Dexter Filkins on the Syrian Sinkhole

 Much of the aid that the White House is supplying to the opposition is intended to provide the rudiments of civilian infrastructure in liberated areas, including electrical generators and Internet connections. But the President's critics argue that the United States needs to become more deeply involved with rebel groups, so that it has allies in Syria. The U.S. has few friends it can call on to gather intelligence, secure chemical weapons, or even provide a welcome to American troops in the event of a military operation; after Assad falls, there is little guarantee that the new leaders will be sympathetic. Mc­ Cain told me, "If you believe—that's one the Administration and all of us agree on—that Bashar al-Assad's departure is inevitable, then every day that goes by this conflict will get harder, and the harder it's going to be to clean up when it's all over."

Still, Obama's aides argue that nothing will prevent the war from continuing after the regime falls. Along with the shabiha, Assad has mobilized the Popular Committees, a nationwide militia made up largely of minority groups loyal to the regime. Both forces—together with Assad's regular Army, of about seventy thousand active soldiers—appear prepared to continue fighting if the rebels take Damascus. White House officials and intelligence ex­ perts say that much of the post-regime planning is being done with the help of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Hezbol­lah; they, too, are prepared to fight on after Assad.

According to the most common pre­ diction of the war's eventual end, Assad will lead Syria's Alawites to an enclave on the Mediterranean coast, which includes the major ports of Latakia and Tartous, where the Alawites predominate. Amer­ ican officials say that Assad is trying to lay the groundwork. The regime has ethni­cally cleansed several Sunni-majority villages on routes that lead to the coast. And, according to the American intelligence official, the regime appears to be stockpiling weapons and supplies in the area. Perhaps most suggestive is the tenacity with which it has held on to the city of Horns, which lies on the highway between Damascus and the coast. Homs would give an Alawite rump state unimpeded access to Hezbollah, and to Iran. "Homs is the key," the official said. "If they can hold it, then they can have the Alawite enclave on the coast that's linked to Hezbollah and backed by the Iranians, and the Russian ships could still come into the port." It was in Homs that American officials spotted the regime training the shabiha in the use of chemical weapons.

Joshua Landis, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oklahoma, who has written extensively about Syria, doubts that the Alawites will be able to build a state on the Mediterranean—"Assad's enclave of evil," he calls it—though he expects that Assad will destroy Damascus in the attempt. Instead, he says, the capital will likely fall to a newly empowered Sunni majority, who will undertake a large-scale expul­ sion of Alawites from the country. 'When this is over, you are not going to want to be an Alawite in Syria," he said. "Once the Sunnis take power, they are going to want the coast, and right now the Alawites have it. The elegant solution, for them, is ethnic cleansing. It's elegant because the alternative is killing all the Alawites. The Sunnis will pick one little town, maybe two, and kill everyone. The rest of the Alawites will not stick around and wait to see what hap­pens. They will all go to Lebanon."

In May, the senior American official who is involved in Syria policy met me at his office in Washington. When I asked him to predict Syria's future, he got up from his desk and walked over to a large map of the country which was tacked to his wall. "You could have a situation where the more secular rebel groups could well be fighting the more Islamist-oriented groups," he said. "We are already getting that in places like Deir ez-Zor, in the east. In Aleppo, they fight each other." Pointing to an area near the Turkish border, he said, "We see fighting between Kurdish and Arab militias up in the north." Elsewhere, there were Druze militias, members of a small religious community most often associated with Lebanon. 'They have had some clashes with the Free Syrian Army. And here is my favorite. Christians are now setting up their own militia.

"What does that sound like? Leba­ non. But it's Lebanon on steroids." He walked back to his desk and sat down. "The Syria I have just drawn for you—I call it the Sinkhole," he said. "I think there is an appreciation, even at the high­ est levels, of how this is getting steadily worse. This is the discomfort you see with the President, and it's not just the President. It's everybody." No matter how well intentioned the advocates of military intervention are, he suggested, getting involved in a situation as complex and dynamic as the Syrian civil war could be a foolish risk The cost of saving lives may simply be too high. "Whereas we had a crisis in Iraq that was contained— it was very awful for us and the Iraqis— this time it will be harder to contain," he said. "Four million refugees going into Lebanon and Jordan is not the kind of problem we had going into Iraq." In a year, he estimated, Lebanon alone could have four million refugees, doubling the population of the country. "Jordan will close its borders, and then you will have tens of thousands of refugees huddling down close to that border for safety."

The rapid growth of Al Qaeda in Syria is deeply troubling, he said. "In February, 2012, they were tiny. No more than a few dozen. Now, fast-forward fourteen months. They are in Aleppo. They are in Damascus. They are in Homs." In Iraq, he said, "They didn't grow so fast and they didn't cover all the big cities. In Syria, they do." Also, he pointed out, there were no chemical weapons in Iraq, as there are in Syria. "We will have a greater risk, the longer this goes on, that the bad guys—they are all bad guys, but I mean terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Islamist extremist groups—will acquire some of these weapons. How do you plan for that? The longer the war goes on, the more the extremists will gain." Indeed, the longer the war goes on, the greater the threat that it will engulf the entire region.

The official said that the United States' quandary was clear enough: "Iraq was a searing experience—to see our kids out there, out on those checkpoints, and they don't speak Arabic, and they don't know what the fuck is going on around them. I know there is a debate on military intervention. I cannot recommend it to the President unless there is a very clearly defined political way back out. People on the Hill ask me, 'Why can't we do a no-fly zone? Why can't we do military strikes?' Of course we can do these things. The issue is, where does it stop?" ♦