Republic of BlowbackBy Ken Menkhaus and Karin von Hippel
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Back in the 1980s, frustrated aid workers joked that Somalia was the "graveyard of foreign aid," a place where hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on projects that occasionally left villagers worse off than before.
In the early 1990s, an ambitious UN peace enforcement operation set out to end a famine and promote reconciliation in war-torn Somalia, only to be drawn into the very war it was meant to stop, producing a debacle that put a quick end to hopes of a more robust UN peace enforcement capacity in the post-Cold-War era.
Thus began the schooling of the international community on the law of unintended consequences in Somalia, a country where what foreigners want and what they get rarely coincide. The latest example is U.S. counter-terrorism efforts.
American diplomatic, intelligence and military activity designed to reduce Islamic radicalism and the threat of terrorism in Somalia have instead helped to catalyze a much more powerful, popular, shockingly violent and stridently anti-American jihadist movement.
This alarming blowback in a remote but important corner of the world can be traced to four specific policies. As is often the case, each policy met the "it seemed like a good idea at the time" criterion for the government agencies that conceived and executed them.
The first occurred in 2006, when the United States promoted the formation of a counterterrorism alliance composed of Somali militia leaders, who were to apprehend several high-value Al Qaeda foreigners believed to be in Mogadishu. The alliance was decisively defeated by local Islamists who correctly understood it to be a U.S. front.
By June 2006, Mogadishu - a lawless city that had been divided into warlord fiefdoms for 16 years - was united under the administration of the victorious Islamic Courts Union (ICU). The ICU quickly spread its authority across most of southern Somalia, earning broad popular support by providing law and order.
Promoting the expansion of Islamist rule over southern Somalia was not the intended policy objective of the United States, but that is what it bought by meddling with and supporting unpopular Somali warlords.
Much more serious blowback soon followed when the United States threw its support behind an Ethiopian military offensive against the ICU in December 2006.
Ethiopia and the U.S. government were right to worry that the ICU was increasingly coming under the control of hard-liners. But the proposed cure - a prolonged Ethiopian military occupation of Mogadishu and other parts of southern Somalia - has provided the perfect breeding ground for armed insurgency and radicalization.
Jihadist fighters known as the shabaab have been able to conflate their extremist Islamist agenda with legitimate nationalist sentiments against the Ethiopian occupation of the country, giving the once fringe jihadist movement much wider support among Somalis of all political persuasions.
The displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians and suffering caused by counterinsurgency operations conducted by Ethiopian forces and their client, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), have radicalized rather than pacified the local population.
The third instance of blowback has resulted from the U.S. counterterrorism operations inside Somalia conducted in tandem with the Ethiopian occupation. These activities include Tomahawk missile attacks, AC-130 gunship attacks, "snatch-and-grab" operations targeting alleged terrorists, renditions of Somali suspects from Kenya for interrogation and Predator drone strikes.
All this has had the unwanted effect of reinforcing the widespread belief among Somalis that the United States is masterminding the Ethiopian occupation.
This perception is inaccurate - the Ethiopian government does not take orders from anyone - but the result is that the United States is held directly accountable by Somalis for the catastrophic levels of displacement, destruction, and abuse produced by a combination of heavy-handed Ethiopian counterinsurgency tactics and uncontrolled, predatory TFG security forces. The latter, it is worth noting, receive direct Western funding. Not surprisingly, anti-Americanism is now virulent in Somalia. This is hardly a victory in the battle for hearts and minds.
Finally, recent U.S. policies intended to marginalize the most radical elements of the armed opposition in Somalia, the shabaab, have inadvertently accelerated a process of decentralized political violence that has rocked Somalia.
U.S. designation of shabaab as a terrorist group in March 2008, and a subsequent U.S. air strike that killed shabaab leader Aden Hashi Ayro, have prompted the group to expand its campaign of political violence from a focus on Ethiopian and TFG forces to the targeting of any and all Somalis linked to the West.
The result has been a bloodbath of assassinations against local aid workers and civic leaders, who ironically have also been targeted by the Western-backed TFG as "terrorist sympathizers." Since the beginning of the year, 20 local and international aid workers have been killed in Somalia - over a third of all humanitarian fatalities suffered worldwide - while at least a dozen have been kidnapped and are still being held captive.
The very Somalis - civic leaders, moderate clerics and businesspeople - who stand as the best hope for a peaceful solution in the country are being killed off or driven out. And aid agencies are now unable to respond adequately to one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world because of threats to their staff.
More blowback may be on the horizon. The listing of the shabaab as a terrorist group could attract foreign recruits and funding for the shabaab, who publicly expressed delight at being placed on the U.S. list. For a group that not long ago was little more than a small band of gunmen with vague Islamist credentials, this constitutes a major promotion. A number of international jihadist Web sites now include Somalia on their list of battleground states.
No one can claim to have a simple solution to Somalia's wicked problems of warlordism, state collapse, radicalization and humanitarian disaster.
But by any reasonable yardstick, U.S. counter-terrorism policies in Somalia have fallen far short of their objectives.
They have been part of a deadly combination of ill-conceived interventions by a number of external actors that have produced a situation in which all concerned parties - the United States, our ally Ethiopia, international aid agencies and the Somali people - are far less secure than they were a few years ago.
That alone should prompt a complete overhaul of U.S. foreign policy in the Horn of Africa and make Somalia a higher priority for the next administration in Washington.
