Data from over 100 failed ceasefires shows most are followed by offensives | Hacker News Reader

Data from over 100 failed ceasefires shows most are followed by offensives

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135 pointsJulianMorrison89 comments

> To systematically illustrate this pattern, I used various sources — news reports, reference books and archival material — to compile a data set of 105 failed ceasefires from 25 different wars.

If you filter your dataset to failed ceasefires, why would anyone expect it to show that they work?

What I think the data the author used shows is "Of the ceasefires that failed, it would have generally been better not to have had a ceasefire at all".

Which is an entirely different thing from "You shouldn't try to have ceasefires at all."

Agreed 100%, and I'd go even further: Even the most honest attempt at finding "failed ceasefires" seems likely to over-emphasize ceasefires followed by offensive campaigns.

Ceasefires that become formal armistices that become peace treaties generally don't continue to be referred to as "ceasefires", for a start..

And those which do end, of course, generally end in an offensive, otherwise they wouldn't be worth ending. The question is whether that offensive would have been impossible without the ceasefire.

Basically, this work shows that if you're involved in a ceasefire, you had better not stop digging holes and filling sandbags in the interim.

How much are you increasing the odds of it failing by digging those trenches? (Or are you decreasing the odds? Both seem possible to me.)

So, my perspective comes from over a decade fighting wars as an infantry soldier, so you'll have to keep in mind that my perspective is one-sided. I think that the success of a ceasefire depends on the people sent to the round table, not the people on the battlefield. And the failure of a ceasefire depends on the people on the battlefield, not the people sent to the round table. This is an oversimplification, but I think you won't be provoking ceasefire failure by continuing to build out your defenses and digging in to hold the ground you have. Or preparing for defense in depth, or whatever. Maybe the terms of the ceasefire would have some special rules which make diplomats happy, but I think to every man on the ground with a gun, a ceasefire only means literally to cease fire, and you should not expect anything else. Clearly, from the numbers presented here, one should be prepared for the near certainty that if the ceasefire fails there will be an attack. It sounds reasonable to me to continue digging in while the ceasefire takes place. And certainly, as an infantry veteran, I fully expect the enemy to be making similar defensive preparations, as well, and planning for the tactical situation on the battlefield to reflect those kinds of changes upon the resumption of hostilities. The infantryman's motto: "Hope for the best, plan for the worst".

> I think that the success of a ceasefire depends on the people sent to the round table, not the people on the battlefield. And the failure of a ceasefire depends on the people on the battlefield, not the people sent to the round table.

This makes a lot of sense.

I think decreasing the odds. The more "expensive" it is to attack you the more likely the ceasefire will hold.

Extremely good defense stops wars before they start.

I just want to point out that I'm living in a country (Israel) that has ceasefires lasting tens of years (with Syria for example) even when the other region is in internal conflict.

I'm not saying ceasefires are great but there are plenty of examples where ceasefire treaties have ended wars. The dataset is extremely skewed.

Although we might refer to the 1953 agreement between North & South Korea as an Armistice (and North Korea claims to have invalidated that in 2013), it is really just a

_glorified ceasefire with a Nuclear Power!_

So I hope that one works..

Are we letting this lie because we don't want to start a political debate in this thread?

I don't mean to make any assumptions about the politics of the parent here (and apologies if this paints you in an unreasonable light), but personally, Israel is the last example I would use for successful cease fires[0]

[0] one of many examples, hopefully this one is non-partisan enough: http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/54341?lang=en

> Israel is the last example I would use for successful cease fires

Because some of Israel's ceasefires have not been successful the successful ones shouldn't be used as examples of successful ceasefires? I'm not sure I follow the logic there....

I came here to post this after reading the article. These clickbaity headlines using ill-conceived methodologies are going to doom us all to the pits of misinformation.

There are notable ceasefires still in effect in the middle east, eastern europe, and asia that have been going on for years (if not tens of years).

Of course, ceasefires, like medication for a psychological illness, are merely a treatment of symptoms and not a cure for the cause. But they do create stable living conditions for the civilians in an area.

And, perhaps equally as importantly, they open up the opportunity for diplomacy to find that cure that will lead to a longer, more lasting peace.

