risks and opportunities in somalia
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Risks and Opportunities in SomaliaJonathan StevensonPublished online: 04 Jun 2007.
To cite this article: Jonathan Stevenson (2007) Risks and Opportunities in Somalia, Survival: GlobalPolitics and Strategy, 49:2, 5-20, DOI: 10.1080/00396330701437801
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In June 2006, a coalition of Islamist groups known as the ‘Islamic Courts Union’ (ICU) gained substantial de facto control of the southern two-thirds of Somalia. The coalition displaced secular clan militias aligned with the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) formed in exile in October 2004, which remained Somalia’s internationally recognised government. In hopes of eventually taking power in Mogadishu, Somalia’s putative capital, the TFG kept a temporary headquarters in Baidoa, 150 miles to the northwest. The United States and Europe were, and are, too overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan to provide serious armed help. In early December, however, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted US-sponsored Resolution 1725, authorising the deployment of an African force in Somalia to protect the TFG. The resolution barred the participation of neighbour-ing countries under the UN’s aegis, and only Uganda firmly offered troops.
The Islamic Courts harboured and backed Ethiopian separatist groups and supported Ethiopian Islamists. So it was logical for Christian-dominated Ethiopia to fill the security vacuum, sending several thousand troops to rein-force the TFG’s increasingly besieged position in Baidoa. The Islamic Courts, emboldened by their success, then overplayed their hand. In late December, backed by up to 2,000 Eritrean troops and probably a few hundred foreign jihadists, they attacked outside Baidoa, were pushed back towards Mogadishu by TFG and Ethiopian forces, and abandoned Mogadishu when local clans withdrew their support. With a wink and nod from Washington as well as some intelligence assistance, the Ethiopian troops – many of them American trained – pressed their advantage. Within a few days the Islamists had dispersed and gone underground, and the TFG and Ethiopians – joined by a few small US special-operations teams – held sway in southern Somalia.
Risks and Opportunities in Somalia
Jonathan Stevenson
Survival | vol. 49 no. 2 | Summer 2007 | pp. 5–20 DOI 10.1080/ 00396330701437801
Jonathan Stevenson is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the US Naval War College.
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Somalia was back in the headlines, and major powers were confronted with the question of what to do about it. The provisional American answer was to let the Ethiopians continue to function as the United States’ proxy for security enforcement in the Horn of Africa, and some officials even extolled Ethiopia’s US-backed effort as a model for the prospective prosecution of the ‘long war’ on terror.1 Any such notion was quickly dispelled when Ethiopia announced that it could not afford to keep its troops in Somalia, and started, in late January,
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Risks and Opportunities in Somalia | 7
gradually to pull them out. Furthermore, long-term Ethiopian involvement in Somalia posed the risk of a regional proxy war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which, though about half Muslim and half Christian, supported the Islamic Courts mainly due to its strategic enmity towards Ethiopia.2 The TFG, however, encountered the usual difficulties in building the institutional capacity required to satisfy Somalis that the government merited trust, and Islamist guerrilla activ-ity increased. By February, heavy fighting had erupted in Mogadishu between the TFG and the Islamists. By early spring, low-intensity warfare had forced an estimated 320,000 of Mogadishu’s two million residents to flee and take refuge outside the city in camps which, as a result of the insurgency, aid organisa-tions could not easily supply. Fatalities from mid March to mid April were conservatively estimated at 1,000. Most of the victims were civilians caught in heavy-arms crossfire between insurgents and TFG forces. The table was set for yet another change of de facto control.
