From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Mon Aug 10 2009 - 08:11:49 EDT
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/-/2558/636864/-/view/printVersion/-/12k0l3oz/-/index.html
Somalia,
the Clintons’ poisoned legacy By PAUL GOLDSMITH (email the author)
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Posted Monday, August 10 2009 at 00:00
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Nairobi with an agenda
larger than the Agoa Forum.
The comments she proffered followed the script President Obama unveiled
during his recent visit to Ghana.
The unavoidable subject of Somalia, however, presented a thornier dilemma.
One might even propose that Somalia is a Republican Trojan Horse that the
Bush family faithfully bequeaths to the Clintons when they leave office.
*Operation Restore Hope* was the last overseas initiative launched by George
H. Bush before handing over to Bill Clinton.
Three months later, the noble mission to deliver famine relief had morphed
into the new president’s first major crisis.
The emotive televised images generated by the Black Hawk Down battle forced
Clinton’s decision to withdraw the US military from Mogadishu.
The short-term political calculations behind this decision in 1993 were to
exert long-term consequences. Clan militias resumed their turf battles.
The genocide in Rwanda erupted in the shadow cast by the failed intervention
in Mogadishu’s civil war.
Osama bin Laden, reputed to have provided assistance to the forces fighting
the Rangers, left Sudan.
Prior to his departure one of his allies, Hassan Al Turki, and his Ikhwan
militia had taken control of the Benadir coast bordering Kenya’s Lamu
District.
This area subsequently served as a safe haven and supply depot for Al Qaeda
sleeper cells behind the attacks on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es
Salaam in August 1998.
President Clinton, in the throes of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, responded
by dispatching cruise missiles to targets in Afghanistan and Sudan.
The missiles hit abandoned Al Qaeda camps and the Al Shifaa pharmaceutical
factory in Khartoum.
The choice of the latter, based on dubious Israeli intelligence, effectively
torpedoed a burgeoning international coalition against terrorism that
included the Arab League and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
The Benadir link in the embassy bombings was ignored despite the presence of
a training camp in Ras Kiamboni and reports of light-skinned foreigners
training on the beach.
The light-skinned foreigners eventually dispersed, the Ikhwan’s Islamist
mini-state soldiered on.
The Clinton administration support for the external formation of the
Transitional National Government appeared to end at the border.
Once in Mogadishu, TNG president Hassan Abdul Salat was on his own.
America’s Somalia policy remained strictly laissez faire on the ground, even
after George W. Bush succeeded him.
The US helped fund the Igad process leading to the Transitional Federal
Government; after Kenya obliged the TFG to go home, direct funding for
Abdullahi Yusuf and his parliament was limited to the allowances provided by
the United Nations Development Programme.
All this worked well with humanitarian assistance from agencies chanelled to
non governmental organisations well, until the rise of Aden Hashi, or
“Airo,” the notorious leader of the Al Shabaab militia, when Fazul Mohammed
slipped out of Siyu, boarded a speedboat, and re-entered Somalia via the Ras
Kiamboni route.
The rise of the Islamic Union Courts in 2006 upset this status quo.
Although leaders linked to Al Qaeda, who could be counted on the fingers of
one hand, controlled only three of Mogadishu’s 16 Islamic courts, Bush
ignored the advice of his State Department and channelled covert support for
the warlords’ opportunistic Coalition Against Terrorism.
This gambit only empowered the IUC radicals associated with Airo’s Al
Shabaab.
When they marched on the Baidoa-based TNG, the Ethiopians were called in.
The Ethiopian army scattered the IUC; US air strikes targeted the radicals
fleeing to the south, but they survived to fight another day.
Predictably, the insurgency challenging the TNG and their Ethiopian
guardians proved more problematic than the original IUC.
A new TFG government headed by IUC moderate Ahmed Sheikh Sharif fuelled
hopes of a negotiated settlement.
But even formal recognition of Sharia law has failed to stem the Islamist
surge.
The insurgents controlled a large swath of south-central Somalia by the time
Barack Obama was sworn in.
Bolstered by volunteers from abroad and within their regions, they swarmed
into Mogadishu.
They continue to lay siege to the small quarter controlled by the TNG,
bombarding the president’s Villa Somalia residence and his African Union
troops from dug-in positions.
This was the situation framing Mrs Clinton’s meeting with President Sharif
at the US embassy in Nairobi last week.
He accused Eritrea’s President Issayas Afeworki, the insurgents’ most
visible patron, of using Somalia as a proxy battleground for his quarrel
with Ethiopia.
Following his lead, she promised Eritrea would face stern action, and more
US weapons.
As the BBC’s Nairobi observer pointed out, the insurgents will use this
promise to highlight the illegitimacy of the TNG, and portray Sharif as an
American puppet.
*New York Times* correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman, reported that the theme
of her Africa mission is “how to use the United States’ enormous leverage on
the continent… while still trying to come across as a friend.”
Unfortunately, Somalia requires leverage on the scale of the Soviet airlift
that evicted Siad Barre’s Somali army from Ethiopia’s Ogaden Province in
1978, a massive infusion of troops and mechanised armour presaging the
Powell doctrine.
While this would arguably have been a viable alternative to covert
operations for a Bush president, Obama’s options are constrained by eight
years of neoconservative blowback.
Among other things, this explains why Hamid Karzai is campaigning for
re-election in Afghanistan by promising to send his American friends back
home.
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