having
some impact. The collapse of the Lebanese banking system is another
big blow. You see it in the spatting between the Russians and Assad in
the recent, underreported Damascus refugee fiasco. That was a Russian
idea.
We’re sure the Russians know there’s no military victory. So they have
gone to, how can we get a political victory? And the way to do that is
to hijack the UN-led political process, by using things like the Assad
election in 2021 as a substitute for the UN-mandated elections, [and]
using a Russian-led conference on refugees to take that portfolio away
from the UN and international community and put a Russia and Assad
stamp on it. So, we mobilized the international community to basically
boycott it, very successfully.
It goes up and down but the Russians have never embraced a true
implementation of 2254. We’ve made it clear that we would relieve the
sanctions and that Assad would eventually be invited back into the
Arab League, that the diplomatic isolation would all fall. We laid it
out to Putin at Sochi in 2019, by Secretary Pompeo. They know about
the offer. They don’t really make any changes to it.
Al-Monitor: Has the US explored alternative paths, such as potential
engagement with members of the Syrian regime’s support base in the
Alawi community?
Jeffrey: No, other than the few reported contacts on Austin Tice. And
I can’t talk any more about that. I see nothing promising. Not
everybody would agree with me.
Al-Monitor: Let’s move to the subject of Turkey. Secretary of State
Pompeo sharply criticized Ankara during the NATO Foreign Ministers’
Meeting. In recent Al-Monitor podcasts, Stephen Cook and Philip Gordon
said the US should probably not consider Turkey an ally or a “model
partner.” How would you recommend the Biden administration engage with
Erdogan out of the gate?
Jeffrey: First of all, you have to separate Erdogan from Turkey.
The biggest challenges for Biden will be China, Russia, North Korea,
Iranian JCPOA and climate. Those are the five big ones. Number six is
Turkey, because Turkey directly impacts two of the first five: Iran
and Russia. And it impacts number eight or nine, terrorism.
They’re a very important NATO state. The NATO radar that is the core
of the entire anti-ballistic missile system defending against Iran is
in Turkey. We have tremendous military assets there. We really can’t
“do” the Middle East, the Caucuses or the Black Sea without Turkey.
And Turkey is a natural opponent of Russia and Iran.
Erdogan is a great power thinker. Where he sees vacuums, he moves. The
other thing about Erdogan is he’s maddeningly arrogant, unpredictable
and simply will not accept a win-win solution. But when pressed — and
I’ve negotiated with him — he’s a rational actor.
So if Biden sees the world as many of us do now, near-peer
competition, Turkey becomes extremely important. Look what [Erdogan]
has just done in eight months in Idlib, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh.
Russia or Russian allies have been the loser in all three.
If we return to Obama’s end-of-office mindset that we don’t have a
geopolitical problem, but we have sets of little problems — that
Erdogan’s buying S-400s, [IS] cells in the desert and refugees in
Lebanon, Iranian 3.25% enriched uranium, and the Khashoggi murder and
the never-ending starvation drama in Yemen — all these become sui
generis problems that we have to throw resources and policies and
mobilizing the bureaucracy at, without trying to figure out how do
they all fit together.
If the Biden administration goes back to that stupid thinking, then
they’re going to lose the Middle East. You can forget about Asia.
Al-Monitor: How should the Biden administration approach Erdogan?
Jeffrey: Erdogan will not back down until you show him teeth. That’s
what we did when we negotiated the cease-fire in October of 2019. We
were ready to crush the economy.
That’s what Putin did after the Russian plane was shot down. The
Russians have now twice sent strong signals to the Turks in Idlib.
They chopped the shit out of a Turkish battalion. It didn’t work out
the way the Russians wanted to.
You have to be willing, when Erdogan goes too far, to really clamp
down on him and to make sure he understands this in advance. The
Turkish position is never 100% correct. They have some logic and
arguments on their side. Given their role as an important ally and
bulwark against Iran and Russia, it behooves us to at least listen to
their arguments and try to find compromise solutions.
Al-Monitor: You came into the Special Envoy position as a proponent of
accelerating the Manbij roadmap model to ease Turkey’s concerns about
northeast Syria. Is it safe to say that approach backfired?
Jeffrey: The Turks considered Manbij a failure. There was tremendous
pushback from the SDF and from the local military council, and from
McGurk’s office. Every individual who had PKK connections, there had
to be intelligence adjudication both of the Turkish and American
sides. Very few people were pushed out.
I basically insisted, and we eventually got a group of about 10 to
leave. But that was after about a year, and the Turks thought we
weren’t serious. That was the model that we tried to apply to the
northeast.
The SDF, they’re clean kids. I’ve gotten to know them and their
leadership very, very well. They really are phenomenal, by Middle
Eastern standards. They’re a highly disciplined Marxist offshoot of
the PKK. They’re also not particularly interested in pursuing the PKK
agenda. They’re the squishees; they don’t have any mountains.
Meanwhile, nobody at the State Department side said hey, what about
Turkey? Frankly, our local military and the State Department’s
defeat-IS people were basically like, that’s somebody else’s problem.
