Public Access to the text of the resolution to end the Syrian civil war that was approved on December 18 is currently embargoed. Based upon reporting in the Washington Post it is very similar to other types of agreements that are designed to end civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa among other places:

• Waring parties will negotiate the composition of a transitional government
• The transitional government will draft a new constitution and hold elections within 18 months
• The United Nations will foster the talks on a transitional government and observe the implementation of the agreement
• (Interestingly there is no mention of a DDR program which is usually part of these types of agreements)

This is mostly the diplomatic equivalent of  paper shuffling to look busy. The international community, embodied in the United Nations, is invested in seeing Humpty-Dumpty, that is Syria, put back together again. In reality Syria has already been partitioned.

According to the article (we’ll have to wait for the text from the UN), there are profound disagreements on what the end-state looks like. Is it an acceptance of a partitioned Syria?

• Russia is invested in seeing Assad remain in power, for reasons detailed previously in this blog. Would they accept a rump state on Mediterranean coast?
• The Europeans just want to stop the flow of refugees.
• A Kurdish state is anathema to Turkey. An Iranian proxy on its borders–those darn Persians keep cramping Erdogan’s Neo-Ottoman style–is also unacceptable. It is doubtful they would accept the Syrian Alawite rump state on the Med. solution.
• Israel does not want a third front opened against on the Golan, but they may trust in their capability to deter aggression. Hizbollah or ISIS in possession of the Golan is the worst case scenario.
• Don’t discount the importance of the sectarian war to the Sunni Arab powers in the region.
• The United States just wants to defeat ISIS and not have to deploy the Marines to do it.

Where does it leave us? If the UN Security Council can’t even agree on which warring parties in Syria have a seat at the talks on a transitional government, this is doomed to fail. Ultimately, the UN will be back at square one and will have to wait until one of two conditions prevail: (1) all sides are militarily exhausted, (2) they can back a strong horse who appears to be winning. Russia is doing its part to see that option 2 is Assad. The problem is that the U.S. and Europeans are doing their part to see that Kurdish militias are that option 2, since they are the best proxies to use against ISIS. ISIS chose the tactic of international terrorism, taking a page from the PLO’s playbook. This has backfired on them, as it did for al-Qaeda. Now the West is using proxies against them and inadvertently creating a second force who could bid for state.

Syria like Somalia is a failed state. The IGOs want to put it back together again on the abstract principle of inviolability of borders, but population transfers have already occurred and the state has been effectively partitioned. Acceptance of that is the best option, but it will only be reached when the conditions on the ground warrant it.

Most states understand this, since no state has signed up for monitoring or peacekeeping as part of the agreement.