By Emily Wight 

Almost a year since the uprising began inSyria, 7000 people are estimated to have died at the hands of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The death this week of the revered journalist Marie Colvin – a founding member of the Frontline Club – has intensified the media spotlight on what has become a humanitarian crisis.

A panel of experts on the situation came to the Frontline Club on Friday for a #FCBBCA event exploring possible solutions to the situation.

Chaired by BBC Arabic presenter Rasha Qandeel, Crisis in Syria – what can be done? began with a tribute to Marie Colvin before Qandeel began the discussion.

The panel was nothing if not balanced. British-Iranian journalist Ramita Navai, a reporter for Channel 4’s documentary series Unreported World, focussed on the plight of Syrians; meanwhile Ammar Waqqaf, a member of the Syrian Social Club – which strives for regime reform rather than regime change – claimed that the killing of army members by rebels is commonplace.

Waqqaf also referred to a poll – the source of which he couldn’t say – showing that the majority of Syrians supported Assad. Navai found this hard to believe, recalling her time undercover with members of the opposition movement in October, when they found themselves under siege (“You couldn’t walk down the road to get bread”, she said).

Navai dismissed any speculation that the rebels weren’t simply ordinary people whose human rights had been trampled on by an oppressive regime:

“Who are the rebels? Who is the Free Syrian Army? They’ve taken to arming themselves to protect themselves and their families – it’s a natural progression. The activists are not terrorists.”

Navai also insisted that Assad has a stronger military than Gadaffi ever had inLibya.

Debate moved on to what can be done to stop further bloodshed. Scores of refugees have fled across the border toTurkey, but Qandeel spoke of latest BBC reports that the Syrian government has now lined their borders with landmines to kill anyone attempting to leave the country.

Should, then, the international community intervene? If so, how?

Dr Mouna Ghanem is a gender expert and vice-president of the political movement Building theSyrianState, which aims to unite Syrians with a variety of ideologies in forming a democratic and egalitarian state. She still has faith in diplomacy, saying:

“Only through international consensus among other countries – this is the only way for a safe exit strategy. We can stop the killing by creating an international consensus amongRussiaandChina.”

Others on the panel as well as audience members agreed that this is looking less and less likely.

The biggest controversy of the evening, however, came after Malik Al-Abdeh, Chief Editor of the Syrian opposition Barada TV, pointed towards the sectarian issue as the “elephant in the room”. The Syrian regime is dominated by Alawite Shiites; Al-bdeh claimed that “Sunni Arabs feel that the state doesn’t represent them.”

But Dr Ghanem insisted the situation was simply a question of pro- versus anti-Assad. Audience members spoke up; many had personal ties to theMiddle Eastand could shed light on their experiences. All were passionate about the humanitarian crisis unravelling in the country and hopeful that, somehow, it must come to an end.

The decision to go into Afghanistan was necessary as a kind of “acting out” to restore American national confidence and pride in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but it was done with little idea about what was to be achieved by it.

That was the claim of Jean MacKenzie, senior correspondent for GlobalPost and previously programme director for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in Kabul, about the decision of president George Bush to send troops into Afghanistan less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.

"We had to go in, America had to kick ass because we had been attacked and we had to prove that we were big guys, and there was very little resistance to going in to Afghanistan, Afghanistan was a very convenient ass to kick, because it was not being really defended," said MacKenzie.

MacKenzie, who was taking part in a recent discussion titled: Counterinsurgency and the "War on Terror": Doomed to fail? agreed that America had to react to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. The problem was not the decision to intervene, but  the fact that it was done without a clear idea of what it would accomplish, she said:

"We didn’t need to go in with this open-ended brief of we’re going in there to get rid of al-Quaeda, now we’re going in there so that little girls can go to school and maybe we’re there so women don’t have to wear burqas and now we’re there, as Time magazine tells us, so that women’s noses are not cut off. Where does it stop? We needed to define our goals from the very beginning."

