President Trump’s decision to stop a covert CIA program to arm Syrian rebels is “absolutely not a sop to the Russians,” according to a top U.S. Army general.
Gen. Tony Thomas, the top U.S. special forces commander, maintained Friday that Trump killed the program following a review of its effectiveness. His defense of the president corroborated the assessments of some former Obama administration officials who said the program might have outlived its utility.
“[It was] absolutely not, as least from what I know about that program and the decision to end it, absolutely not a sop to the Russians,” Thomas, who leads U.S. Special Operations Command, said Friday at the Aspen Security Summit. “It was, I think, based on an assessment of the nature of the program, what we’re trying to accomplish, the viability of it going forward — and a tough, tough decision.”
The existence of the program was widely reported based on anonymous sources, but government officials have avoided discussing it in public. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert noted that it is “an intelligence matter” when she declined to comment Thursday. Lawmakers contacted by the Washington Examiner also demurred when asked about CIA efforts to arm the rebels. Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain avoided direct mention of the program, even when criticizing Trump for canceling it.
“If these reports are true, the administration is playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin,” the Arizona Republican said Thursday. “Making any concession to Russia, absent a broader strategy for Syria, is irresponsible and short-sighted.”
Thomas described the move as an appropriate, albeit difficult, course correction. “We’re all reading the editorials now of ‘are we leaving people at the altar,’ people that we’ve manned and equipped, but it’s so much more complex than even I can describe,” he said.
Russia, which is fighting on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad, responded to news of the program’s demise by accusing the United States once again of supporting terrorists. “It is an open secret that a substantial number of militants who have been trained under the U.S. Train and Equip program ultimately joined ISIS,” Artyom Kozhin, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Friday.
Thomas implied that if the program had a weakness, it was that the CIA wasn’t allowed to take more aggressive steps to arm the rebels.
“And again, that’s not necessarily an organization that I’ve been affiliated with, but a sister, a parallel activity that had a tough — some would argue impossible — mission, based on the approach we took,” he said. “It might have been scoped too narrowly or not empowered sufficiently. I don’t know enough about it to criticize it in that direction, but it had a tough row to hoe.”