For the United States and other major powers, the reality is that Somalia poses moderate but not insignificant threats to their interests as a source of and inspiration for transnational jihadist terrorism and as a potential site of regional war; that a narrow counter-terrorism approach (military containment, covert support to pro-US factions) has not appreciably mitigated these threats; and that a more enterprising diplomatic component is needed to do so. This reality, in turn, chimes with the evolving view as to what the global Islamist threat really constitutes and what is required to durably counter Islamist terror. In that view, Islamists who ostensibly subscribe to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s grand visions of a global caliphate and share his civilisational complaints against the West gener-ally have more deeply rooted local or regional grievances that are often not primarily religious. Accordingly, those seeking to contain the Islamist terrorist movement need to disaggregate it into regional and sometimes local ele-ments and devise customised policies to deal with them.3 Effective policies will inevitably entail direct applications of soft as well as hard power – in particular, conflict resolution and state-building. And successful applications of soft power are likely to have a more positive effect on Muslim perceptions of non-Muslim governments than are exercises of hard power.
The events in Somalia at the end of 2006 may have been a key factor in induc-ing the Pentagon to stand up a long-contemplated new regional command for Africa, dubbed AFRICOM, in February. This bureaucratic overhaul could, but need not, position the United States to take a more active and constructive role
A narrow counter-
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in stabilising sub-Saharan Africa. It seems a propitious time, then, to examine Somalia as much for the opportunities it presents as an object of diplomatic attention as for the threats it poses that may call for military or law-enforcement remedies.
Somalia’s fluid threat profileIn the early 1990s, Somalia was the site of the United States’ naive good intentions gone awry. The problems really started in 1991, when strongman President Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown in a civil war. Competing clans were able to commandeer weapons supplied alternately by the Soviets and the Americans during the Cold War to the now-toppled government, and the country devolved into a Darwinian patchwork of clan fiefdoms without central authority. An ineffectual United Nations mission was unable to amelio-rate drought and famine, prompting the United States to lead a multinational intervention in December 1992 with the relatively narrow intention of facilitat-ing humanitarian relief in the service of a ‘new world order’. In bootstrapping a humanitarian mission into a coercive peace enforcement effort, however, the United States antagonised Somali clan militias. Their fury culminated in the now-infamous October 1993 ‘Black Hawk Down’ attack in which 1� US Army Rangers and hundreds of Somalis died. This disaster precipitated a hurried American withdrawal, stoked anti-Americanism, and strengthened al-Qaeda’s hand in East Africa.4 Bin Laden and second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri are fond of calling the United States a ‘paper tiger’ with no staying power, and their favourite examples are the American pullouts from Lebanon in the early 19�0s after Hizbullah’s bombing of the Marine barracks and from Somalia in the early 1990s after ‘Black Hawk Down’.
Although the US embassy bombings in East Africa in 199� moved many US officials to view East Africa as a potential exporter of Islamist terrorism to the West, between the 1994 US withdrawal and the 11 September attacks Somalia was only a minor concern among the major powers. Since the 11 September attacks, and especially after the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001, Western threat perceptions have stayed at a relatively high level. The fear has been that al-Qaeda remnants fleeing Afghanistan would seek and find refuge in failed or failing states in sub-Saharan Africa and reconstitute their operational base, including training camps and indoctrination centres. Although the northwest third of Somalia consists of the breakaway self-declared republic of Somaliland, which is relatively peaceful and well governed, the southern two-thirds remains in utter disarray, as the clans that form the basis of Somali society have battled for territorial control and two factions have unilaterally declared their
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Risks and Opportunities in Somalia | 9
own republics – Puntland and Jubaland – within Somalia. Between 1991 and 2004, over a dozen governments formed in exile tried, and failed, to govern. Somalia remained a leading candidate for jihadist colonisation, in light of its homogeneous 9�% Sunni Muslim population, the absence of state enforcement mechanisms, and its proximity to the Persian Gulf.
Yet Somalia did not ripen into a full-fledged global terrorist threat. Even bin Laden, when contemplating his next stop after Sudan in 1996, had strong indications from several al-Qaeda operatives dispatched to Somalia to help clan militias battle foreign troops that the clans were too untrustworthy and hostile to outsiders to provide reliable security in an otherwise ungoverned country.5 (In any case, the lawless areas of western Pakistan may for now prove a serv-iceable enough base for the al-Qaeda/Taliban rump.6) Furthermore, Somali Islamism – though growing slowly – seemed to be having trouble gaining polit-ical traction.