105 failed ceasefires, and one that worked, is still one that worked. We shouldn't judge the concept on the basis of average successes or failures. Just because something doesn't work 90% of the time doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Stopping a war is something you try again and again no matter the odds.

Wow. I mean no offense to you when I say this, but I really thought that you had to be taking that out of context in some way.

What on earth was the author of this article thinking?

To think, all the author has to do is add "These " to the front of the title.

By definition don't ceasefires fail until the conflict is resolved on a long term basis (then in a sense the last ceasefire succeeds).

It seems like a variation on the expression - "I always find it in the the last place I looked."

If you're fighting a war you want a ceasefire to achieve any goals made impossible by constant conflict, which may or may not be peace talks. The success of a ceasefire depends on those goals, not on whether or not it ends that conflict. Even during total wars, life must go on and there comes a time when everyone wants a break from the conflict even if they don't see a possible path to peace.

For example, there's the famous WWI Christmas ceasefire [1], the WWII mini-ceasefires to help wounded soldiers [2], and plenty of more modern ceasefires that allow the labor pool to temporarily switch from war to agriculture for critical harvests [3].

Edit: Also, just because the peace talks don't succeed doesn't mean that the ceasefire is a failure. Peace is a lot harder to negotiate than a break in the fighting so naturally only a small fraction of ceasefires will result in peace. They fail when not only the peace talks break down, but when one or more sides uses the ceasefire for tactical gain, increasing distrust and making continuation of the peace process that much harder.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

[2] http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-hurtgen-forest-temporary...

[3] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/asia/harvesting-c...

Yes, I didn't intend my comment to mean there should be no ceasefires (or that there always should be ceasefires as a tool for peace for that matter). I think the article has the seed of some interesting data for analysis, but isn't at a strong conclusion yet. What might really be interesting to get to is if one can see in data if certain pre-conditions to ceasefires are associated with an increased likelihood to get to longer term peace - or just that they're not as employed as time to regroup-for-the-next-attack - though it's hard to see in data if those waves would have occurred anyway (there are flareups and lulls in conflict even without cease fires). On the flip side, in a very grim way, could more attacks, more intensely bring the conflict to an end more quickly?

Some ceasefires are of an explicitly limited duration. If the fighting resumes after the end of the ceasefire, that might count as a non-failure. Hard to tell how they're counting it here.

"A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend."

That's true of course, but many think of winning wars in the terms of the well-known quote about what is best in life: "To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!"

Romantic, but not really going to work.

Historically, it works quite well. Even in modern times it's not that uncommon to see wars that end only with the destruction of the entire ruling class in the defeated nation.

I'm surprised the author didn't mention the outlier for a very long and successful ceasefire (despite numerous border incidents): North Korea/China and South Korea/USA. It would've made the article seem a little more balanced to me.

Eh, that's more like a proxy war stalemate. It's not quite the same thing.

What is a ceasefire if not a stalemate?

Also it's not a proxy war to Koreans, obviously.

A stalemate is when the belligerents have fought to a draw.

A ceasefire is when they could fight more but choose not to.

In Korea, both sides definitely could fight more. So it's a ceasefire.

But you're not counting the "Chinese volunteers" who completely turned around the result of the initial war. After they withdrew, it's very questionable the North could have fought some more.

> it's very questionable the North could have fought some more

China didn't enter the war "just because" - the main reason was the US encroachment on the Chinese border. By comparison, it would be as-if China was warring in Mexico, and the US decided to ensure China didn't continue marching northwards.

Both China and the US more-or-less stood-down together, which left both North and South Korea in a tough spot - fighting could absolutely continue, however it would have been more of a drag on both nations without their "big brother" support.

So, the ceasefire wasn't because one side of the other couldn't continue the fight - it was because both sides _could_ continue the fight, but both recognized it would be devastating for everyone.

If we fast forward to today, it's unquestionable both sides (with or without foreign support) could continue to wage war on the other.

Well, it's demonstrably not "unquestionable", since I question every paragraph you've written above after the first.

