The U.S. air strike targeting al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in southern Somalia earlier this month caught many by surprise, but it shouldn't have. Touted as a sudden display of American force after a 12-year leave of absence from the country, the move was more of an exclamation point heralding a broader initiative underway to secure lawless areas across the latest frontier of the Bush administration's "war on terror."
Pentagon architects are already providing arms and expertise to a host of African "partners" to shore up porous national borders, with grander designs in the works for a new Africa Command to anchor counter-terror operations and protect at-risk oil interests. Critics warn that strengthening authoritarian regimes to consolidate power and crushing legitimate opposition on the pretext of fighting terror is a strategy that could backfire: Radicalism might surge and make enemies where they scarcely exist. Early symptoms are visible. And in no place will long-term U.S. plans encounter fiercer resistance than Somalia, where clan-based tensions -- now doused with an Islamist guerilla war -- again threaten to plunge the country into anarchy.
U.S. officials insist the Jan. 8 raid killed at least eight Islamist fighters working for Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, patron of the terrorist trio behind the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that claimed more than 250 lives. The official line was that the Ethiopian army had cornered militia loyal to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), forcing al-Qaeda agents among them to break cover for an opportune U.S. strike. Many believe the strike was launched from the Djibouti-based Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, presently the main U.S. counter-terrorism outpost in the region and possibly the shadow of a larger footprint. President Bush is expected to formally announce plans for an Africa Command later this year.
Criticism rained down, with the European Union, United Nations and African Union, expressing fears that unconfirmed reports civilians had died in the AC-130 attack would spark reprisals against Ethiopian forces and harm Western interests in the region. But Ethiopia has already started to withdraw, well aware that the longer they remain occupiers the more likely they will become a foil against which opposition groups of all stripes can mobilize. The United States' own misadventure is a vivid reminder.
Since the ill-fated "Black Hawk Down" intervention of 1992-93, Washington's psychological phobia had reduced its role to patrolling the pirate-infested waters along the Somali coast. Images of a U.S. Army ranger's body being dragged half-naked through the streets of Mogadishu by an angry mob precipitated the end of U.S. peacekeeping efforts less than a year later. Warlords filled the vacuum. A dog-eat-dog policy of disengagement stood for a number of years, even as Western intelligence agencies knew alleged al-Qaeda operatives sought refuge amid the lawlessness. This changed with the Sept. 11 attacks, which sobered the Bush administration to the dangers of ungoverned territory in far corners of the world. Osama Bin Laden's foot-soldiers had flourished in the badlands of Afghanistan; so too could Islamist zealots find traction in godforsaken swathes of Saharan Africa and the Horn.
This prospect led the CIA to funnel suitcases of cash to leading warlords last summer when it became clear ICU fighters were preparing to take over Mogadishu. It was yet another backhanded strategy of using a devil to kill a snake -- effectively the same devil that resulted in the deaths of 18 U.S. Special Forces more than a decade before. But the move is said to have helped consolidate Somali support for the ICU, seen as a stabilizing force to Somalis fed up with indiscriminate violence, and the warlords were routed. If not for the Ethiopian maneuver, Washington would still be facing what it dreads most: a potentially hostile Islamist state situated at the nexus of Africa and the Middle East. The fact that the ICU broke the warlords' stranglehold and brought a semblance of order to a failed state ran into a policy monolith.
The blowback of unintended consequences could extend much farther. Starting in mid-2005, Congress earmarked $500 million for an overt counter-terror program to tame what military officials have called the "Wild West" of Saharan Africa. The Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative was conceived to give low-key military training and arms reinforcements to nine countries spanning Chad to Mauritania, where barren reaches are considered fertile ground for Islamist groups to establish Afghanistan-style terror training camps. The Algeria-based Salafist Group for Call and Combat, included on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations, has become a poster menace for its role in a 2003 kidnapping of a group of European tourists and a series of alleged attacks on Algerian and Mauritanian troop outposts in 2005.
Yet the Salafist Group has withered; top leaders have turned themselves in and called on holdout fighters to take advantage of a government amnesty, which hundreds have accepted. Though some hardcore members still stir occasional trouble in the countryside, the group's activities in Africa are now largely confined to smuggling illicit goods. According to Jeremy Keenan, a Sahara specialist at the University of East Anglia in Britain, this has not stopped Algeria and other authoritarian governments from using disinformation to inflate the terrorist threat. As a result, some governments have scored millions in U.S. military hardware, reinforced by the support of Special Forces advisory units. Keenan argues the U.S. and Algerian authorities have failed to produce "indisputable verification" of Salafist Group terrorism in the Sahara since the kidnapping, undermining the very basis of the U.S. presence in the region. "If anything," he says, "the [Trans-Sahara Initiative] ... will generate terrorism, by which I mean resistance to the overall U.S. presence and strategy."
Similarly, a March 2005 report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, asserts that though the Sahara is "not a terrorist hotbed;" heavy-handed governments there are exploiting the Bush administration's "war on terror" to stifle political opposition and deny civil freedoms. Ignoring the region would be a mistake. But without a higher degree of economic and political liberalization, Crisis Group warned that anti-American sentiment was likely to surge in areas where it is not yet a problem.