In part to forestall the growth of Somali Islamism, the TFG was established as a secular ruling body in October 2004, with UN support, by clan delegates who had been meeting in Kenya over the preceding two years. It had structural prob-lems from the outset. For example, it has a clan-based cabinet, while most of the conflict in Somalia occurs on the subclan level, and therefore does not reflect the realities of Somali power politics. This rendered governance inherently prob-lematic. Furthermore, members of the Hawiye clan, who dominate Mogadishu and make up ten of the Islamic Courts’ 11 constituent militias, perceived repre-sentation in the TFG as unfairly favouring the Darod clan. In 2005 and most of 2006, Mogadishu was not safe for the TFG, which remained headquartered in Baidoa. Several TFG ministers, while refusing to resign from the cabinet, joined a rival quasi-governmental grouping, the so-called Somali Rehabilitation and Redemption Council (SRRC), which in 2005 consolidated under the banner of the ‘Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-terrorism’. To increase its political viability and attract US support, however, the TFG stressed its ‘anti- terrorist’ credentials and TFG President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s strongly secular mindset. It was reassuring to the United States and its partners that the TFG and the SRRC were both anti-Islamist by inclination.
Given that Somalia’s regional and global threats appeared more potential than actual, the United States and its partners have been content to main-tain a posture of vigilance and containment via train-and-equip programmes with African states, financial assistance to their security sectors, and special- operations deployments (for example, the �00-strong Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa in Djibouti) to collect intelligence and take direct action if necessary. In late 2005, however, a number of suspected al-Qaeda operatives
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surfaced in Somalia. They included Fazul Abdullah Mohammed of the Comoros Islands, probably the most important al-Qaeda figure in sub-Saharan Africa, believed to have helped organise the 199� embassy bombings. The CIA, through its Nairobi station, then chose to actively support the SRRC’s efforts to neutral-ise the Islamic Courts Union. The CIA’s approach backfired. When the SRRC warlords tried to forcibly dominate Mogadishu, the Islamic Courts gathered clan support, and took control of Mogadishu in June 2006.7 Al-Ittihad al-Islami, the small Somali radical Islamist movement led by Hassan Dawer Aweys, then sided with the Islamic Courts militias. Al-Ittihad advocates the unification of Somalia with the ethnically Somali Ogaden region of Ethiopia, which Somalia unsuccessfully tried to annex in the 1977 Ogaden War, and Aweys wants to make Somalia a unified Islamic republic. He was appointed leader of the Somali Supreme Islamic Courts Council, replacing the more moderate Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who had shown some interest in working with Western powers.8
Latent threatsAt first blush, the TFG’s Ethiopia-assisted blitzkrieg against the Islamic Courts appeared a stunning victory for secular interests that would bode well for the containment of Islamism on the Horn of Africa. Somalis, though almost entirely Sunni Muslim, generally prefer a relatively casual, traditional and moderate brand of Islam to the militant strain of Wahhabi-influenced Salafism that bin Laden has spread. This sociological reality suggests that the TFG ought to be stable, given that its secular status is in line with Somalis’ customary attitude towards Islam. The Islamic Courts movement, however, brought order to several key areas in Somalia, and increasing numbers of Somalis were willing to submit to sharia law for the sake of greater security – much as religiously moderate Afghans initially supported the Taliban. So for many – probably most – Somalis, support for Islamists was a pragmatic consideration rather than a matter of principle. But it is poverty and insecurity that have driven their prag-matic tilt towards Islamism.9
The Islamists’ January defeat by the TFG turned on their own unrealistic military ambitions rather than the TFG’s performance legitimacy. Since the TFG assumed control of Mogadishu, the lives of Somalis have not materially improved. Indeed, they have become considerably worse. In spring 2007, there were no hospital beds left in Mogadishu, commerce had shut down, and food convoys were being attacked. The two sides could not reach a sustainable cease-fire. Furthermore, most Somalis are paradoxically nationalistic as well as clan orientated. It was not lost on most of them that Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was close to the Ethiopian leadership, and rising Ethiopian brutality increasingly
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tainted him. Unsurprisingly, Somali public opinion was turning against the TFG. The fear is that if these persist and Islamists, on the pattern of Hizbullah and Hamas, offer antidotes to social problems that secular entities cannot or will not supply, Islamism will take deeper root in Somalia. In this scenario, it could acquire a degree of legitimacy that could rival or even defeat that of clan identity and religious moderation and create more promising conditions for the establishment of a functioning republic – this time, an Islamic one.
