In their guest essay in the New York Times (NYT), Trita Parsi and Adam N. Weinstein, vice president and research fellow at the Quincy Institute, respectively, find U.S. President Joe Biden’s proclamation that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would end “an era of major military operations to remake other countries” to be incomplete at best.
Parsi and Weinstein, in their NYT article, posited that the U.S. presence has helped fuel insurgencies in Iraq. Accordingly, al-Qaida, and later, Daesh, they wrote, were able to take advantage of the chaos that ensued after the U.S. forces entered the country. Let’s assume this is correct for Iraq. But how can you account for the emergence of Daesh in Syria? How do you explain the mighty U.S. armed forces, with their F-16s and assortment of weapons, and the SDF (a separatist umbrella group dominated by the PKK’s Syrian affiliates, the YPG and PYD), which was supplied tens of thousands of trailers of inventory, failing to prevail against a few hundred al-Qaida remnants?
Trump couldn’t explain this either and, as a result, asked McGurk to leave the government and ordered U.S. forces to leave Syria, as they would in Afghanistan and Iraq. He agreed with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that the Turkish military could take care of what McGurk used to call Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s Syria branch.
Thanks to the U.S. electorate, Trump lost the elections and consequently, McGurk resumed his work in Syria and Daesh for al-Qaida reappeared. Now, the Biden-Kamala Harris team is back in the Situation Room at the White House to watch live the extermination of al-Qaida leaders in their hideouts in Syria.
So, to answer authors Parsi and Weinstein’s (and the NYT’s) inquiry about why the U.S. troops are still in Iraq (and Syria), to use Biden’s words, “remaking those countries is not over yet.”
See also:
–What Joint Russian-Syrian Air Patrols Might Mean For Foreign Air Forces Over Syria
–Iran Is Syria’s Strategic Partner: Damascus