The Turks along the border were provoked, primarily by us announcing
that we were going to create a new border defense force [in 2018] that
would be even larger, and the first place we’d deploy them is along
the Turkish border.
This was CENTCOM out of control. This was the classic, ‘We’re just
here to fight terrorists, let the f---heads in State Department take
care of Turkey, and we can say or do anything we want that pleases us
and pleases our little allies, and it doesn’t matter.’ And this was
the bane of our existence until we finally got it under our control,
and it didn’t come fully under control until — with a few outliers —
Pompeo asked me to take over the D-ISIS job.
Al-Monitor: Operation Peace Spring threw a major wrench into the US
mission there and has been called an “ethnic cleansing.” You’ve said
you have to show Erdogan teeth. But prior to the incursion, you led an
effort to have the YPG dismantle its defenses as part of the safe
zone. What was the logic behind that?
Jeffrey: It was an expansion of the Manbij roadmap: joint patrols and,
in Manbij, the withdrawal of PKK-associated leadership. In the safe
zone it was all SDF forces, and heavy weapons and defenses to be
withdrawn. We thought, given constant Turkish pressure on the
president to do something about this, that that made sense.
When Bolton and I went out [to Ankara] in January 2019, there was a
lot of talk about Jeffrey running in with this map. It wasn’t
Jeffrey’s map. The map had been drawn up by our military personnel
with the Kurds, and it had been agreed with them.
The Kurds were supposed to dismantle their fortifications but they
didn’t. That was one of Erdogan’s major complaints. Bolton didn’t want
to have any Turks in there; that was one of the arguments that I’d had
with him out in Ankara. We agreed that we wouldn’t show the map, but
that we would deploy to the Turks the concept of the map.
We finally got an agreement in July and August. It included Turkish
patrols down to the M4 highway, so the Turks got their 30 kilometers,
and somewhat vaguely, [a] Turkish permanent presence, but we couldn’t
determine where that would be.
It was a good compromise. It was kind of working, but the Turks were
still unhappy with it because they knew the SDF was still controlling
the area, and they didn’t believe the SDF was dismantling the
fortifications. And that’s true. We kept on pressing the SDF to do it
and we got a lot of excuses.
Al-Monitor: Why did it collapse?
Jeffrey: The president was uncomfortable with our presence in Syria.
He was very uncomfortable with what he saw as endless wars. This is
something he should not be criticized for. We took down the [IS]
caliphate, and then we stayed on. Trump kept asking, “Why do we have
troops there?” And we didn’t give him the right answer.
If somebody had said, “It’s all about the Iranians,” it might have
worked. But the people whose job it was to tell why the troops are
there was DOD. And they just gave the [Congressional] Authorization of
Use of Military Force: “We’re there to fight terrorists.”
The reason that Trump pulled the troops out was I think because he was
just tired of us having come up with all these explanations for why
we’re in there. There was an implicit promise to him, ‘Hey boss,
nothing’s going to go wrong, we’re working with the Turks, we’re
working with the Russians.’ And then he gets these disasters.
I didn’t brief the president on it. Pompeo did, and made arguments
along those lines, focused on Iran. But Trump was uncomfortable about
those forces, and he trusted Erdogan. Erdogan would keep making these
cases about the PKK, and the president would ask people, and they
would have to be honest and ‘fess up. Of course, it’s more complicated
than that. Wars are complicated.
The president was briefed, but he also listens to Erdogan. Erdogan is
pretty persuasive.
We at the State Department never provided any troop numbers to the
president. That’s not our job. We didn’t try to deceive him. He kept
on publicly saying numbers that were way below what the actual numbers
were, so in talking to the media and talking to Congress, we had to be
very careful and dodge around. Furthermore, the numbers were funny. Do
you count the allies that didn’t want to be identified in there? Do
you count the al-Tanf garrison? Do you count the Bradley unit that was
going in and out?
We were gun shy because the president had three times given the order
to withdraw. It was a constant pressuring and threatening to pull the
troops out of Syria. We felt very vulnerable and may have been a
little bit punch drunk on fear because it made so much sense to us. I
understand his concerns about Afghanistan. But the Syria mission is
the gift that keeps on giving. We and the SDF are still the dominant
force in [northeast] Syria.
The Kurds were always trying to get us to pretend that we would defend
them against the Turkish army. They pressed CJTF, over my objections,
to start putting outposts along the Turkish border. I hated the idea;
it just provoked the Turks.
I wasn’t able to get those stopped, but I was able to stop additional
ones [being built]. They made no sense. The US military had no
authorization to shoot at the Turks, who could simply drive around
them. It was simply a signal to the Turks that we couldn’t really be
trusted and that we had some plan of a permanent statelet in northeast
Syria run by the PKK as a pressure point, just like many Turks
erroneously think we have our Greece policy and our Cyprus policy and
our Armenia policy all to pressure the Turks. Because that’s how the
British and French dealt with the Ottoman Empire.
It was played up in Congress and the media as if we had this policy of
being a bulwark against the Turks, and then the president changed our
policy on the ground in his conversation with Erdogan.