This view is far from fanciful. Non-state actors would find weak or corrupt states easier to co-opt than outright failed states insofar as the putative authori-ties could at least be relied upon to stay bribed and to possess the street muscle required to provide the shelter and protection they have been paid to provide.10 So the ascendancy of the Islamic Courts last June made the prospect of a wholesale Islamist takeover of Somali territory more plausible by establish-ing indigenous quasi-state institutions sympathetic with the jihad. Although relatively few Islamic Courts members are militant jihadists in the mould of bin Laden, if Somali Islamists hold sway again in Somalia, they could still be induced to play host to foreign jihadists and perhaps to key al-Qaeda leaders, just as the Taliban hosted bin Laden and Arab jihadists from 1996 to 2001. The jihadists, in turn, could also dispatch terrorists – perhaps directly to the United States, but more likely to infiltrate Europe, which could again serve as a plat-form for attacking America as it had before 11 September, or to the Middle East or elsewhere in Africa (say, Kenya).
To a limited extent, Islamist elements in Somalia – al-Ittihad before the Islamic Courts – have helped propagate terrorism already. The explosives used in the December 2002 attack on Israeli tourists in Mombasa, Kenya probably came from Somalia, and perpetrators of that attack and the nearly simultane-ous attempted shoot-down of an Israeli airliner leaving Mombasa escaped to Somalia. A Somali as well as an Eritrean and an Ethiopian are suspected of staging the attempted London bombings on 21 July 2005, and at least one Somali was among the 17 people arrested in Canada in June 2006 on suspicion of ter-rorist activity. According to a leaked UN report, some 700 Somalis went to Lebanon to help Hizbullah battle Israeli forces last summer in exchange for military training.11
Overall, to be sure, jihadist recruitment in Kenya and Tanzania appears to be limited.12 But because the longstanding insecurity in Somalia has forced many Somalis to take refuge elsewhere, the Somali diaspora is large and widespread. And that diaspora holds some potential for the buildup of ‘self-starter cells’ and terrorist support
The Somali diaspora holds some potential
for terrorist networks
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networks motivated by both ‘old’ and ‘new’ terrorist concerns: expatriate Somalis would tend to be more inclined to radicalise locally if they perceived their host nations and allies as harming their country and countrymen, and that grievance would find reinforcement in the aggressive Salafist ideology that has come to permeate the global community of Muslim believers (the umma) thanks to bin Laden. The Somali diaspora reportedly repatriates up to $700m a year, and the Islamic Courts organised a moderately successful fund-raising campaign in the United Kingdom in late 2006. Al-Barakat, the large Dubai-based Somali hawala organisation that handled about $140m annually, was shut down by US authorities after 11 September, but smaller outfits have arisen to take its place. While Somali remittance vehicles, including al-Barakat, have not been found to have contributed large amounts to terrorists, that could change with realities on the ground. More generally, the reciprocal encourage-ment of indigenous Somali Islamists and Somali diaspora to radicalise could increase jihadist recruitment in the region, and more widely. Jihadist-fuelled war in Somalia could also force tens of thousands of Somali refugees to flee over Kenya’s border – potentially destabilising the country that has been, at least by default, the anchor of stability in East Africa. That Kenya itself per-ceives this as a salient threat is suggested by its late-2006 stance of ‘neutrality’ with respect to the TFG–Islamic Courts confrontation in spite of its strong role in forming the TFG.
