Despite years of diplomacy and a CIA operation to equip and train moderate rebels, the US finds itself without a credible partner on the ground in Syria as it bombs the Islamic State. That’s a potentially serious flaw in its strategy to ultimately defeat the militants. Obama administration officials have long conceded that airstrikes alone won’t drive IS from its strongholds across Syria and Iraq, but it also has ruled out the use of American ground troops. The US strategy to crush IS rests on the use of local proxy forces, and hinges on plans to use $500 million and a base in Saudi Arabia to build an army of moderate Syrian rebels. We don’t have a willing, capable, effective partner on the ground inside Syria right now,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said last week.

The central reality is that Washington has no serious local partners on the ground. It is important to understand that the Free Syrian Army doesn’t actually exist. A U.S. strategy of escalating airstrikes in Syria even if coupled with ground forces would wish that the weakest and most disorganized forces in the country somehow become the strongest, first defeating the Islamic State, then the Assad regime, all while fighting off Jabhat al-Nusra and Khorasan. The chance that all this will happen is remote.

Critics believe this policy would have been easy three years ago, when the opposition to Assad was more secular and democratic. It’s a fact that the demonstrations against the Assad regime in the initial months seemed to be carried out by more secular and liberal people. This was also true in Libya and Egypt. But over time, more organized, passionate and religious forces triumphed. This is a familiar pattern in revolutions including the French, Russian and Iranian. They are begun by liberals and taken over by radicals. Now all the effective ground forces of rebels in Syria are radicals.

There are variety of forces fighting the Assad regime, and the infighting and shifting allegiances among them is quite often. After realizing that there is no credible partner on ground U.S. is trying to create a side, rather than pick a side and US didn't really know what its side looked like as the Syrian civil war dragged on. Given that the U.S. now arguably has at least three distinct enemies in Syria the Assad regime, ISIS, and al-Qaeda affiliates the enemy of America's enemy isn't necessarily America's friend. In Syria, the United States has also been monitoring the actions of the Khorasan Group, a shadowy cell of senior al Qaeda operatives who are reportedly plotting attacks against Western targets. U.S. ally Turkey is refusing to contribute and the plight of a beleaguered Kurdish town exposing the limitations of the strategy. Even Washington’s most loyal ally, the United Kingdom, is sitting on the sidelines of the Syrian military operation.

The main beneficiary of the strikes so far appears to be President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces have taken advantage of the shift in the military balance to step up attacks against the moderate rebels designated by President Obama as partners of the United States in the war against extremists. At the start of the air campaign, dozens of US cruise missiles were fired into areas controlled by the moderate rebels, who are supposed to be fighting the Islamic State. Syrians who had in the past appealed for American intervention against Assad have been staging demonstrations denouncing the United States and burning the American flag. The US air strikes have not loosened the militant’s grip on power or had any significant impact on the militant’s capacity to launch offensives and capture territory, as the assault on the Kurdish border town of Kobane has demonstrated. Over a two-week period, fighters swept unimpeded through a string of villages around the town.

The one front on which the moderate rebels are battling the Islamic State, in the northern province of Aleppo, has not seen any coalition airstrikes, even though rebels say they have asked for them. Instead, the Syrian government launched a new offensive last week aimed at cutting off rebel supply lines to Aleppo city a few miles farther south, forcing the rebels to redirect troops from the fight with the militants. Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group said if the U.S. government doesn’t speed up plans to support the Free Syrian Army, “a year from now there might not be any moderate rebels left,”. What's ended up happening as a byproduct of US airstrikes is that regime resources are freed up against what the regime sees as the more important frontlines, in the western and central parts of Syria.

But one thing is clearly visible President Obama's Syria strategy is a self-contradictory mess. The strategy is supposed to be reconciled by arming Syria's "moderate" rebels. But Obama's not willing to arm them enough to actually win. Even worse, his attacks on ISIS are undermining those rebels. They're freeing up Assad to focus even more on fighting the rebels, which is exactly the situation that Assad had hoped to engineer. So both Assad and the rebels are focusing more on fighting one another, and thus less on fighting ISIS.

Obama doesn't want to build up the rebels enough to defeat ISIS, he doesn't want to invade and occupy Syria (rightly), and he doesn't trust Turkey enough to sponsor a Turkish invasion. With those options off the table, only Assad is left as someone who is able to re-conquer ISIS-held territory and occupy it for many years, which is what it would take to end the ISIS threat. Unless ISIS miraculously collapses on its own or Obama changes the calculus that had led him to rule out every other option, then he ultimately has two choices. Keep the status quo strategy, accepting that it will leave ISIS pretty capable of attacking the US and American interests and will leave Assad in power, or partner with Assad and help him win the war. Both of those options are disasters for Syria and for the broader Middle East, not to mention for Obama's legacy.