And most especially the last, for the North can't even feed its own army, and one of the many things standing in the way of reunification is the major difference in intelligence, height, and so on of the respective populations, the North being stunted from malnutrition.

The South's hand has been stayed because they've not been willing to take the costs, especially to Seoul, infamously within heavy artillery range of the North, and of course our moderating influence. And now, of course, we've let the North get nukes....

"Could continue the war" isn't the same as "Want to continue the war".

The ceasefire is/was a great way for both sides to "save face" and not admit defeat.

Pretty impressive that a nation of starving imbeciles can have a successful nuclear weapons program.

Sort of, it's the least successful known, in that all others managed to light off a successful "full power" device on their first try, their first was a sub-kiloton fizzle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_Korean_nuclear_test).

However, one should note that they're part of a worldwide network of nations trying to achieve nuclear status sub rosa, they're definitely not doing it all by themselves. And of course their nomenklatura that's executing this nuclear program is by definition not starving. But the bulk of the nation is, and rather uniquely, that includes the army, and that has decisive implications on their ability to wage a general war against the South.

I'm a bit skeptical. North Korea is a highly militarized state and highly dependent on military control. Surely if the military itself is starving we'd see much greater instability than we actually do.

The most important reason the North can't reasonably go to war with the South is that the South obviously enjoys US support and nobody would support the North in such an invasion.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I don't know how the DPRK does it (it's notoriously opaque), but it would be astounding if they didn't follow the 20th Century Communist model of having political types police the military. As for the Korean People's Army, a few minutes with Wikipedia turned up this acknowledgement of direct political control (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People%27s_Army#Commiss...):

The primary path for command and control of the KPA extends through the State Affairs Commission which was led by its chairman Kim Jong-il until 2011, to the Ministry of People's Armed Forces and its General Staff Department. From there on, command and control flows to the various bureaus and operational units. A secondary path, to ensure political control of the military establishment, extends through the Workers' Party of Korea's Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea.

Now, this control is not tight like the infamous USSR Red army political commissars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_commissar#Red_Army), as can be discerned by how nowadays army units out in the field on non-military duty are known to act like bandits. Including capturing and eating small farm animals before they have to return to their barracks.

So, yes, a degree of skepticism is warranted, but there are too many reports of this sort of thing to dismiss it. The Soviets certainly squared this circle, albeit without the spur of pervasive malnutrition ... which, come to think of it, can put a damper on mutinies and the like, if you barely have enough energy to survive.

The Soviet approach to civilians, making them spend lots of time gathering the necessities of life, is another way of suppressing dissent. The PRC was more direct, get on the wrong side of your block or village political committee and you'd no longer get your ration coupons and would starve to death. My PRC roommates in the very late '80s reported this was the biggest effect of Deng Xiaoping's opening of the food system, changing your fate to having to pay more for a lot of your food.

I'd say even with such support it was far more of "a drag" on the Korean peninsula than it was for either patron state.

I can see a decent argument that the Korean ceasefire is qualitatively different; it arose less from an attempt to stop fighting, and more from a conflict where no one wanted to keep fighting but peace terms couldn't be settled. It wasn't envisioned like ceasefires in Syria, Palestine, or Ireland, as a way to stop killings while peace talks happen.

Having said that, it certainly deserves mention as an exceptional result. Many of the border incidents have been larger than the events that broke other ceasefires, but the fundamental peace has held.

despite numerous border incidents

And, oh, more than a few attempts to kill the head of the government of South Korea? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangoon_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_House_raid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuk_Young-soo#Assassination), naval combat ... this is a most hot "cease-fire", just look through the grab bag of topics here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:North_Korea%E2%80%93S...

I count it as an abandoned armistice, which is what it started out as (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Armistice_Agreement), abandoned through the deeds and words of the North. Which, without another huge helping of "Chinese volunteers" simply lacks the military strength to do a whole lot more without retaliation they, or rather their nomenklatura, aren't willing to bear.

There is a plausible argument that ceasefires and endless international community meddling make wars worse, not better, because they drag on as open sores for years instead of being resolved one way or the other. Interesting to see some data suggesting that's true.

Well in the sense that the powers involved in the ceasefire are also arming the belligerents that's probably true.