Superficially, the situation may not look terribly ominous. Ethiopia’s expedi-tious suppression of the Islamic Courts tamped down both the terrorist and the insurgent threat in the short term, and effectively installed a pro-Western secular government in the form of the TFG. The problem is that the TFG’s regime secu-rity is entirely dependent on Ethiopian troops, and they are unable to stay in Somalia for both financial and political reasons. Guerrilla activity has spiked as the troops have started to leave. A long-term Ethiopian military presence, then, is obviously no basis for US policy. And the unvarnished truth is that as long as Somalia lacks a stable political system with broad popular support, ‘down’ will never mean ‘out’ for any Somali spoiler faction – including the Islamic Courts. Old cycles of violence that have customarily resulted in tenuous power shifts are already starting to repeat themselves.13 On 19 January, the African Union authorised an �,000-strong African peacekeeping force for Somalia. On paper, Uganda offered the lion’s share of the nine battalions deemed necessary by a fact-finding mission, and Malawi and Nigeria also tendered forces. As of April 2007, however, only about 1,500 Ugandan soldiers had arrived, and most of them were hunkered down at Mogadishu’s airport rather than patrolling its streets. One had been killed by artillery fire. Even if the full �,000-soldier force
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could in fact be mustered – a dubious proposition – given Somalis’ visceral dislike for foreign forces and the wide availability of weapons, it would stand little chance of imposing or keeping peace. Without more diplomatic work on the Somali polity, the TFG’s tactical success probably will not translate into strategic victory. Accordingly, the US and its partners should not be sanguine about Somalia’s innocuousness from either a counter-terrorism or a counter- insurgency point of view. Somalia still presents estimable threats to US interests in countering transnational terrorism and preserving regional stability. How, then, to deal with them?
Counter-terrorism and counter-insurgencySomalia remains a ‘failed state’ on most objective criteria. The TFG does not systematically collect taxes or provide effective social services, and has not established a civilian law-enforcement organisation. It clearly enjoys nothing like a monopoly on the use of force, and cannot make collective decisions for the populace. Even if for now Somalia does have a UN-sanctioned government that is in nominal control on the ground, the bad news is that the government is highly vulnerable to insurgency from the Islamic Courts. In turn, the rise of indigenous Somali Islamisation at the grassroots level has stoked both insur-gency and transnational terrorism. Since that rise is driven largely by poverty and insecurity, the TFG’s secular cast in and of itself furnishes little reason for confidence that the rising trend of Islamisation in Somalia will subside. Only the TFG’s as yet undemonstrated ability to improve Somalis’ welfare would estab-lish its political advantage vis-à-vis the Islamic Courts. Several impediments stand in the way.
For one, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has already portrayed Ethiopia’s inter-vention as the act of the infidel, and would inevitably cast a more extended commitment as the non-Muslim occupation of a Muslim land – especially if it were to receive more overt or abundant US support. As in Iraq, this charac-terisation has drawn foreign jihadists into the conflict and stands to accelerate the Islamisation of Somalis themselves, respectively fuelling jihadist terrorism worldwide and strengthening the Islamic Courts, which declared jihad when the prospect of a peacekeeping force (however notional) materialised. Within days of Mogadishu’s liberation from the Islamic Courts, anti-Ethiopian protests began, and armed attacks on Ethiopian troops ensued.
Even if Ethiopia were to re-insert troops and try to mount a counter- insurgency campaign, the American intervention in Somalia painfully dem-onstrated the difficulty of enforcing peace in a politically atomised territory inhabited by a people with a penchant for shifting alliances who nonetheless
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share a fierce sense of nationalism and a resentment of foreign interlopers. A key counter-insurgency task is to identify those who firmly support the government and ensure their continued support by protecting them from those who oppose it. In Somalia’s perplexing maze of clans and sub-clans, and their nomadically fluid jockeying for momentary advantage, this challenge has proven impos-sible to meet on a sustainable basis. It is telling that both the Islamic Courts’ victory in June and the TFG’s counter-strike the following December turned on the support of the same local clan elders in Mogadishu: during that six-month period, they simply changed their minds about what group they should back. Likewise, many of the SRRC militiamen recruited by the United States to counter the Islamic Courts undoubtedly fought against American forces for Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed in 1992–94; the SRRC’s co-chairman is Aideed’s son Hussein, a former US Marine.
