Let me get this straight: my onetime enemy who hasn't cleaned up his act and is still pretty awful is now my friend because his enemy is now my enemy even though his enemy used to be my friend in Afghanistan in the 1980's when his enemy was my enemy.
Apparently that's the case:
Mogadishu is a place most Americans would rather forget. During the 1990s, the "Black Hawk Down" debacle symbolized the dangers of dabbling in far-off lands we don't understand. TV images of a half-stripped GI being dragged through the dust by gleeful Somalis—he was one of 18 U.S. Army Rangers killed in a botched effort to arrest a warlord—became an emblem of American vulnerability. But Mogadishu, it seems, won't be forgotten. Somalia is erupting in violence again. And with little warning, Americans find themselves once more in the middle of battles they only dimly comprehend—and may well be losing.
Last week, for the first time since the early 1990s, much of the Somali capital was engulfed in bloody fire fights. By all accounts, a jihadist militia of the so-called Islamic Courts Union was gaining ground on an alliance of secular warlords who have received U.S. backing. Observers say the Union has been winning adherents by casting its enemies as stooges of Washington, especially since the U.S.-friendly warlords formed a group called the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism last winter. The revived fighting inside Somalia—a lawless state on the Horn of Africa with no central government—has raised new questions about America's global war on terror, which is being fought mostly out of the public eye.
For several years Somalia's three major anti-Islamist warlords have received U.S. cash and some equipment to help with intelligence operations, according to several unofficial sources, including John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group. No U.S. government official reached by NEWSWEEK would confirm or deny that the program existed. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official who stays in touch with his ex-colleagues, says much of the money is funneled through the 1,800-man Joint Combined Task Force, based in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Other reports point to the CIA. The warlords—Mohamed Dheere, Bashir Raghe and Mohamed Qanyare—have been asked to collect information on Muslim extremists tied to Al Qaeda. In one 2003 case, Dheere's men snatched an East African Qaeda cell member and turned him over.
The policy has provoked dissent at both the CIA and the State Department, as well as in Europe. Some officials fear that America may be inadvertently creating a new jihadist haven in Somalia by generating an anti-U.S. backlash. Before the U.S. program began, the Islamists were only a small part of the population. "We know neither the rationale nor the scale of U.S. involvement; what we do see are consequences," says Marika Fahlen, Swedish ambassador and special envoy for the Horn of Africa: "The fighting is increasingly complex. Certain [Islamist] groups that were not so active in fighting before have become fighters." Giraldi is more blunt. "We're creating a new mess," he says. "Everything is tactical with this administration: catching a guy, catching a guy. I don't see that anyone has thought about the strategic issue of losing support." [my emphasis]
The italicized part is as succinct and on point an analysis of the problem as I have seen. Read the entire article and try not to get depressed. On the blowback meter this rates a ten.
Randy, I disagree with you, but then, what else is new? Somalia’s descent from political entity to anarchical free fire zone makes it the perfect place for a movement like al-Qaeda to set up shop. Can anyone really believe that bin Laden and his followers were going to get out of the terrorism business simply because we took away their base of operations in Afghanistan? We are fighting a war with these people and war is always an act against an object that reacts, as Clausewitz put it. Deprived of a base of operations in one country, is it any surprise that these terrorists started to look for a new base to operate from, a country that in many respects mirrors the conditions that existed in Afghanistan before the Taliban came to power there? Faced with that reality, I would be more than a little surprised to find out that this Administration was simply going to sit on its hands and allow these terrorists to re-establish themselves somewhere else because they feared adverse publicity from leaks and criticism in the media. The very same people in the media and the permanent bureaucracy who criticize this program now will be the very first people to criticize the Administration for not doing enough in the wake of a terrorist outrage planned in a backroom in Mogadishu that leaves scores of Americans dead.
As for the enemies of my enemies being my friends: well, there is nothing new about this, is there? The United States intervened in the Soviet Union in 1918-1919 and supported the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945. We fought the Germans from 1917-1918 and 1941-1945, only to have the Germans as allies during the Cold War against our wartime allies, the Soviets. The Italians and the Japanese were American allies in the First World War, only to be our enemies a generation later. Britain and Germany (or rather, some parts thereof) were allies in the war years 1792-1815 against the French, and the French were British allies against the Germans a century later. French and British sailors who fought each other at Trafalgar in 1805 fought together against the Turks at Navarino in 1828. The list goes on and on, of course, but the principle is the same—whoever helps me against my enemies is my friend, however much I find them and their politics loathsome.