I'm not very sure that such things can be compared in the manner they are being compared.

Israel has a 'cease fire' with Egypt, Jordan that seems to be working.

North/South Korea.

Georgia/South-Ossetia.

Bosnia/Kosovo/Croatia/Serbia.

South Sudan (kind of).

And I don't think that anyone is naive about how the one's that failed ended up failing ...

Israel has negotiated and signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. I don't understand in what sense you would say that these are 'cease fires', and how that relates to the article's point.

Well, prior to the peace treaties, there definitely were armistices. So those armistices worked very well indeed.

If we say that a 'cease fire' that later turned into a 'peace treaty' doesn't count as a successful peace treaty then of course it looks like 'cease fires' only result in failures.

If the resumption of hostilities qualifies as a failure, then I would have to say a permanent armistice and a peace treaty would have to be qualified as a success.

> Bosnia/Kosovo/Croatia/Serbia.

The wars are over for a long time, these aren't ceasfires.

This is false (or at least a poor interpretation of the data). Ceasefires make it more likely that future ceasefires will succeed. Steven Pinker and others have looked into this extensively.

Here is a write-up of the opposing take.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/world/middleeast/another-c...

Thank you for the link. This study is more interesting since it is showing how ceasefires succeed and fail and offer an explanation on how they work, which is more enlightening that the original article.

To the contrary, cease fires work very well indeed! The article is just looking at things from the wrong perspective.

seem to have been tactical pauses that the <party A> and <party B> used to re-supply and plan further operations

The only reason the parties agree to a cease fire is to give themselves breathing room (logistics, maneuvering units, etc) to position themselves better for new offensive ops.

And to calm the public for a while. Maybe have the press find some other interesting topics.

The Syrian case actually seems like a pretty unfair place to assess ceasefires, since many of them have been been based on incompatible demands.

Just prior to the May ceasefire, the US suggested that it would only hold if Russia ceased bombings on moderate rebel groups. Russia replied that they would do no such thing, and that the ceasefire would only hold if the US considered treaties that would maintain Assad in power. The US, of course, had already rejected that possibility.

The ceasefire was implemented, both countries condemned the other for doing the thing they had already promised to do, and it immediately dissolved. Everyone entered into the ceasefire with conditions they knew wouldn't be adhered to, so the whole thing has to be read more as an attempt to look devoted than an actual move towards peace.

"We've abused these numbers to make a point the numbers themselves cannot support." -More honest headline.

Here's the opposite case: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/world/middleeast/another-c...

"The Surprising Science of Cease-Fires: Even Failures Can Help Peace"

Ceasefires don't work... (by these measures we chose).

I'm sure the civilians appreciate a good cease fire as a time to rebuild their lives, even if just a little. The alternative of just killing each other until all but one side runs out of bodies is not exactly proving better.

Right -- maybe they reduce the intensity of the ongoing fighting.

Looking at the graphs, what they do is allow people to rebuild their lives for a moment - and then send an offensive to trash them harder. That appreciation was misplaced.

Not that stopping war is bad, but that ceasefires don't stop a war.

The goal of a ceasefire isn't to stop a war, it's to provide breathing room for diplomacy and the possibility of a peaceful solution focused on compromise. In that, it then makes sense that it fails so often to end a war given the parties inherent hatred required to go to war in the modern age.

All is fair in love and war. Ceasefire can be used for any kind of goal, including to gain tactical advantage.

True, ceasefires can be used for many goals, but the goal of the third party who instigates a ceasefire is usually to bring the warring factions to a negotiating table. At least "officially".

Bring to table and then kill them. Youngest example I know: mass killing of Ukrainian soldiers in Illovaysk by Russian army after promising of fire cease. They break lot of laws, rules and memorandums before that, so one more/one less does not matter.

Wars begins where diplomacy ends. To return to diplomacy, defending party must demonstrate power first, to be considered as equal, to talk with. Few thousands of dead Russian soldiers forced Russia to Minks and diplomacy.

That was my conclusion looking at the article, too. So we have drops and spikes instead of a smooth curve. The word "alternatives" doesn't even come up in the article.