No government – or coalition of governments involved in any multinational peacekeeping force – familiar with the American experience in 1992–94 and with Somalis’ defiance and dissemblance would welcome the extraordinary burden of protracted counter-insurgency. And without substantial diplomatic efforts, a force of �,000 troops, as prescribed by the AU, would have no realistic chance of controlling a geographically dispersed, politically fragmented, and heavily armed Somali population. Finally, even if an externally supported counter-insurgency campaign were possible and effective, its very success could stoke a regional war – in which Ethiopia and Eritrea exploited the TFG and the Islamic Courts as proxies for prosecuting long-standing border conflicts – or render Somalia a still more fertile field of jihad. A UN monitoring group has already reported that the governments of Egypt, Djibouti, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya and Sudan as well as Eritrea have contributed funds, arms, and technical support to the Islamic Courts’ cause.14
The establishment of the TFG made it easier for the United States to take overt military action on Somali soil, and American AC-130 strikes targeting al-Qaeda players in January and February made sense from a strict counter-terrorism standpoint. But they also inflamed Somali anti-Americanism (some civilian casualties were reported) that had been latent since the mid 1990s, on top of anti-Ethiopian sentiments that had already surfaced. The European Union’s acquiescence to the Ethiopian occupation – even as it has evolved as a brutal one – has tilted Somali opinion against Europe as well as the United States. So, the net result of Ethiopia’s intervention and the closeness of the TFG’s relation-ship with the United States and Ethiopia may well be the Islamists’ continued popular appeal. Without more, then, counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency in Somalia look unpromising any way they are sliced.
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Conflict resolutionThe upshot is that there is no satisfactory coercive solution to the quandary of Somalia. If it is viewed simply as a counter-terrorism challenge, the threats it poses, regionally and globally, probably aren’t going to go away – as they have not gone away for the past five years. Diplomacy, though perennially frustrating when it comes to Somalia, appears obligatory. In fact, the situation in Somalia is best viewed as a political opportunity to tame Somali Islamist through political co-optation.
Along these lines, a number of lessons have been drawn from the favourable turn of events beginning in the early 1990s in Northern Ireland. To be sure, that leftover outpost of British colonialism is part of a mature democracy with a func-tioning civil society, and hard to compare to the virtually anarchical Somalia. But one general truth that did emerge from Ulster is that a robust peace process, even if its enforceability is imperfect and its substantive terms inelegant, can have a durable pacifying effect on a conflict – especially when an insurgency perceives military futility.15 In the case of Somalia, the Islamic Courts have just suffered a serious military defeat, and have far less leverage than they had in the latter half of 2006. Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who remains head of the Islamic Courts’ executive committee, surrendered himself in Kenya on 21 January and appears interested in political reconciliation.
The Islamic Courts should be part of any political talks. Carrots and sticks could further increase the Islamic Courts’ incentives to compromise. For instance, the TFG might concede that Ethiopian troops should stay out of Somalia, and clan elders might forswear any future tactical alliances with the Islamic Courts. Outside powers should also show greater awareness of the complex alignments within and among clans that determine who wields power in Somalia. The TFG tends to be regarded as a vehicle for advancing Darod clan interests, the Islamic Courts as one for press-ing Hawiye interests. And there are indications that the Islamist insurgents leading the resistance against the TFG have been joined by secular Hawiye militias, Somali nation-alists and opportunistic profiteers.16 In April, Hussein Aideed, a deputy prime minister in the TFG, went to Eritrea and joined an alliance of former Islamist leaders, proclaiming the Ethiopian counter-insurgency campaign a ‘genocide’. A negotiating framework would also need to offer some incentives for these parties to stand down in favour of dialogue.
