By ADAM ENTOUS And SIOBHAN GORMAN
In the early days of the Syrian rebellion, U.S. intelligence agencies made a prediction: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days were numbered, an assessment repeated publicly by President Barack Obama and top U.S. intelligence officials.
Mr. Obama said so as recently as March 22, at a press conference in Amman with Jordan’s King Abdullah: “I’m confident that Assad will go. It’s not a question of if, it’s when.”
Behind the scenes, though, U.S. intelligence services had already begun to pick up indications that this long-held assumption was wrong.
That winter and early spring, U.S. and Israeli spy agencies received intelligence that Iran and the Assad regime were pressing the reluctant leader of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon to commit to sending his fighters into Syria en masse, current and former U.S. officials said.
Members of a U.N. investigation team take samples from sand, in the Damascus countryside of Ain Terma, Syria. Associated Press
The resulting Hezbollah surge to bolster Mr. Assad represented a turning point in the Syria conflict, giving the Syrian leader enough strength to survive, though not enough to prevail.
U.S. intelligence agencies and administration speechwriters quickly dialed back pronouncements about Mr. Assad’s impending departure from public remarks.
Now, at the end of 2013, Syria stands as a tale of mismatched commitments, and an example of America’s inability to steer events from a distance. In many ways, Syria as it was known before simply doesn’t exist any longer, U.S. officials say. Its place has been taken by a shattered state riven into sectarian enclaves, radicalized by war and positioned to send worrisome ripples out across the Middle East for years to come, say current and former officials.
In fact, U.S. officials think the chances of steering the outcome have shrunk dramatically. The intelligence assessments that once showed Mr. Assad on the verge of defeat now say he could remain in power for the foreseeable future in key parts of the country bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast. The U.S. doesn’t think he will be able to retake the whole country again, U.S. intelligence agencies believe. Areas outside his control are fracturing into warring enclaves along ethnic and sectarian lines, abutting a new al Qaeda-affiliated haven that sweeps from Syria into Iraq.
The civil war could last another decade or more, based on a Central Intelligence Agency analysis of the history of insurgencies that recently departed Deputy Director Michael Morell privately shared with lawmakers, according to congressional officials.
Through it all, U.S. intelligence and military officers watched the evolution with alarm from the sidelines, at least one step behind developments on the ground. The White House was unwilling to commit significant resources to back opposition fighters, wary of getting drawn into another conflict in the region or inadvertently backing violent extremists. Wary U.S. intelligence officials told policy makers that a cohesive, well-organized opposition didn’t exist and was unlikely to take shape even if the U.S. made a more substantial investment, officials involved in the deliberations said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Assad’s key backers—Iran and Hezbollah—spared no expense to save their ally, U.S. officials say.
Mr. Obama’s limited covert engagement in Syria has been part of a deliberate effort to avoid further entanglement in the Middle East and take the U.S. off a war footing, senior U.S. officials say.
Yet Arab leaders have bluntly warned their American counterparts that Syria presents a conundrum in which the U.S. must either pay now or pay even more later, when al Qaeda fully establishes itself in Syria’s ungoverned territory.
In 2011 and the first half of 2012, White House officials thought the rebels could score a quick victory, either by killing Mr. Assad or forcing him to flee the country. At the time, senior U.S. officials told visiting Arab delegations that Mr. Assad could be out “within months,” according to meeting participants. Some Arab officials who attended the meetings said they scoffed at what they saw as American naiveté about Mr. Assad’s survival skills.
The first hints that those long-held assumptions were wrong came in the second half of 2012, when the CIA realized that the Syrian military was starting to change its tactics with help from Iranian advisers, who had cracked the opposition’s battlefield communications.
Next came the Hezbollah push.
U.S. intelligence officials misjudged the extent to which Hezbollah was prepared to double down in support of Mr. Assad.
U.S. intelligence initially showed that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, resisted repeated appeals from Iranian leaders, including the commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, for sending Hezbollah fighters in large numbers into Syria to reinforce the Assad regime, current and former U.S. officials say.
U.S. spy agencies believed Hezbollah’s leadership at the time was riven by internal debate, worried that intervening in an uprising next door would be “bad for the brand” and spark a backlash at home, according to an official briefed on the intelligence.