As the Obama administration has attempted to rally support for intervention
against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, critics and pundits have
questioned the use of the analogy to the "successful" counter-terrorism
campaigns in Yemen and Somalia. Is it really possible to label these
campaigns as "successful"?
Yemen, wracked by violence, threatened by al-Qaeda affiliated militias,
lacking any semblance of an effective central government, and verging on the
outbreak of civil war, can hardly be classified as a success. Somalia, on
the other hand, after suffering through these problems a decade ago, is
beginning to show signs of "success." It might be useful in today's debates
to examine what worked and didn't work in Somalia.
Following the Somali Civil War in the early 1990s and the overthrow of
President Siad Barre's regime in 1991, the colonial state of Somalia
collapsed and broke up into autonomous regions of Puntland, Somaliland and
southern Somalia. Southern Somalia became essentially stateless, ruled by
rival clans, militias, criminals and warlords who did little to maintain
stability and the rule of law. Into this power vacuum the phenomenon of
Islamic Courts was born in 1994. Following the initial success of the
independent Islamic Courts in imposing law and order, the diverse courts
united into the broad based Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and developed a
political agenda. As ICU increased its area of control and raised the
specter of an Islamic state in Somalia, it attracted the attention of the
George W. Bush administration and became a focus of the "War on Terror."
Although some elements of ICU had connections with al-Qaeda- linked groups,
ICU remained a very diverse organization encompassing both moderate and very
radical groups. Unfortunately, dealing with nuance was not a strong point of
the Bush administration. The U.S., in conjunction with Ethiopia, a
predominately Christian neighboring country with a restive Somali Muslim
minority, hijacked an internal Somali issue for its own foreign policy
agenda.
The ICU was no match for the U.S.-armed Ethiopian Army and in 2007 was
quickly defeated and most of its leaders and fighters melted back into
Somalian society. The most radical of the ICU adherents migrated to
al-Shabaab (the youth), and became the core of al-Qaeda influence in the
Horn of Africa. The period of statelessness, with accompanying disorder,
that followed the overthrow of ICU made the brief period of Islamic rule
feel like a "golden age" to most Somalis. At one point the U.S./Ethiopia
installed Transitional Federal Government (TVG) controlled only a few blocks
of Mogadishu.
In 2008, the TFG formed a coalition government with ICU and other insurgent
groups. In 2010 a new technocratic government was elected. By late 2012 the
central government had reclaimed control of 85 percent of southern Somalia.
The messages that I take away from this saga are that:
* Counter-terrorism tactics of targeted killings, selecting winners
and losers with little local knowledge and installing "friendly" governments
not only are likely to fail, but also to make matters worse by creating
ungoverned space for the most dangerous and radical elements.
* Not all Islamist groups are created equal and painting with a broad
brush is dangerous
* Local groups and individuals are best equipped to find a governing
solution
* Colonial imposed borders are not sacrosanct
* External actors can help, but they can't be the solution, especially
if their actions are driven by their own agendas
While the Islamic State is not the Islamic Courts, it has succeeded in
bringing a semblance of governance to the territories that it
controls-territories ignored by the central governments of Syria and Iraq or
suffering under competing rebel groups. The Islamic State has provided
education, paid municipal salaries, built roads, opened hospitals,
maintained electric, trash and sewage services, and even began issuing
parking tickets. Al-Monitor correspondent Edward Dark (a pseudonym) reports
from Aleppo, "For almost three years, the opposition and the local rebels
have failed to provide any semblance of civil administration or public
services to the vast areas they controlled. This lawless chaos added to the
people's misery, already exacerbated by the horrors of war. In the end, they
rallied around the only group that managed to give them what they wanted:
the Islamic State."
Regional powers Turkey and Iran seem to be reluctant to get directly engaged
in countering IS. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said that, "for Iran,
Baghdad and the holy sites (in Karbala) are a redline." This says to me that
Iran is okay with Iraq breaking up. Turkey, faced with its own internal
Kurdish problem, dealing with Islamist groups within, is reluctant to
intervene to aid Syrian Kurds against IS, which it has supported in the
past. If the U.S., without regional support, is going to intervene
unilaterally in order to destroy or defeat IS, it better have a plan for
what comes next.