Obama's To-Do List: Somalia
Somalia, a genuine failed state,
ranks alongside Sudan as the world's most conspicuous candidate for
American attention in the early days of Barack Obama's
administration. Last week, capping a series of territorial gains
across the country, Islamist insurgents seized the port of Merka,
and appeared poised for an offensive against the capital city of
Mogadishu 60 miles to the north. Aspiring jihadists, averse to the
risks posed in Iraq and Pakistan, are increasingly flocking to
Somalia, which is 97 percent Sunni Muslim. At the same time, Somali
pirates have become a significant maritime menace, with press
reports suggesting that they are driving up prices of goods
worldwide. Almost two years ago, U.S.-supported Ethiopian troops
ousted the de facto government run by the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic
Courts Union (ICU) from Mogadishu, installed an internationally
recognized secular transitional government formed in exile, and
remained in-country to support it along with an anemic African Union
(AU) contingent. But the Ethiopians can't afford to stay much
longer, and their repressive tactics have lost Somali hearts and
minds, allowing the Islamists to regain social as well as military
traction. Earlier this month, in a brutally populist application of
sharia law, a 13-year old girl was stoned to death in the southern
Somali city of Kismayu for alleged adultery in a stadium packed with
1,000 spectators.
The upstart al-Shabaab--meaning "youth"--faction of the ICU has
become a political spoiler. On October 29, the group executed five
coordinated suicide car-bomb attacks against transitional government
and U.N. targets in different locations around the country, killing
about 30 people and accelerating a trend of rising jihadist violence
against local civic leaders and international aid workers perceived
as pro-Western. Significantly, al-Shabaab targeted the northern city
of Hargeisa, the seat of government of the relatively safe and
successful quasi-state of Somaliland, even as the transitional
government was making progress in Nairobi towards an orderly
Ethiopian withdrawal. The threat the ICU posed in late 2006 has thus
re-materialized: that Islamists will Talibanize Somalia and nurture
a regional base for jihadism that exports insecurity and
instability.
If the résumés of his likely foreign-policy advisers are any
indication, President-elect Barack Obama does not intend to ignore
Africa. Susan Rice, a strong contender for national security
adviser, was assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the
Clinton administration. Samantha Power, also prominently mentioned,
wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell, a passionate
chronicle of the Rwandan genocide and critique of the United States'
failure to intervene. In the 2,000-strong Combined Joint Task
Force-Horn of Africa, based in Djibouti, Africa Command (AFRICOM),
the United States' new combatant command dedicated to Africa, has
the means of bolstering secular Somali militias (or more Ethiopians)
against Islamist forces. But that has not produced sustainable
stability in the past and isn't likely to do so now, and would only
stoke Africans' fears of American militarism. Further, constricted
budgets and two wars elsewhere will call for judiciously set
priorities.
Soft rather than hard power should be the United States' instrument
of choice on the continent, and in Somalia. So what about an
audacious diplomatic American approach to Somalia? The fraught
1992-93 U.S.-led humanitarian intervention, U.S. backing for
Ethiopia, and civilian casualties caused by recent American
counterterrorism strikes have eroded Somali respect for the United
States. But Obama's singular status as the first African American
president substantially renews American diplomatic credibility with
all Africans, including Somalis.
Expending political capital on such a knotty problem--over a dozen
transitional governments have tried and failed over the past 17
years--might seem imprudent at first blush. But the Somalis' very
recalcitrance has yielded such low expectations that very little
would actually be at risk. Moreover, an earnest attempt at
conflict-resolution in Somalia would enable Mr. Obama to showcase
the differences between him and his predecessor.
Mr. Bush was a self-described "gut player," uninterested in the
cultural subtleties of other peoples, and it showed in a foreign
policy that was often ineffective on account of its insensitivity.
By contrast, Mr. Obama is surrounding himself with true regional
experts, including Africanists who have made it their business to
understand Africans and their politics in all their complexities.
Somalia's notorious clan system makes for extreme political
atomization, and makes any power-sharing solution an especially
daunting prospect. Yet the clan network also disperses power from
the bottom up, and, properly harnessed, could systematically limit
the trajectory of a top-down movement like radical Islamism.
Mr. Obama's prospective team also has extensive experience on the
volatile international stage of the 1990s, when the Clinton
administration pragmatically--and usually successfully--backed
high-level diplomacy with the selective, and therefore credible, use
of military force in the Balkans and elsewhere. Thus, they
understand one of Mr. Obama's most provocative campaign positions:
be open to talking to your enemies.
To be sure, al-Shabaab are bad guys. Members of the group's core
leadership are believed to have trained in al Qaeda camps in
Afghanistan, it has sought to expel transitional government forces,
AU peacekeepers, and Ethiopians troops through insurgency tactics,
and supports forming an anti-Western Islamic state. Yet it was a
mistake for the Bush administration to include al-Shabaab on the
State Department's list of proscribed terrorist organizations. That
move, along with a U.S. airstrike in May that killed Aden Hashi Ayro,
al-Shabaab's leader, needlessly glorified and antagonized the group;
pushed it closer to Al Qaeda; spurred it to expand its target set to
any Somalis associated with the West, including local aid workers
and community leaders; attracted foreign jihadist recruits; and
politically inhibited any U.S. moves towards positive engagement.
Conversely, removing it from the list--as the Clinton administration
de-listed the Provisional Irish Republican Army to advance
U.S.-brokered talks--could induce al-Shabaab to enter into all-party
negotiations with an eye to integrating it--and the ICU--into
government and thus co-opting them. Although al-Shabaab would likely
continue to be a potential spoiler, nudging it into a negotiating
framework that offered some political legitimacy would also make it
more susceptible to compromising with moderate Islamists, who are in
turn more inclined to deal non-violently with the secular
transitional government and with the United States. Sinn Fein's
doves, after all, were better able to control the IRA's hawks once
the IRA had been de-listed.
High political dividends could be achieved with relatively low
financial and bureaucratic investment by coordinating U.S. efforts
with and through the AU's larger peace and security agenda. Useful
precedents include President Clinton's diplomatic intervention in
the Northern Irish "troubles" and President Bush's in the
north-south conflict in Sudan. In both cases, the president's
appointment of a seasoned and dedicated special envoy with influence
and gravitas--former Senator George Mitchell and former Senator John
Danforth, respectively--ultimately produced formal political
settlements on a non-threatening multilateral basis.
The goal in Somalia would be negotiated state-building. Perhaps
U.N.-sanctioned special political status for Somaliland that could
qualify it for international aid and protection, in recognition of
its largely self-generated order and viability, should be on the
table to create incentives for the more unruly militias in southern
Somalia to reach political compromises. Even if a diplomatic foray
by the Obama administration does not yield immediate success,
striking a salutary keynote of multilateral diplomacy would help
alleviate African worries about AFRICOM and the militarization of
U.S. Africa policy. And returning to Somalia--the notorious site of
U.S. military failure around fifteen years ago, which drove its
sustained disengagement from Africa and emboldened Al Qaeda--would
decisively signal a renewed commitment to the continent.
By Jonathan Stevenson
The New Republic
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