Obama's plan to train Syrian rebels to fight ISIS is even more of a joke then we first thought. The Daily Beast.

Syrian rebels firing a weapon. The Daily Beast/Reuters

President Obama's plan to train moderate rebels to fight ISIS in Syria has only successfully trained 60 fighters. The Daily Beast. The generals in charge of the program claim that the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is to blame. Many rebels went home to visit their families and the ones that weren't were too "tired" from the festivities to train. The program, which costs $500 million, was to train 5400 troops a year for three years, but has not reached anywhere near that number. At the rate the training is going, it seems unclear if Syria will even exist by the time the rebels are ready to fight. Compounding the problems the program has, the United States has put into place strict vetting procedures that very few rebels can pass. The United States has also told the trainees that they must only focus their attention on ISIS and that they could not fight the Syrian regime. There are also very few secular, non-Jihadist groups left in Syria to draw recruits from.

My Comment:

I talked about this program before. Back then a major rebel leader quit the program and took a lot of his troops with him, citing the fact that he couldn't fight the Syrian regime. He also complained that the United States would not guarantee airstrikes. 

That was a month ago. Now it is clear that this program has been almost completely useless. They have only trained 60 people. 60. That's not a division. That's not a brigade. It's not even a company. It's a reinforced platoon at best. 60 guys is not going to make one bit of difference in the Syrian Civil War. Even if they were the best forces ever trained, there would be little such a small group of men could do before they were wiped out. 

And given the fact that a bunch of them went AWOL because of Ramadan, we are not talking about disciplined troops. The article said that the ones that were left were too tired, thirsty and hungry to train. That is one of the dumbest things I have ever read. Being a soldier is hard work. You don't get time off because you want to party with your family. And you certainly don't give up a fight because you are too tired from all your partying to do anything. 

This program cost half a billion dollars and we are getting nothing out of it. I'm used to the government wasting money but this is just insane. It's very clear that it was never a serious attempt at training an army. If it was then there would have been many more troops trained at this point, and they would be disciplined enough stick around through a holiday. 

I stand by my previous assessment that this program was never meant to do much of anything except make it look like the President was doing something about ISIS. And again, the smart options would be to either abandon this program completely, or double down on it an actually make an effort to win the war against ISIS. Train thousands of troops, not dozens. Rain hellfire down on ISIS, not a few piddly airstrikes. Or just sit back and watch the region burn, but don't waste any of our money in the process. 

The whole program just reeks of half measures and I hate half measures. Go big or go home isn't just good advice for normal people, it should be on a plaque near the President's desk. Either do your damnedest to win, or don't try at all. That's how our foreign policy should be run.

The worst part of it is that it looks like the Syrian regime has a decent chance of losing most of the country or even falling completely in the very near future. They only really hold a strip of land to the West and a few outposts in the northeast and east of the country, all of which are under siege by ISIS. Other then the Kurds, and a few secular militias in the south, the vast majority of the country is held either by ISIS or Al-Nusra and their Jihadi allies. 

The best case scenario is that somehow the Syrian regime manages to hold on. The possibility of a secular Syrian rebel movement ending up on top has long disappeared. There is a possibility of some secular groups gaining some ground in the south, but they are going to be outnumbered and outgunned by ISIS or other Jihadi groups.

It really seems like Obama is willing to abandon Syria to the Jihadis. Like I said, that could be an acceptable situation, if that was what Obama was publicly claiming to support. Destroying ISIS will probably become necessary at some point, but we don't have to do it now. But if that is our strategy, why are we wasting money on training rebels who won't fight and blowing up whatever targets we can find with airstrikes? Why are we wasting money on a strategy that won't work? 

The obvious answer is that Obama doesn't care about foreign policy. He wants to focus on domestic issues and his "legacy", such as it is, was to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. To fully commit to fighting ISIS now would mean that he made a mistake in Iraq by pulling out so early. It would also show  his long history of half measures, dithering and outright stupidity in handling the Syrian Civil War was entirely unjustified. Obama admitting that he screwed up in either Syria or Iraq isn't going to happen. So we will continue to do stupid things like training 60 out of 5400 soldiers at a cost of $500 million...