I guess by these lights, the Rwandan Genocide was a model of diplomacy. Free markets and unchecked hostilities for a better society.

Or to get the hell out.

There is probably civilian pressure to provide pauses in the fighting (the armies are fighting amongst and often populated from the people they hope to rule). Interesting that this is an aspect of civil wars that we don't fully see.

All those bodys piling up, they certainly excert pressure on the ground. The war feeding the war can go on for quite a while (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War) the idea that it is reason that finally extinguishes the flame is delusional.

What extinguishes the war, is that the resources of those spending for it, are rerouted to other theaters of the great game. So if you want to end the war in Syria, create internal strife in iran/russia/saudi arabia/ theWest or friction among blocks consisting of allies.

What extinguishes the war, is that the resources of those spending for it, are rerouted to other theaters of the great game.

Doesn't always have to be that, they can end by enough men of military age being killed or disabled on one side. The US Civil War (as much as a 1/3 of the South; we don't have good figures for it), WWI very possibly, certainly neither resulted in a rerouting to "other theaters of the great game."

In WWII the main combatants on one side were decisively defeated, occupied, and pacified, at least for a while for the Germans, and the following "great game" strife didn't consume a fraction of the human resources of the US and USSR that WWII did.

Then there's Carthaginian peaces, although of course in that case Rome always had some other frontier to make war on.

> I'm sure the civilians appreciate a good cease fire as a time to rebuild their lives, even if just a little.

Note the quote towards the end of the article, which expresses the opposite: Fear that worse will come at the end of it, because that's what happened last time.

> The alternative of just killing each other until all but one side runs out of bodies is not exactly proving better.

I wouldn't say this article proves that your claim is wrong - it's not providing enough data for that. But if& the offensives following the cease fires are sufficiently deadly to make up for the reduction during the cease fires, it's certainly possible* that it is better to just keep going.

Even if the post-ceasefire offensive raw casualty numbers are higher it also matters who is dying and why.

Often the stated purpose of the ceasefire is to allow the civilians to leave, or to allow the weaker party to surrender or relinquish their positions if they choose to do so.

I do not really find that surprising. The way I think about the observation is as an iterated prisoners dilemma, in which both sides have a history of defect. To expand a bit, wars happen when both sides prefer war to the terms of peace (and in this game theoretic view "terms of peace" does not include any assumption of reasonability, for one side "terms of peace" may well be getting annihilated), plus of course a breakdown of trust. So each side has to prepare for the defection of the other side and neither side trusts that the other side will stick to the cease fire, and has therefore an incentive to attack first.

This is a odd generalization and mischaracterization of ceasefires. There's nothing intrinsically magical about a ceasefire. You can only truly judge their success by their circumstances and goals, not what happens after they end.

We wouldn't have the peace we have now in Northern Ireland without negotiated ceasefires.

The problem here is that the author never really defines what the criteria for a ceasefire's success is.

My understanding is that ceasefire is like a "timeout" -- a temporary stoppage to stop/lower the intensity of conflict to give an opportunity for cooler heads to prevail, evacuate wounded, etc.

Being from Ireland I suspect they work best when accompanied by a process to get people an alternative to, and path out of, violence.

It took a lot of goes before one stuck here. I have memories growing up of a ceasefire every other day, broken the next.

Each ceasefire elicits some sort of confidence issue within the movement and towards their adversaries so that when they fail they often do so catastrophically (Canary Wharf etc).

But it only takes one to stick...

I've recently read an explanation for the end of that conflict that makes the most sense of any I've read, not that I consider myself to be even minimally informed about it, and it was that the series of anti-material bombings that included Canary Wharf is what forced the U.K. to make a peace work, the massive damages to buildings and other infrastructure were just too much to sustain.

its kind of an interesting article, but the thing that snagged me and wouldn't leave my mind was this:

> when U.S. aircraft mistakenly killed about 80 Syrian troops.

you mean, it fell apart because of america and not russia like the newspapers said? and they never retracted it so they must have been right?

i'm so glad i live in the west where our media is unbiased ¬ (i really wish i wasn't joking about that :()

Errr, what newspapers do you read? Using this Google search https://www.google.com/search?q=us+appologizes+for+bombing+s... I find this errant bombing and often Obama's apology reported by the NYT, The Guardian and the Daily Mail (really, a lot better than the other tabloids) as just the most prominent papers on the first page, along with FoxNews (well, Murdoch does have papers as well), going to the 2nd page, The Telegraph and the BBC (non-newspaper) ... it's a pretty thorough cross section of the Left through the Right (most of the latter not mentioned in this posting)....