The vast, forgotten desert-nation of Mauritania is a case in point. Former president Maaouya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya on many occasions vilified and jailed opposition politicians on bogus charges they had ties to the Salafist Group and sought to topple his government. Hundreds of Mauritanians in the capital, Nouakchott, took to the streets to protest the start of the Trans-Sahara Initiative two months before Taya was deposed in a bloodless August 2005 coup staged by top generals to ease popular discontent. To their credit, the generals have made good on a subsequent promise to hold free elections to restore civilian rule. U.S. officials behind the Trans-Sahara Initiative would no doubt like to see more democratic governance in which resources are better distributed to ensure a viable framework for their counter-terror strategy. Otherwise, volatility in partner countries like Chad and Nigeria could very well be exploited by ideological entrepreneurs that would harm American interests.
A recent swell of political instability has also accelerated Defense Department efforts to establish an Africa Command to encompass ongoing projects and streamline policy. In his final days as defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld lobbied President Bush on the importance of setting up a new command pay closer attention to the restive continent, with keen eye on protecting oil reserves subject to theft and disruption by militant groups -- and the aggressive advances of Chinese investors. Nigeria is the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, but pipeline attacks could have severe ramifications on international oil prices stretched thin by Mideast violence and Asian demand. Energy officials say the Gulf of Guinea will produce 25 percent of U.S. crude by 2010, placing the region ahead of Saudi Arabia. The Bush administration has thus designated West African oil as a “strategic national interest.” This means defense by force if necessary.
The Defense Department operates five separate military commands worldwide, and Africa is divided among three of them: European Command oversees 43 countries across North and sub-Saharan Africa; Central Command covers the Horn of Africa; and Pacific Command keeps tabs on Madagascar. Some analysts assert the new command would be best situated some where central but off-shore, perhaps on the twin islands of Sao Tome and Principe at the Western bend of the continent within quick-response distance of gulf reserves. Others, like outgoing CentCom commander Gen. John Abizaid, insist burgeoning security threats such as civil conflict, extreme poverty, open borders and territorial waters, and the specter of natural disasters -- Somalia's national cocktail -- make a command on or near the Horn paramount. CentCom's Horn of Africa headquarters in Djibouti was created shortly after the 9/11 attacks, has about 1,800 troops and functions as both a desert warfare training and intelligence-gathering center. As in the West, border control and counter-terror exercises have been conducted with the armies of Kenya and Ethiopia, the latter reportedly just prior to the December operation into Somalia.
It is impossible to know what the ICU's ultimate plans were for Somalia and its neighbors. The Islamists made the false move of advancing on Baidoa, home of the transitional government, and were dispatched. So the debate goes on as to whether a critical mass of ICU leadership tilted toward a moderate or radical strain of Islam. Six-months in power produced a harsh, albeit effective, form of Islamic justice that finally subdued one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Streets in the capital under
Now that they have been scattered by their Ethiopian rivals, the Islamists are not simply going to vanish. A report drafted by the U.N.'s Monitoring Group on Somalia in late 2006 warns the ICU "is fully capable of turning Somalia into what is currently an Iraq-type scenario, replete with roadside and suicide bombers, assassinations, and other forms of terrorist and insurgent-type activities." Al-Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri has sounded a jihadist call-to-arms. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the ICU's radical leader, told reporters his fighters would "think of way to overwhelm the enemy. ... We will give them unprecedented lessons, as we did in 1993." Its more moderate leader, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, surrendered to Kenyan authorities. Washington has suggested the transitional government reach out to Islamists of his ilk to build consensus, and was rebuffed by the Somali transitional government. The clock is ticking, and if Ethiopia pulls out all its troops before a multi-national peacekeeping force arrives, the usual suspects are sure to fill the void.
So far only Uganda has committed any troops (1,500) to the hoped-for African Union mission. Other countries have yet to step forward with firm commitments or even timetables. As one Somalia hand recently noted, even if the proposed 8,000 troops arrive, "[that amount] could be eaten before breakfast in Somalia." Meanwhile, developmental aid -- lots of it, and fast -- is needed to rebuild infrastructure and institutions. Washington has pledged a paltry $40 million, and matching commitments have yet to arrive. The international community remains skeptical the Somali government, splintered by factionalism since its founding two and a half years ago, will rise to the occasion.
It's been less than one month since Mogadishu fell, and there are already signs of a resurgence of clan warfare. Islamist fighters have attacked Ethiopian convoys; thousands of residents have burned tires and blocked streets; the presidential palace was shelled with mortar fire. And instead of pressing ahead with a critical national-local dialogue, parliamentary infighting continued with the expulsion of the speaker of the house -- for trying to broker talks with the ICU last year. The transitional government has managed one united act: declaring martial law to try to bring order to the capital.
Jason Motlagh is a deputy foreign editor at United Press International in Washington, D.C. He has covered conflicts in Asia and Africa.
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