Obama seeks new leverage in Syria diplomacy

Obama sends 50 special ops troops as Kerry pushes for negotiations

For the first time in the four-year Syrian civil war, President Barack Obama is beginning to execute a combined diplomatic and military approach to force Assad to leave office and end the carnage.

WASHINGTON — For the first time in the fouryear Syrian civil war, President Barack Obama is beginning to execute a combined diplomatic and military approach to force President Bashar Assad to leave office and end the carnage.

As 50 special operations troops arrive in Syria to bolster the most effective opposition groups, the administration is gambling that Secretary of State John Kerry will have more leverage to push Russia, Iran and other players toward two objectives: a cease-fire to limit the cycle of killing and the establishment of a timeline for a transition of power.

Some have doubts

But the task is enormous, given the number of nations and rebel groups operating at cross-purposes and the tiny size of the U.S. force so far. Even senior members of the administration express doubts in private about whether the effort is sufficient.

While Kerry has been optimistic that diplomacy can end the carnage, and has criticized the White House internally for moving too slowly, he has conceded doubts to aides that his strategy of fast-paced diplomacy can harness so many fiercely opposed forces toward a political solution.

Kerry will travel to Vienna this weekend, summoning many of Syria’s neighbors and European powers to turn a vague declaration of principles, settled on two weeks ago, into a plan for a political agreement. The talks, at least so far, have not included representatives of Assad’s government or the fractured rebel groups seeking to depose him, and Kerry is struggling to bring them to the negotiating room.

But after years in which the Obama administration has been accused of largely sitting on the sidelines while a quarter-million Syrians died and millions more were displaced, Kerry seems buoyed by being at the center of the only diplomatic effort underway.

“I can tell you that as long as he thinks there is a glimmer of possibility, he will not let go,” Wendy R. Sherman, Kerry’s undersecretary for policy until six weeks ago, said recently.

The move to increase pressure to create negotiating leverage echoes the strategy that the administration employed to force Iran into negotiations that led to a nuclear deal last summer. That effort, which involved economic sanctions, a bolstered military presence in the Persian Gulf and covert action, produced perhaps the most complex arms negotiations in U.S. history.

For Kerry, the Syria effort has become an obsession, much like his failed bid to strike an Israeli-Palestinian accord in 2013 and his so-far successful effort on the Iran nuclear deal this year. On a trip through Central Asia last week, he used every spare moment to make phone calls from his plane or hotel to keep the diplomatic effort on track.

The Syria situation “may or may not be ripe” for solution, Kerry told students at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard before he left on the trip. “But it’s imperative. It’s a human catastrophe, a disaster that screams at all of us in public life to exercise responsibility in trying to find a solution.”

Will it be enough?

At White House meetings, administration officials say, Kerry has argued that without applying both military and diplomatic pressure, the Russian intervention that began in late September would shore up Assad “and actually wind up destroying Syria.”

But the question is whether the military element of the strategy will be enough to make a difference.

“What he is doing will not work,” Fareed Zakaria, a journalist whom Obama frequently speaks with, wrote in a column in The Washington Post last week. “In a few months,” he predicted, the United States “will face the challenge again — back down or double down.”

The 50 special operations troops, U.S. officials said, will attach themselves to commanders of the tribal affiliates in northern Syria and coordinate with the Kurdish militia known as the YPG. That group has dealt the Islamic State its most significant setbacks across an enormous strip of northern Syria near the Turkish border.