Our intervention in that mess has been so maladroit, especially as of late, that pretty much everyone in the US is unfavorably reporting on it.

train rags like metro mainly. they are not good quality sources, but they have very wide readership.

Not familiar with that one (can you supply a link to a website?), but since the Daily Mail's coverage of this is better....

Then again, the thing that's astounded me about the Daily Mail is just how good its reporting of very current events can be, including stuff that you might think would be obscure to it like the EF-5 tornado that ripped through my home city 4,500 miles away.

Well, it killed 160, so "if it bleeds, it leads", but, still, their reporting on it was timely, accurate, and their collection of pictures was better than any paper in the region, two of which I snarfed for my own page on it.... Whereas I have nothing good to say about its tabloid competitors (and despair at what the Torygraph has become, etc. etc. but that's for another discussion).

> http://metro.co.uk/

if you use public transport regularly you would have seen it. its probably the mostly widely read paper in the london area together with the evening standard. both are free, and most people don't go out of their way to buy newspapers any more...

they aren't great sources, but they are also the most often used source of news by many commuters in the london area

you do get them further afield, but there is not the same scale of public transport usage.

North and South Korea have been in cease fire for a while now.

I think what won't stop are proxy wars, because a proxy war is more viable than a direct confrontation. In a world where economies are interconnected and interdependent you cannot afford a world among major [super]?powers.

What actually works, conflict resolving by party separation and having deterrents that could wipe out both sides leaders.

Pakistan/India. Iran/Iraq. Russia/America.

Conclusion, Nuclear weapons reduce Civil(ized) Wars.

Aren't there lower bounds to the size of the parties for which this would be a guarantor of deadlock? As in, does this work at the gang-scale, or smaller organizations where physical violence is substituted with, say, fees?

Cease fire is used to buy time, most times both sides understands this

not surprising--what i think is more interesting though is the why they don't work. I suspect casefires often fail despite both parties best intentions and efforts to properly execute a ceasefire.

i've seen the term "prisoner's dilemma" in the comments here, and that's absolutely what it is--a game theoretic problem in which the strictly dominated strategy is to violate the ceasefire.

In my experience (USMC infantry) a ceasefire requires an extraordinary degree of precise orchestration along both axes (vertically: squad -> platoon -> company -> battalion - brigade; and horizontally: infantry -> artillery -> air assets -> logistics).

Add to that the difficulty of coordinating your own ceasefire effort with your enemy--while they are (ostensibly) trying to doing the same thing.

the fact is that once a cease fire is agreed upon, and an authentic message delivered up and down the commands in battle, tanks and artillery will still continue to fire to allow the infantry to disengage.

but what's the safest way to disengage with someone who's shooting at you? It depends. Troops in a defensive posture (i.e., "dug in") are highly unlikely to vacate their relatively safe positions because to do so means raising their exposure to enemy fire--and indeed they are still active during the casefire.

so for instance to induce the infantry to withdrawal, indirect fire--artillery, mortars, tanks, air assets--will often substantially increase immediately after a ceasefire is communicated. Again, this is normal. But it just takes one officer who doesn't understand this and who thinks the other side has reneged and orders his unit to continue to attack the opposing infantry unit, which is now vulnerable having vacated their carefully prepared defensive positions.

The title is a little bit too clickbaitish for my taste, but after reading the article I'd argue its only large scale ceasefires which have been proven to be ineffective. Small scale, company/battalion/regiment level ceasefires, not designed to stop the war, but designed to reduce the suffering of those wounded still stuck on an active battlefield, have demonstrated plenty of value.