Believe me, I was with the commander in December 2018 when the Turks
were about to come in, and we were trying to figure out what the US
Army should do. There was no plan. There was no plan to respond to the
Turks because they had no order to do that. That was not part of their
mission set.
Secretary Pompeo, I and others had consistently made that point to the
Turks: Even if we don’t stop you [militarily], and that’s not our
policy, we will act against you politically. But more importantly, the
Kurds will just invite in the Russians. The Turks just pooh-poohed
this. They pooh-poohed this after the 6th of October incursion.
The president sent a message to Erdogan that if he did not stop within
24 hours, Mazlum would reach out to the Russians and invite them in,
and the US would not stop them. I wound up passing that message on,
and our Turkish interlocutor was incredulous. They either thought the
Russians wouldn’t come in or we would stop them, just like we did to
Wagner [at the Conoco gas field in Deir ez-Zor].
And the Russians came in. Suddenly it’s checkmate. Can I claim the
Turkish problem has been resolved? No, I can’t. But the Turks now have
a presence in the northeast. They have less to fear from the SDF.
Al-Monitor: Did they ever have anything to fear from the SDF?
Jeffrey: Of course. Sure. Look, they almost went to war with Syria in
almost 1999 over the presence of [PKK leader Abdallah] Ocalan. The YPG
is the PKK. Remember when they went into Raqqa? Remember the poster?
That’s the problem. Erdogan does not want another statelet like Qandil
in Syria that is protected by the United States or protected by
Russia.
The Turks have lost 40,000 people to the PKK. It is an existential
threat to Turkey. The Kurdish population of Turkey is split. Half of
it is in Kurdish enclaves. The other half is integrated into Turkish
society. You’re looking at a Bosnia-Rwanda type situation if the PKK
could ever truly mobilize the Kurdish population to the degree that
the Turkish majority decided that “the only good Kurd is a dead Kurd.”
That is the existential threat of the PKK to Turkey.
What Erdogan didn’t have to fear was the idea that the United States
was deliberately doing this as part of some long-term plan to keep
Turkey weak.
Al-Monitor: But you never saw any evidence that the SDF funneling
weapons or fighters into Turkey?
Jeffrey: Certainly not from the northeast of Syria. That was part of
our agreement with them.
Al-Monitor: Do you think the US can still reach consensus with Erdogan
on northeast Syria, given his insistence that the PYD/YPG is
inextricable from the PKK terror group?
Jeffrey: I don’t know. Whenever you talk about northeast Syria, the
most important thing is Turkish domestic politics. Erdogan’s battle
buddy, [Devlet] Bahceli, can be summed up in one sentence: The only
thing that matters is the Turkish national agenda, and in that there’s
no place for Kurds.
That’s not the AKP’s agenda, of course. Erdogan, who has had much
better policies toward Kurds and the PKK than anybody before him, is
being hampered by the MHP.
If Erdogan feels that he needs a victory [to] churn up national
sentiment, he might do something more. The problem is, he would have
to do that in conjunction with the Russians because I don’t think he
will go south of the M4. He and his people had always maintained that
they were not interested in what happens south of the M4. So Kobane,
for example. But that would require agreement of the Russians.
The Russians have made it clear — I have it on the highest authority —
that the Russians do not want to see an expanded Turkish presence into
Syria.
The SDF people keep saying the Russians are telling them the Turks are
about to come in. That’s a Russian threat. It’s made out of
whole-cloth to the Russians to push us out and get access to the
oilfields. It’s a crude Russian pressure tactic. I don’t see it as
likely.
Al-Monitor: SDF commander Mazlum Abdi has expressed doubt that an
agreement with the Assad regime is likely in the near future. What is
the status of PYD-KNC talks? How might this end for the SDF?
Jeffrey: Here’s Jim Jeffrey’s cynical answer to that: The answer to
Dave Petraeus’ question, 'How does this all end?' — it’s an issue of
proportionality. We don’t have a perfect roadmap. If you want to put
limited resources, fine, but it’s OK because that’s the primary way
our competition moves forward.
The various Kurdish groups are going to be a factor in the eventual
outcome of the Syrian crisis. Politically and militarily. They hold
many of the reins.
Al-Monitor: Could they ever be included in Geneva?
Who knows? We live in a world of Kashmirs and Nagorno-Karabakhs.
The point is, this [preserving the SDF] is our plan B. We have a plan
A. Plan A doesn’t answer 'how does this all end?' Plan A’s whole
purpose [is] to ensure that the Russians and Assad and the Iranians
don’t have a happy answer to how this all ends, and maybe that will
someday get them to accept Plan B. Meanwhile, they’re tied up in
knots. They don’t see Syria as a victory.
Al-Monitor: Do you think Mazlum will be able to get the PKK cadres out
of northeast Syria?
Jeffrey: We’ll see. I think he’s doing everything in his power to
balance PKK, Turkish, Russian and American interests to maintain first
of all the protection of his own people, the Kurdish population of the
northeast, [and] secondly, of the areas that he controls, which
includes a large number of Arabs. He’s doing exactly what I would be
doing under these circumstances.
How much pressure on PKK cadre that policy requires or will allow may
vary from time to time. It’s certainly something that we and the Turks
keep raising.