Back in 2012, Fred Hof was President Obama’s advisor for Syria. Today, Zack Beauchamp asks him if there was anything we could have done 
back then to prevent the rise of ISIS:
In mid-2012, President Obama’s key national security officials — Clinton, Panetta, Petraeus, and Dempsey — all recommended a robust training and equipping effort designed to unite and strengthen nationalist anti-Assad rebels. One of the justifications for the recommendation was that they were beginning to see the rise of al-Qaeda-related elements in Syria.
Had that recommendation been accepted and then implemented properly, the ISIS presence in Syria would not be what it is today. Had the US been able to offer Syrian civilians a modicum of protection from Assad regime collective punishment — barrel bombs and all the rest — a major ISIS recruiting tool around the world and inside Syria could have been diluted and even neutralized.
That bolded phrase is doing a helluva lot of heavy lifting here. I wish Beauchamp had followed up and asked Hof if he thinks the US intelligence and military communities could, in fact, have implemented this policy effectively. Their recent efforts, which produced something like five trained rebels, don’t inspire a ton of confidence. My guess is that Obama listened to their recommendations but concluded that in the real world, it wouldn’t have worked. I suspect he was right.
We’ll never know, of course, which means this can be a subject of debate pretty much forever. But there’s sure nothing in the recent historical record to inspire a lot of faith in our ability to carry out a plan like this.