The ceasefire in Aleppo city worked pretty well -- once the RuAF siege on the east was lifted, the Salafist-Jihadist forces wasted no time indiscriminately shelling western Aleppo city and killing scores of civilians in a matter of days. At that point the RuAF and SAA had every moral right to respond in kind.

It was always expected that there would be violations and it would fail, the idea is that they fail in a manner that benefits The Good Guys(TM). In this case, the al-Qaeda-linked Salafist-Jihadists supported by the CIA and Turkey will now be relegated to the sands of time, fading into obscurity (and rightly so).

It is unfortunate that the SDF and related groups (ie: YPG/J) never receive the same political and military recognition that their radical Islamist counterparts do.

It is unfortunate that the SDF and related groups (ie: YPG/J) never receive the same political and military recognition that their radical Islamist counterparts do.

Oh, I don't know, not counting those on the "Alt Right" (for which I'll define here as "the non-'neocon' Right, we have a lot more respect for the SDF in particular, the Kurds, not so much as soldiers vs. e.g. skirmishers), for tomorrow the rest of the US goes to vote to decide the outcome between one person who had a major hand in creating the contours of this outbreak of this conflict ("Hama Rules" reminds us it's quite a bit older than when any of these people having a role in it), and someone who'd be satisfied if the SDF and related groups terminate the Salafist-Jihadists et. al. with extreme prejudice and (start to?) return a semblance of peace to the region.

Hmmm, as for the latter case, it wouldn't be the first time a US president had a major fight on his hand with "his own" CIA....

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make from that incoherent babbling, but let's make one thing clear -- the YPG/J are regarded as some of the most well-trained and disciplined organizations in Syria.

They're able to make great strides against Isil with minimal backpedaling, engaging in the toughest counter-terrorism and guerrilla operations the world has ever seen, in addition to long-lasting success in large-scale conventional warfare. US SOF have been very tightly embedded with them for a relatively lengthy period of time and the effects are definitely apparent.

Their power structure is clearly defined compared to the FSA and other radical Islamists, whom are bereft with nepotism and weak professional cohesion, and I'm certain the schism within the current administration is between the US State Department+CIA and the US DOD.

As for your jab at Hillary with your "Hama Rules" reference and your subtle allusion to whether Trump supports the SDF -- I am willing to argue that Hillary is just as clueless to the Middle East as Trump. The former will defer to our partners in the Middle East (eg: Gulf monarchies, Turkey) and pursue a policy of leading from behind while the latter will go with the status quo. Frankly I'd prefer the latter as the situation is unstable but there is definitely a positive trend with regards to knocking radical Islamist ideology down a couple notches.

I know nothing about the YPG/J, except what I just looked up to confirm that they've got a number of Kurds, and my point about Kurds is that in general, they aren't good at more than skirmishing.

That a group including a lot them could be formed that's "regarded as some of the most well-trained and disciplined organizations in Syria" is hardly incompatible with that observation, especially with US SOF involvement, the latter something too many forgot or worse after the Vietnam War.

When compared to the typical modern Arab officered army, that they're a lot more effective against ISIL is hardly surprising; I myself an interested in how the SDF became so effective, although it could be a "do or die" existential sort of thing.

"Hama Rules" wasn't intended as a "jab at Hillary", just an observation that we're in the middle of a very long term conflict, which I'll add won't be resolved as long as the jihadists lose this round as they did in the early '80s.

The real jab, that's clearly drawing blood from others, is how they don't like being reminded of the blood that'll be on their hands after they vote for Hillary tomorrow.

Well, let me just say that my statement is most definitely still incompatible with yours: the YPG/J are one of the most well-trained, disciplined, and professional army in the entirety of the Middle East. Yes, they rival that of the IRGC in Iran and the TSK in Turkey, but not quite on the level IDF in Israel.

Their only shortcoming is the lack of heavy weaponry and high-tech training. That kind of specialty requires special connections or domestic heavy industry.

How did they become so effective? I would put it as two parts: 1) do-or-die as you said, and 2) rich history of duty, service, and honor. The former is pure grit and there is no shortage of that on the radical Islamist side of things but the latter requires a personal and social investment that is far more rare.

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