 To assess Syria today, most people are looking to the war in Afghanistan. But to really draw lessons from the war in Afghanistan, we shouldn't look to the last 10 years, but we should actually look to the last 30 years, and particularly to the 1980s under the Soviet occupation. In Syria, what had initially been a peaceful protest had become militarized within six or seven months. And once it became militarized, the political emphasis shifted away from purely just winning political support as a protest leader or as a political leader towards getting guns and money. That became sort of the emphasis. In other words, towards patronage. And that reordered the whole Syrian conflict where now you have groups in Syria who are allying with whomever will give them guns and whomever will give them money. And that is something that's very similar in my mind to the experience in Afghanistan, particularly in the 80s. So in the 80s, you had the Soviet occupation of the country and you had people, ordinary people taking up arms against the Soviet brutality. But the moment they took up arms, there was a question of where are they going to get their guns? Where are they going to get their money from? And it was mostly from the CIA or from Pakistan or from Saudi Arabia. In other words, it became a question, again, of patronage. And once it became a question of patronage, these units on the ground, they said they were fighting for God, but the real God they were fighting for was guns and money. Real fear is Syria could become the same thing. And I think drawing upon that, a lot of U.S. policymakers have expressed hesitance to just pouring in money and weapons into Syria because in Afghanistan, we poured in money and weapons not only to all sorts of people, but also to the most extreme people because the most extreme people are also the most effective at killing Russians. But that came back to haunt us in the 90s because a lot of the people we supplied ended up being the main instigators of the Civil War and in sort of second order and third order effects ended up bolstering what became al-Qaeda and became the Taliban. And there's a real fear that doing that in Syria will lead to similar sorts of things. I think a major lesson we can take from the Soviet occupation in the 80s is that the moment we get involved and start injecting guns and start injecting money, we transform the local environment, we transform the incentives and the priority of the local actors to be something that we don't necessarily want and they didn't necessarily intend upon in the beginning.