From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sun Oct 18 2009 - 06:55:32 EDT
In Somalia, a New Template for Fighting Terrorism
By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jeffrey_gettle
man/index.html?inline=nyt-per> JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: October 18, 2009
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/so
malia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> Somalia isn't just a nagging geopolitical
headache that won't go away. It is also a cautionary tale. Few countries in
modern history have been governmentless for so long, and as the United
States has learned, it would be nice to think you could ignore this wild,
thirsty, mostly nomadic nation 7,000 miles away. But you can't.
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaed
a/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Al Qaeda is working feverishly to turn Somalia
into a global jihad factory, according to recent intelligence assessments,
and the way the United States chooses to respond could serve as a template
for other fronts in the wider counterterrorism war. Just last month,
American helicopters swept over the dusty Somali horizon to take out Saleh
Ali Saleh Nabhan, a wanted Qaeda suspect who had been hiding out in Somalia
for years and training a new bevy of killers; some of those trainees are
believed to be Somali-Americans who could easily slip back into the United
States and do some serious damage as suicide bombers.
In a way, the daring daylight strike against Mr. Nabhan, which was
supposedly part of the Obama administration's shift from targeting
terrorists with cruise missiles that often kill civilians, was a flashback.
Few in Somalia - or the American military - have forgotten Black Hawk Down,
the battle in October 1993 when Somali militiamen in flip-flops killed 18
American soldiers, including members of the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/us_army
/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Army's elite Delta Force. It was a searing
humiliation for the Pentagon, which had just emerged from the first gulf war
pumped up on smart bombs and laser-guided missiles, but in Somalia found
itself back in a Vietnam-style quagmire where high technology was no match
for local rage.
Black Hawk Down made the United States gun-shy for years, contributing to
its failure to intervene against
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/rw
anda/genocide/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> genocide in Rwanda and, for
a time, in Bosnia, too. The battle itself was immortalized in a so-so film
and a great book - required reading for some courses at
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_
states_military_academy/index.html?inline=nyt-org> West Point.
"Never again, that was the message," said John Nagl, a retired Army officer
who was on the team that wrote the military's new counterinsurgency field
manual. "People were saying this is what happens when we get involved in
small wars in places we don't understand."
But American policy has pivoted since 1993 to another question: What happens
when we don't get involved?
The experience in Somalia speaks to that concern as well - to the problems
of ignoring any patch of ungoverned territory, especially in the Muslim
world, whose anarchy might tempt the arrival of the likes of Al Qaeda.
Concern about the perils of lawlessness is not new to American policy
planning, of course; it was an element in the Reagan administration's
abortive effort to help calm Lebanon in 1982. But it has acquired intense
urgency since Sept. 11, 2001, and now figures heavily in calculations about
Afghanistan and Pakistan, about the pace of extracting American forces from
Iraq - and in a reprise of 1993, about what to do in Somalia.
The United States has never really understood this place. "I frequently
marveled at how little Washington seemed to care about what was happening in
Somalia during 1989-90, but as an old African hand I simply chalked it up to
the low level of priority that the department almost always attached to
African affairs," said Frank Crigler, American ambassador to Somalia from
1987 to 1990. "The only question people asked us was, 'What happens after
Siad?' " His reference was to Siad Barre, the dictator who was ousted by
clan warlords in 1991, ushering in the chaos that reigns today.
"We hazarded a few guesses" about what would follow Siad's rule, Mr. Crigler
said, "but we never came close to imagining the scenario that eventually
unfolded or the humanitarian nightmare."
A drought that swept the country in 1992 killed several hundred thousand
Somalis. There was probably enough food in the country at the time. But the
clan warlords, for whatever calculations, were blocking aid shipments from
reaching the parched interior. In his final months in office, President
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_bush/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per> George H. W. Bush set in motion an enormous
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_
nations/department_of_peacekeeping_operations/index.html?inline=nyt-classifi
er> peacekeeping mission - nearly 30,000 American soldiers - to feed the
Somalis. This was during the heady days of the post-Soviet "new world
order." The aid eventually got through and probably saved half a million
lives. But even as it was turning over the mission to the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_
nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org> United Nations, the new Clinton
administration allowed itself to get sucked into Somalia's vortex of warring
clans.
