How many more times can the Foreign Office get it so wrong?
A total misreading of the situation in Syria is just the latest example of Whitehall blundering
Free Syrian army members in Al-Shaar remove what they claimed was a body from rubble after an airstrike by forces loyal to President Assad Photo: Reuters
By
Peter Oborne
8:57PM GMT 18 Dec 2013
475 Comments
This December has seen the final collapse of British and American policy in Syria. David Cameron’s favourite general, Salim Idris, was meant to unify the rebels, bring down Assad, and vanquish al-Qaeda. Instead his Free Syrian Army has taken to its heels, giving up its equipment to its Islamist rivals, while Idris himself has reportedly gone on the run.
Officially, the Prime Minister still insists President Assad must go. Like an old gramophone record, Downing Street was even yesterday stressing the importance of “a political transition… to bring this brutal regime to an end”.
Privately, it is now a different story. The emergence of al-Qaeda and its various allies and associates has led to a sudden change of attitude. At a meeting in London last week, Syrian rebels were informed that removing Bashar al-Assad was no longer the priority. According to the former CIA chief Michael Hayden, speaking in a recent conference in Washington, the survival of Assad, “as ugly as it sounds”, may now be a better outcome than any of the alternatives.
We are supposed to have first-class diplomatic and intelligence services. Yet from the start of the rebellion – and there is no other way of putting this – they haven’t had the faintest idea what was going on.
First of all, they failed to understand the underlying stability of the regime in Damascus: the strength of the army, the level of support among the population, the loyalty of insiders, and the ruthlessness of its leader. British diplomats repeatedly told ministers that Assad would be toppled in a coup – which never materialised.
Second, the Foreign Office misunderstood the opposition. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, officials continued to believe that it was liberal, secular, pluralistic and drawing-room friendly. General Idris was supposed to be an independent military leader – another Foreign Office fantasy.
Third, our Government misunderstood al-Qaeda. Two years ago, in the wake of the killing of bin Laden, the British intelligence services were privately telling ministers that the terror group was all but defeated. Today – in part thanks to avoidable Western policy errors – al-Qaeda, under the leadership of bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been able to penetrate a new country from which it had previously been excluded.
These three elementary errors of analysis have had deplorable effects on policy. A Chatham House analysis published last week was scathing, describing how Britain and the United States “have oscillated between explicit demands for President Assad to leave and implicit acceptance of him as a viable partner”.
Worse, we have combined bellicose anti-regime rhetoric with inertia on the ground. The rebels were encouraged to rise against Assad, without being given the means to do so. This was the exact combination that led to the slaughter of thousands of Shia rebels by Saddam Hussein in 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War – or, indeed, allowed the Spanish Republican cause to fall into the hands of the Communists in the Thirties. Worst of all, the vocal demands for Assad’s downfall created an obstacle to the very political process that we now claim to favour.
How did the Foreign Office, once reputed to be especially well-informed on the Middle East, get it so wrong? This has become an urgent question. If the NHS had shown comparable incompetence it would be a national scandal. Yet the same has happened time and again with the FCO – in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Egypt, and now in Syria. It is time to recognise that there is a complete crisis in the policy-making machine.
Some insiders date the problem back to Michael Jay’s period as permanent secretary 10 years ago. Lord Jay, carrying out orders from New Labour, degraded the Foreign Office’s traditional language and policy-making functions. He closed down the language school, and put priority on management-speak, gender equality and ethnic diversity (Rory Stewart, the Tory MP, has provided a grim portrait of this dismal period in his short masterpiece Can Intervention Work?). In an instructive paradox, Foreign Office officials have become more and more alike as a result: independence of thought and analysis has been replaced by consensus – normally a dim reflection of whatever the current US position is perceived to be.
Lord Jay’s world of ethnic and gender diversity has little room for the kind of eccentrics to be found in John le Carré novels, armed with the profound knowledge and sheer passion to challenge conventional wisdom. This has made the Foreign Office vulnerable. A great deal of the intelligence and analysis that has shaped official policy on Syria has come from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. These are all suspect sources, each with reasons of their own to emphasise Assad’s vulnerability.
Very few officials in today’s FCO have the intellectual confidence to place the latest intelligence from Riyadh in its proper context, especially when to do so might irritate Washington. And policy-making has become emotional. Assad was categorised instantly as a monster, and the rebels as heroes. I am told that the case for treating with the Syrian leader has until very recently been dismissed as out of the question. This renders sober judgment impossible.
It is worth adding that the Foreign Office is not just out of its depth in the Middle East. Even in the wake of Parliament’s vote in August to block military action on Syria, the British embassy in Washington was adamant, right up almost to the last moment, that the US Congress would still support a bombing raid on Damascus.
All this helps to explain why so many of David Cameron’s recent interventions in foreign affairs have been hopeless or embarrassing, like this week’s claim that it was “mission accomplished” in Afghanistan. On the very day that the Prime Minister made this remark, it was reported that Taliban forces are currently going out on joint patrols with the Afghan army in the Sangin district of southern Helmand, where more than 90 of our soldiers were killed. Mr Cameron is a busy man, but one has to wonder about the kind of advice he is receiving.
Since becoming Foreign Secretary, William Hague has done his best to undo the damage done by Lord Jay and New Labour. But it is no easy task – as demonstrated by a recent episode concerning Sir Simon Fraser, the FCO’s latest permanent secretary.
Sir Simon informed Parliament last May that 96 per cent of heads of mission “had proficiency in” the local language. He has now been obliged to clarify to MPs that “the problem is that only 38 per cent of heads of mission have attained the target level”. In other words, the original claim that nearly 96 per cent of our senior diplomats speak the local language was a significant exaggeration.
This catalogue of policy errors means that Britain and America must carry their share of the blame for the situation in Syria – not least the terrible humanitarian catastrophe unfolding this winter. The Prince of Wales eloquently points out on this page that terrible things are happening to Christians in the Middle East. The FCO must bear some of the blame for that too, especially since Assad had been their protector. Meanwhile, all attempts to investigate the consequences of its incompetence – especially by the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq – are being blocked. That’s not good enough. Something has gone wrong, and it must be dealt with.