There was also a lack of clarity about who the enemy was, said MacKenzie, who claimed local groups could manipulate NATO or the International Security Assistance Force into fighting their battles by claiming their opponents were Taliban:

"We go into an area, like in Kunar, where two groups are fighting over logging rights – another gets close to us and says they are the Taliban. We start fighting them and they fight back and as soon as they do, they become an insurgency."

As a result of the lack of clarity the rhetoric about the US mission in Afghanistan had taken on a life of its own, MacKenzie argued:

"It’s a very broad statement but I think we are now fighting the Afghan people, the Afghan society. We say the Taliban stone women for adultery, the Taliban stone young couples, the Taliban throw acid in the faces of school children.

But in most of these cases, if you unravel it, it’s not the Taliban, it is the community that has done these things. So if we are fighting those manifestations of Afghan culture, we are not fighting the Taliban, we are fighting Afghan society, we are fighting a culture that we find noxious. That, I think, is quite a bit beyond our brief."

Ten years on, the mood in Afghanistan was one the “darkest despair”, said MacKenzie, adding that there is little trust on the ground in the ability of the Afghan forces to protect the people. In addition, things have gone "way beyond the point" when outside nations could impose anything on the country:

"There was a point at the beginning when there was a certain amount of hope and goodwill among Afghans, but I don’t feel it there any more," she said.

"The Afghans are more and more pessimistic, they have given up on their own government, how do you fight counterinsurgency when you have no legitimate government to partner with? How do we begin to do anything?

Yet the US is likely to leave Afghanistan with "honour and dignity in the strategic communications sense," said MacKenzie, who predicted that from now until the end of 2014 the US administration was going to be "busily engaged in painting a narrative of victory":

All that is required for us to have won is for the media to pack up and go home so there’s no focus on what’s actually happening and for us to redefine victory and to move the goalposts as it were."

Malte Roschinski, a security consultant, political analyst and author who reported from Afghanistan for AFP news agency, was also pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan and said he believed the best that the US could do was to "come up with a good PR strategy and hope for the next six months or so it’s going to stay fairly quiet".

"After that the media focus will have moved away from the country. There will be stories afterwards but the media works in cycles and public attention has just so much bandwidth anyway so it’s just going to be a PR exercise."

Daniel Abbott over at tdaxp is editing a new book on fifth-generation warfare, to be published by Nimble Books. I’m writing a chapter addressing Somalia, piracy (pictured), human security and 5GW in Africa. Here’s a brief sample:

The “fourth generation” of war entailed irregular combatants fighting for an ideological cause, seeking to remake society according to their ideals. Fifth-generation war, or 5GW, now coalescing, is less clearly ideological but just as sweeping in its goals. 5GW is when a party exploits or encourages an existing or emerging crisis to achieve strategic goals that those most directly involved in the crisis might not even be aware of. 5GW is a form of stealthy proxy war.

“The systematic alteration, or replacement of, an existing rule set is your strategic goal,” Thomas Barnett wrote of 5G fighters. “You’re not happy with things the way they are, so you make those around you unhappy enough that they too, are unhappy with the ways things are. Shock them hard enough, and you can trigger their own movement toward new rule sets that move the pile for you.”

Where fourth-gen combatants might blend in with the surrounding populace most of the time, they still periodically emerged to form military-style units. 5G fighters, by contrast, remain “subtle actors.” They may never once wear a uniform or carry a rifle. Their weapon is the desperate population of a society on the brink; their major tactic is unrest; their goal is to undermine the established order in the interest of changing it, or just leaving it in ruins.

No continent poses less of a traditional military threat to the United States than Africa. But in an age of 5GW, where subtle actors can exploit humanitarian, economic and other crises to undermine the power and legitimacy of the industrial state, no continent poses a greater non-traditional threat. An increasingly volatile Africa begs for greater U.S. intervention and risks corrupting that very intervention, turning American strength into weakness.

For America, 5GW in Africa is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. There are no easy answers to Africa’s worsening crises, and there is no consensus on how, or whether, the United States should intervene. Doing anything might make the continent’s problems worse. So might doing nothing. And despite its distance and its still-tiny slice of world trade and military power, in the age of 5GW, a suffering Africa is a threat to the United States.