On Oct. 3, 1993, the 18 Black Hawk Down soldiers were killed during an
attempt to arrest the pre-eminent warlord of the day, Muhammad Farah Aideed.
In the end, Mr. Aideed's extortionist sins were forgiven by the Somali
people, who were desperate to rally around someone resembling a national
leader. The United States pulled out early in 1994, having acquired a
cautionary new military term still widely used today: mission creep. The
United Nations left the next year, as Somalia tumbled into chaos.
Just as the United States all but forgot about Afghanistan after the Soviets
withdrew with their tails between their legs in 1989, the United States all
but forgot about Somalia after the American military slunk away five years
later. And the same thing happened. Both countries are almost purely Muslim;
in both places a grass-roots Islamist movement emerged as the panacea to
disorder; and in both places, Al Qaeda was not far behind. Actually,
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/osama_bin_lade
n/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Osama bin Laden's men may have gotten to
Somalia first; Somalia is believed to have been the staging ground for the
1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
One widely held misperception about Somalia is that it is rabidly
anti-American. This may come from the indelible images of gleeful Somalis
dragging the corpses of American soldiers through the streets after
militiamen shot down the two Black Hawk helicopters and a heavily armed mob
finished them off. Later American policies did little to curb antagonisms.
In 2006, the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central
_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org> C.I.A. shoveled a few
million dollars to predacious warlords in an attempt to stymie a competing
Islamist movement. When that didn't work, the American government supported
Ethiopia, Somalia's historic enemy, when it invaded. What followed was a
nasty guerilla war that ended only when the Ethiopians agreed to leave
earlier this year and the Islamists were allowed back in. Essentially, the
2006 status quo was returned, minus 15,000 Somalis, now dead.
Still, "most Somalis are not anti-American," said Afyare Abdi Elmi, a
Somali-Canadian political scientist at Qatar University's International
Affairs Program. "Most Somalis are pragmatic and they do not inherently
oppose America's involvement in Somalia per se. They reject when such
involvement is associated with warlords or Ethiopians. Neither condition
exists now."
This could spell an opportunity, as the Obama administration seems to think.
The United States and other Western powers have provided the new Islamist
government with weapons, money and diplomatic support. While terribly weak,
the government has proven to be relatively moderate, vowing to repel
terrorist groups, and seeking a middle path in its interpretation of
political Islam.
The United States, for its part, is helping the government in a crucial way,
with pinprick counterterrorism attacks like the commando raid that killed
Mr. Nabhan; these presumably advance the mutual interest of eliminating
Qaeda terrorists and weakening the Somali insurgency, while avoiding
civilian casualties.
So a new template for fighting terrorism may be emerging as the United
States shows less desire to get involved in the local intricacies of nation
building and more interest in narrowing its focus to Al Qaeda. The focus so
far has been precise, limited and often covert, with attacks carried out
with a parallel diplomatic strategy.
American attacks along the Afghan-Pakistani border seem cut from a similar
pattern, but it may be that Somalia will prove an easier place to make the
techniques work.
To Mr. Nagl, in fact, Somalia is a counterterrorism planner's dream, with
its desert terrain, low population density and skinny shape along the sea;
no place is more than a few minutes' chopper flight from American ships
bobbing offshore. "It's far, far harder to do counterterrorism in
Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Somalia," he said.
What the two fronts have in common, he said, is that "you can't kill or
capture your way out of this problem. You have to change the conditions on
the ground."
The question is, after nearly 20 years of unrelenting chaos, after Black
Hawk Down, the failed C.I.A. strategy and the Ethiopian occupation, does
America finally understand what's going on in Somalia?