Posted by: Akaky | June 01, 2006 at 01:03 PM
Akaky,
Read the article thoroughly:
In other words, we may very well be making the situation worse. No one in the administration is thinking strategically. All they seem to be concerned about is the here and now. While that's important, their neglect of the long term is merely going to help us know where to fix the blame when the shot hits the fan a few years down the road. I take no comfort in that.
As for your historical analogies, the British were not our allies in the war of 1812, they were the enemy. Nevertheless, your analogies don't hold up under present circumstances. Italy was our enemy in WWII because they had a fascist government in power that had replaced the government that was our ally. The mujahadin that we helped in Afghanistan were the same people who became the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The same warlords who dragged our soldiers' bodies through the streets are the ones we're helping now. You'r completing ignoring the history of blowback.
Moreover, your are comparing governments to non-government operators. We're going down the same dangerous road that we've gone down before and I fear the same dangerous results.
Posted by: Randinho | June 01, 2006 at 02:11 PM
Randy, all of history is blowback of one sort or another; political and strategic realities change, making yesterday's ally today's enemy. Do I wish there was a government in Mogadishu we could deal with directly? Yes. But the fact is that Somalia as a political entity is something from Hobbes' worst nightmare, a perpetual anarchical war of every man against every other man. Are we making the problem worse? We may be doing just that, but neither can we ignore the infiltration of a failed state by our professed enemies and just say we can't do anything about it, either. Somalia is one of the places where we convinced Osama and his minions that we were a cotton candy superpower; allowing them to reconstitute their operations base there would be a particularly galling irony.
Posted by: Akaky | June 01, 2006 at 02:45 PM
Consider the recent history, Akaky, on our use of proxies in the GWOT: Tora Bora, Iraq (where the military and police are heavily infiltrated by Shiite militia members), Pakistan, where the shit will most assuredly hit the fan should anything happen to Musharraf (who is protecting the founder of Nukes ‘R’ Us, A Q Khan).
On what basis do you think this will be any better? On what basis do you think the warlords are worth expending our money, credibility and good will in the region? At what point do we learn from our mistakes? Ever?
As the article indicates, we’ve already made matters worse there. Your downplaying of blowback is absurd, to be kind. Your side is always saying that 9/11 changed everything. At what point does it change us enough to keep from making the same mistakes over and over again?
Posted by: Randinho | June 01, 2006 at 03:29 PM
Randy, pardon the delay in answering your last point; I wanted to read the article again, this time more carefully to make sure I understood its main points and the basis of your argument. There are some points of agreement here and I will get to them in a minute, but even after reading it I still don’t agree with your overall thesis.
First, I don’t believe I am downplaying the significance of blowback; I simply accept that the law of unintended consequences and Murphy’s law are part and parcel of human history whether I like it or not. History does not reveal its alternatives, except in science fiction, nor can we see today what the end result of our actions will be some twenty years down the line. We can only act on what we know today, which is, almost by definition, imperfect and fragmentary. If the United States was to conduct its foreign policy on the basis of avoiding the harmful consequences of policies of previous administrations, then the United States might as well build a wall around itself and stop interacting with the outside world altogether. While this idea may enjoy the support of people who want to cut off illegal immigration from Mexico, I think such neo-isolationism is neither practical nor desirable, something I am sure you would agree with. The United States must be involved in the world beyond North America; the jihadis’ willingness to hit us here where we live precludes, I think, any desire on our part to forget the whole mess and return to lotus-eating and trying to make a fortune in real estate, which I hear is the new tech stock bubble of whatever this decade is called.
As for the use of proxies, I must agree and disagree with you. Tora Bora was an egregious error on the part of Rumsfeld and Franks, especially Franks, who should have known better. Franks had just fought a war in Afghanistan and knew that Afghan warlords, like the condottiere of the Italian Renaissance, fight for power and profit and will sell out any government, like the Taliban, not strong enough to keep them loyal. For the warlords, taking high casualties did not make political or military sense, and going after the jihadis would cause high casualties, since the jihadis had nowhere to go and would rather die fighting than risk going to Guantanamo. Franks knew this, or should have, and should have used American forces to do the heavy fighting at Tora Bora. This was a political decision, I think; the Administration wanted to keep American casualties low, which is a laudable thing in both politicians and generals, but not when it means that you let an enemy go to fight another day.
