Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain has agreed to help unblock $349 million in funds for Syrian rebel fighters, after getting private assurances from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford that the program won’t be a repeat of last year’s embarrassing failure.
McCain said a briefing from Dunford allayed his concern the millions of dollars would again would be wasted on a flawed strategy, which spent millions only to train a handful of fighters.
“When we spent a couple hundred million dollars the last time,” McCain explained. “Then the commander of Central Command testified before this committee that we had four or five people left after expending a couple of hundred million dollars, in what I predicted would be an abysmal failure.”
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2572438
Defense Secretary Ash Carter was quick to acknowledge the original “train-and-equip” plan was “a disappointing start,” and said the strategy for enabling local forces has been totally revamped from last year.
“We were trying when that program was initiated to make forces, brand new forces to counter [the Islamic State] in Syria. Our approach now is to identify — and this is where the Special Forces have been valuable to us — forces already fighting ISIL whom we can enable with the great might of the American military,” Carter said.
McCain remains concerned that the local Syrian groups are supported only to the extent they battle the Islamic State, not the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad. “I hate ISIS, but it isn’t ISIS that’s killed 300,000. It isn’t ISIS that’s driven millions into refugee status. It’s Bashar Assad,” McCain said.
But later Dunford said his military mandate did not extend to Assad’s forces. “We have not declared war on the Syrian regime.”
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., asked Dunford whether he might at least recommend taking out Assad’s air forces, which are responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
Dunford demurred, “I’d prefer not to give that recommendation in public. That’s a policy recommendation that if I was going to provide that, I’d provide it to the president in private.”