It’s fair to ask whether – after the United States’ counterproductive interven-tion in the early 1990s and its more recent partisan backing of the SRRC and
The Islamic Courts should be part of any political talksD
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16 | Jonathan Stevenson
Ethiopia – Washington has sufficient credibility among Somalis as an honest broker to make diplomacy work. The short answer is that, however lacking US credibility and good will may be, inclusive diplomacy is more likely than partisan coercion to win over the Somali populace – and any more workable nascent government that might emerge. Consider the January 2005 ‘Naivasha Agreement’ in Sudan between the Islamist Arab Sudanese government and the Christian/animist southern rebels of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which the US helped to broker. The government accurately perceived the United States as a fiercely partisan backer of the SPLM/A, which the US had financed and politically supported for years at the strong urging of, among other US domestic constituencies, the Christian right. The Sudanese government also nursed a grievance against the US on account of its 199� cruise-missile attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, the alleged involvement of which in the production of precursors to VX nerve gas was based on disputed intelligence. Yet, particularly after 11 September, Khartoum’s over-riding interest was in lowering any US perceptions that it was uncooperative with the United States. President George W. Bush therefore was able to leverage the connective power of Senator John Danforth, who served as US special envoy, to get an improbable result at low cost – though its moment has been drastically diminished by the political and humanitarian crisis in Darfur.17 Roughly analo-gous incentives could be marshalled with respect to Somali Islamists.
Although the EU’s toleration of perceived TFG misrule through Ethiopian muscle has lowered its stock among Somalis, they still probably trust Brussels more than Washington. The EU has been more even-handed, and has shown greater appreciation of the consequences of open armed conflict. On � December 2006, EU Development Minister Louis Michel held separate talks in Baidoa and Mogadishu with the TFG and the Islamic Courts in hopes of lowering tensions, albeit to no avail. It seems reasonable to expect that, if the US and the EU posi-tioned themselves alongside a regional power, they could obtain the political cover needed to regain the Somalis’ respect. The most logical choice of a regional partner would be Kenya, which has been the most active and effective broker in the region on Sudanese as well as Somali issues – usually under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). (In brokering the Naivasha Agreement, the US was joined by Kenya, Norway and the UK.) The US and EU have some additional leverage, being, respectively, Somalia’s largest bilateral and largest multilateral donor. They could extend the TFG residual military guarantees and perhaps set the table for the deployment – by consent – of a small UN force to monitor the implementation of a new agreement. With a palpable stake in the political status quo, even if the Islamic Courts continued
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Risks and Opportunities in Somalia | 17
to have jihadist designs, they would be more susceptible to deterrence. In this vein, the way in which Hizbullah’s success in increasing its political power and legitimacy in Lebanon has acted as a constraint on its political violence provides a rational basis for hope. If the Islamic Courts could be persuaded to join talks and to restrain their militias, at some point negotiations could even be feasible in Somalia itself – rather than offsite – which might give the Somali populace a greater sense of ownership in the governance process than it has had in the past.
* * *
But time appears short for establishing a process that might lead to such an agreeable dispensation. As noted, no effective UN peacekeeping force is likely to materialise in the short term. Thus, with most of the Ethiopian troops having left, the Islamic Courts may well be emboldened to increase the tempo of guer-rilla operations. In the resulting chaos, the whip hand could eventually revert to the Islamists, who would become disinclined to bargain. Accordingly, the US and its diplomatic partners need to act sooner rather than later. American engagement would cost nothing in US blood or treasure and – given Somalia’s notorious intractability and correspondingly low expectations for diplomacy – rather little in prestige. The rewards could be disproportionately advanta-geous. Although Somalia may not present acute threats to the United States or Europe, both should view deeper diplomatic involvement in its politics as an opportunity to disaggregate the global radical Islamic movement and shrink the area of active jihad, and to make headway in the long-term quest to forge a better relationship with Islam. The United States’ wholesale diplomatic commit-ment to Somalia could signal a new American approach to Islam that leverages negotiation and reconciliation, and also the United States’ re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has felt crowded out of Washington’s post-11 September calculus. These features, in turn, would make European collaboration with the United States a more appetising proposition than it has been since the disas-trous US-led intervention in Iraq. Whereas a narrow counter-terrorism posture by itself would run the risk of wider instability and of energising the global jihad, the added ingredient of earnest conflict resolution could showcase the transatlantic alliance’s capacity for evenhandedness to the wider Muslim world and deprive bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance.