And Secretary Rumsfeld had an ideological point to prove. He wanted a leaner, meaner, more expeditionary type of military, one more capable of dealing with the world post-Cold War. This makes sense to me; the Soviets are not coming through the Fulda Gap and the military must change to reflect that reality. Changing a bureaucracy, however, is a lot easier said than done, especially when the bureaucracy is large and the people in it find it easier and, to be honest, more promotion enhancing, to go along with the traditional way of doing things than to take a risk and institute changes. This is as true in my little backwater of the civil service as it is in the Pentagon. Afghanistan was Rumsfeld’s first chance at proving that the United States could win a war without invoking the Weinberger Doctrine and its corollary, the Powell Doctrine. His preferred combination of air power, local troops, and special operations teams worked for most of the campaign, but Rumsfeld wanted to prove that this combination could win the war by itself and so he kept using it even when the circumstances on the ground changed. At Tora Bora, he wanted to keep using the epee that had got him to that point, not realizing or not wanting to realize that the time had come to start using a baseball bat. Rumsfeld and Franks both should have known better; circumstances change, and they change faster in a war zone than anywhere else.
I would debate your use of the word proxy as applied to General Musharraf. I agree with you that if he goes, the cow flop will hit the fan at hurricane force, but he was the man in power in Pakistan when this all began on 9/11, so he was the man we had to deal with. To me, a proxy is not an independent actor, but a front man for other interests, and while I am sure the State Department, in its very diplomatic way, strong-armed Musharraf until it hurt, he could have said no. In fact, a substantial portion of his country’s population wanted him to say no, but he chose to say yes. I frankly don’t know what we’ve gotten for his yes; Osama is still on the loose, the Pakistanis still don’t have any real control of their western border with Afghanistan, and all we seem to get from him is agreement that terrorism is a bad thing and photo ops in the White House Rose Garden, but as far as I can see, there is very little meat on this bun.
As for the use of proxies in general, unfortunately you use what’s available. Not every situation is Tora Bora, where you have enough of your own forces to do the fighting and you choose not to use them. At most times and in most locations the locals are the people who have to do the fighting, and their reasons for fighting do not usually include giving the United States government a warm and fuzzy feeling all over. The only other ways of getting around this are first, to do nothing, as we did in Afghanistan, and have no influence over what happens next, or second, send in the CIA and its covert action teams, which seem to be none too covert these days nor terribly fond of any action that doesn’t wind up on the front page of The New York Times, or third, send in the Marines any time something happens in the Third World we don’t like. The first option is not terribly palatable, the second is virtually a non-starter these days, and the third didn’t work very well in Latin America eighty years ago and is not likely to start working very well now. American military intervention is a blunt tool; we should use it when everything else has failed.
All of which brings us, and yes, I hear you thinking it’s about time, to the article’s main argument, which is that American involvement in Somalia is causing a jihadist backlash. This strikes me as post hoc ergo propter hoc. How do we know that this is the case? Because European diplomats, the CIA, and the State Department say so? This is where people like me generally start writing in capital letters and our hold on grammar generally goes out the window as we splutter in rage, so let me just suggest that all three parties mentioned are hardly neutral observers, but people with an institutional ax to grind, and I will come back to rave about left-wing conspiracies some other time.
What do we know about Somalia? As I mentioned in my previous comment, it is anarchy with a flag. To call Somalia a state would beggar any dictionary description of the word. It is what Afghanistan was in the mid-1990’s, it is the Hobbesian political nightmare made horrific waking reality. As such, it is a prime candidate for jihadi infiltration. The promises that the jihadis make, like the promises the Bolsheviks made in 1917, sound wonderful to people grown weary of never-ending war, bloodshed, and disorder. Let your faith be your guide, or rather, let our version of your faith be your guide, and all of your problems will go away. Afraid of modernity, afraid your son will turn into a homosexual, afraid your daughter is going to grow up and become a Britney Spears wannabe, afraid of losing who and what you are to McDonald’s, materialism, gangsta rap, and the Boston Red Sox? Have no fear, Osama’s here, and he will lead us all back to the seventh century just as soon as the whole world converts to Islam and acknowledges the caliphate Osama wants to re-establish at Constantinople. In the meantime, there are madrassahs that need building, burkas to wash, and contracts for enough walls to drop on the gay guys to bid on, as well as clinics for the sick, food for the hungry, and rough justice to be meted out on all those who don’t go along with the master plan.
