Costs of War: The Somalia Inheritance
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
Under the Bush administration, Somalia became a front in the war on terror. Disdaining nation-building and other international community initiatives, the counterterror ideologues of the administration cast a complex intra-national conflict with deep historic roots and significant regional connections as a Manichean struggle of ‘moderates’ against ‘extremists.’
The impact of this policy can be illuminated by considering the career of Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.
In June 2006, Sheikh Sharif was the chairman of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a loose coalition of indigenous Islamist militias which had driven a hated band of US-backed warlords from the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
US support for the warlords had fuelled nationalist and Islamist anti-Americanism in the country and strengthened the hand of the most radical group in the ICU, al-Shabaab, some of whose leaders were linked to al-Qaida by US authorities.
“Had it not been for the United States' counterterrorism efforts, the sharia courts and al-Shabaab might have remained marginal,” external pageconcluded a recent review of the sorry record of US Somalia policy by Bronwyn Bruton of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
Faced with a disaster of their own creation, US policymakers compounded their errors by giving at least tacit support to an invasion by Christian-majority Ethiopia on Christmas day 2006.
Martin Fletcher, in an external pageanalysis for the Times of London that week, called it “a dangerous gamble.”
The Ethiopians said they were restoring the internationally backed but widely reviled internally Transitional Federal Government (TFG). But the TFG was only able to function with the support of Ethiopian forces and the occupation sparked a multi-faceted insurgency that continues today, directed against a UN-backed African peacekeeping force, ANISOM.
external pageBruton echoes many other experts in concluding the invasion was “a catastrophe.” It turned al-Shabaab from an insignificant fringe group into the leadership of a fully fledged Islamic insurgency which has external pagepledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and has global recruiting opportunities among disaffected youth in the many Somali diaspora communities in the US and Europe.
Sheikh Sharif - who was detained crossing into Kenya shortly after the invasion, and external pagereleased a few weeks later after meetings with US officials - is now president of the latest incarnation of the TFG.
Weaker than ever
Barely able to control Mogadishu, even with ANISOM’s 5,000 troops, the TFG faces an insurgency as sophisticated and deadly as any in the 18-year history of Somalia’s internal war.
Using tactics like suicide bombing honed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and trained by veterans of those conflicts, al-Shabaab and its allies have proved able to strike directly at senior government ministers.
Last week’s attack on a university graduation ceremony carried out by a suicide bomber dressed as a woman killed at least three cabinet ministers, and, as external pagethe New York Times reported, “illustrate[ed] how weak the government really is [...]. The insurgents seem to have the ability to strike at will.”
In retrospect, the attack may turn out to look something like a turning point for the fate of the post-invasion political settlements, tortuously hammered out in Djibouti with Sharif and other faction leaders.
Nonetheless, US diplomats, including Secretary of State Hilary Clinton “argue that the Sharif-led TFG is Somalia's ‘best chance’ for peace,” notes Bruton, adding sardonically that this is “a label that has been attached to every Somali government since 2000.”
Bruton argues for an almost Zen approach to policy: “Sometimes, as in Somalia, doing less is better.” The US should embark on “a policy of constructive disengagement toward Somalia. Giving up on a bad strategy is not admitting defeat,” she concludes.
external pageOther experts urge focus on the basics of governance and security, and Andre Le Sage of the US National Defense University noted recently that the TFG will likely to continue enjoy support from “the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union, and many of their member states” in addition to the US.
War on terror blinders
The problem is that there has been too little detailed thinking about what it might mean to take off the war on terror policy blinders with regard to Somalia.
John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s most senior counterterrorism advisor, said earlier this year that Somalia was exactly the kind of place where external pagejoined-up policy thinking was required about a proliferating and shifting set of threats to regional and global/US security.
“Somalia’s a good case in point in terms of not looking at an issue only through the counterterrorism prism,” he said. “What we need to do, though, is to have a more comprehensive approach” to US policy toward all the nations of the Horn of Africa.
He said a lot of meetings were underway to develop policy that would “deal with the situation in Somalia in a thoughtful manner; not just to put Band-Aids on problems that are there, but how are we going to address it longer term?”
No word yet on how that’s going. Typically, complex policy processes like this one require the close attention of the most senior officials to make the wheels turn, even slowly. With the level of attention Somalia is getting in Washington at the moment, it’s easy to imagine they aren’t turning at all.