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1� | Jonathan Stevenson
1 See for example Mark Mazzetti, ‘Pentagon Sees Move in Somalia as Blueprint,’ New York Times, 13 January 2007.
2 In the late 19�0s and early 1990s,In the late 19�0s and early 1990s, the Ethiopian government and the country’s Eritrean population fought a brutal civil war that culminated in Eritrea’s secession in 1993. War between the two countries erupted over a border dispute in 199� and con-tinued until 2000, claiming some 70,000 lives. The cold peace since then has been fragile, and reciprocal military mobilisations on the border occurred in late 2005. Although Ethiopia rejected a boundary demarcation determined by an independent commission in April 2002 – on which Eritrea insists – a direct military confrontation has been discouraged by a 2,300-strong UN ceasefire monitoring force that patrols the border. But Somalia’s fluid and indeterminate political affairs have provided each country with a proxy to use against the other.
3 See for example Brian Michael Jenkins and Paul K. Davis, Deterrence and Influence in Counterterrorism: A Component in the War on al Qaeda (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2002); Robert F. Trager and Dessislava P. Zagorcheva, ‘Deterring Terrorism: It Can Be Done,’ International Security, vol. 30, no. 3, Winter 2005–06.
4 See generally John L. Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1995).
5 Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
6 See for example Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde, ‘Al Qaeda Chiefs Are Seen to Regain Power,’ New York Times, 19 February 2007; Mark Mazzetti, ‘Qaeda Seen as Restoring Leadership’, New York Times, 2 April 2007.
7 See for example Mark Mazzetti, ‘Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge,’ New York Times, � June 2006.
8 See ‘Somalia’s Islamists: A Threat Revived?’ Strategic Comments, vol. 12, no. 5, June 2006.
9 See for example International Crisis Group, Somalia’s Islamists, Africa Report No. 100 (Brussels: ICG, 2005).
10 See Ken Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Paper 364 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the IISS, 2004), pp. 71–5.
11 Robert F. Worth, ‘U.N. Says Somalis Helped Hezbollah Fighters,’ New York Times, 15 November 2006. Given that the Israel Defense Forces reported no sightings of Africans or African casualties, however, this conclu-sion is open to serious doubt. See Andrew McGregor, ‘Accuracy of New UN Report on Somalia Doubtful,’ Terrorism Focus, vol. 3, no. 45, 21 November 2006, The Jamestown Foundation; http://james town.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2370213.
12 William Rosenau, ‘Al Qaida Recruitment Trends in Kenya and Tanzania’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, vol. 2�, no. 1, January–February 2005.
13 See Jeffrey Gettleman, ‘The New Somalia: A Grimly Familiar Rerun,’ New York Times, 21 February 2007.
14 ‘UN Report Says 10 Nations Violating Arms Embargo in Somalia, Potential
Notes
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Risks and Opportunities in Somalia | 19
High for War,’ Associated Press, 15 November 2006.
15 See for example Jonathan Stevenson, ‘Irreversible Peace in Northern Ireland?’ Survival, vol. 42, no. 3, Autumn 2000.
16 Jeffrey Gettleman, ‘In Somalia, Those Who Feed off Anarchy Fuel It’, New York Times, 25 April 2007.
17 See generally ‘Sudan’s Deceptive Transformation,’ Strategic Survey
2003/4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the IISS, 2004), pp. 321–4. The United States’ preoccupation with preserving the integrity of the Naivasha Agreement, of course, arguably afforded Khartoum greater freedom of action than it would oth-erwise have had in Darfur. See ‘US Policy in Sudan: Constraints and Compulsions,’ Strategic Comments, vol. 11, no. 9, November 2005.
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20 | Jonathan Stevenson
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