This is, in short, the first stage of guerilla warfare: find a base and secure it. Give the people in your base area a reason to support you and destroy anyone who thinks that maybe your version of Salafi Islam or Chinese Communism or Ukrainian theosophy or whatever the ideology du jour you are peddling is not such a good idea. This is not rocket science; the process worked in Ireland, China, Vietnam, Algeria, Cyprus, and a half a dozen other places. The Americans at the Joint Combined Task Force in Djibouti presumably know this history much better than I ever will, and when they see the process at work in Somalia they presumably know that something has to be done before a new jihadist base appears in the Horn of Africa. That our proxies don’t seem to be doing as well as Osama’s proxies at the moment is, I hope, either journalistic wishful thinking on the part of the writer of this article or a temporary setback for our side, but one way or the other, the jihadis are fighting to hang on to what they’ve already got as opposed to finding new ways of attacking the West.
Another thing that strikes me about this article is the overuse of qualifiers. For example: some officials, by all accounts, other reports, has raised new questions. Which officials are these, where are all these accounts, what other reports, and who is raising these questions? Why is Mr. Giraldi still in contact with his ex-employers and why is he divulging this sort of thing to the press? Is this a case of institutional sour grapes, as in the CIA trashing a Defense Department operation? If the Swedish ambassador knows neither the scale nor the rationale of the American operation, how does the ambassador know there is an American operation at all and that what she sees is therefore the consequence of them? Does Saab produce crystal balls? I’m not saying that there isn’t such an operation, Randy; clearly, we are doing something in the Horn of Africa. What I am saying that this particular article seems a bit short on facts and a bit long on opinion to me.
To answer your final question, 9/11 did change everything. 9/11 happened because we closed our eyes to a very real danger and refused to see it. This is the point where all of us red state types usually take a cheap shot at Bill Clinton, but the reality is that Nixon, Carter, Reagan and G.W. Bush all missed the boat on this issue as well. We spent thirty years convincing the jihadis that we were a cotton candy superpower who talked a good fight but couldn’t really stand the heat, and that all they had to do was hit us hard enough and we would go away. Osama had the line down pat: kill a few of the Americans, get their faces on the American television, and the Americans would scream Vietnam, quagmire, 58,000 dead, let’s get out now, and all the mujahadeen had to do was sit back and let it happen. How could the Faithful not win when the infidels were so weak and feckless, so apparently willing to become dhimmis if that meant they could keep their comfortable lifestyles, so obviously unwilling to see the truth that was staring them in the face? Are those the same mistakes you’re referring to?
Posted by: Akaky | June 02, 2006 at 10:46 AM
Akaky,
I'll respond to you tomorrow.
Posted by: Randinho | June 02, 2006 at 11:57 PM
First, I don’t believe I am downplaying the significance of blowback; I simply accept that the law of unintended consequences and Murphy’s law are part and parcel of human history whether I like it or not. History does not reveal its alternatives, except in science fiction, nor can we see today what the end result of our actions will be some twenty years down the line. We can only act on what we know today, which is, almost by definition, imperfect and fragmentary.
Akaky, with all due respect, it also doesn't mean that you have to continue responding in the same way, either. People are not thinking strategically here; they're playing whack a mole. You're a librarian, Surley I don't have to mention Santayana's famous quote to you.
Here's a great example of strategic thinking: the Marshall Plan. Rather than let a devastated Europe sink further into misery post WWII, in one of what may be one of our finest moments, we helped rebuild Europe and what did we get for it? A military and political alliance that proved to be victorious against the Warsaw Pact without having to go to war.
Here's a great example of tactical thinking without strategic planning beyond the event: in 1953 we supported a coup against an elected official in Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh and reinstated the Shah to power. What did this lead to? A repressive regime by the Shah that led to an even more repressive theocratic regime that has supported and sponsored terrorism around the Middle East, in addition to the current events that are taking place now.
I would happy to list more, but I hope you get my point. If 9/11 changed everything, then it should have also changed our way of doing business based on historical precedent after historical precedent.
All of which brings us, and yes, I hear you thinking it’s about time, to the article’s main argument, which is that American involvement in Somalia is causing a jihadist backlash. This strikes me as post hoc ergo propter hoc. How do we know that this is the case?
How about actual events on the ground:
God, how I hate to say I told you so. I really wish I were wrong.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration seems to regard everything as a nail and seeems dedicated to use a hammer. All this while Iraq is deteriorating into civil war and Afghanistan (I supported quashing the Taliban, BTW) is unraveling.
Posted by: Randinho | June 03, 2006 at 11:18 PM