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PART 2 of 3 (also reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act)
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THE GRIP OF TERROR
For decades, Somalia was little more to Americans than a pawn in the Cold War. Then, in 1992, U.S. televisions were flooded with images of dying Somali children, the victims of brutal warlords and their civil war. With Operation Restore Hope, the U.S. government set out to respond not only to the humanitarian emergency but also to the clarion call of a new era of peacemaking and multilateral cooperation. Initially intended as a relief effort, the mission soon got mired in Somalia's violent internal politics. On July 12, 1993, U.S. forces mistakenly attacked a peaceful meeting of clan elders, killing 73 civilians. The mission had derailed, and a few months later it hit bottom when a Somali mob desecrated the corpses of U.S. soldiers. The incident, known as "Black Hawk down," was a bewildering assault on the American public's self-image, not to mention a low-water mark of the Clinton administration, and it left the Americans and the Somalis distrustful of each other. For close to a decade afterward, the U.S. government effectively let Somalia be.
Even so, it remained concerned. After the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and then 9/11, what had once seemed like a humanitarian imperative to intervene in Somalia receded. The growing concern that the country's lawless territories could become a safe haven for al Qaeda quickly drove the Bush administration's Somalia policy, producing a series of failed political interventions designed to create a central government in Somalia. In 2002, the UN bankrolled efforts by regional actors to set up a transitional government. Negotiations with warlords and clan and civil-society leaders sputtered for a couple of years and then bred the TFG. The TFG's purpose was to balance the interests of all of Somalia's clans, but in practice, it was dominated by the Darod clan, from the north. This left the Hawiye, Somalia's majority clan, feeling like it had been shortchanged, and it responded by striking an anti-TFG alliance of convenience with the business community and a group of sharia courts in Mogadishu. The alliance's goal was to restore enough order in the capital, a Hawiye stronghold, to undermine the Darod's efforts to locate the seat of government elsewhere. Meanwhile, a group of militant youths formed al Shabab, and although it, too, was associated with the coalition, it belonged to its more radical and violent fringe and started assassinating members of the TFG.
Had it not been for the United States' counterterrorism efforts, the sharia courts and al Shabab might have remained marginal. By early 2006, the TFG's inability to govern was evident; the group no longer posed a meaningful threat to the Hawiye. The defensive alliance it had struck with the Islamists and the business community quickly fizzled out. Al Shabab remained isolated, but some businesspeople and criminals were still compelled to form the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, a pro-government group intent on capturing and deporting suspected terrorists. Public outrage over the United States' support of the group, which included several despised warlords, sparked a vicious four-month battle for the control of Mogadishu that eventually brought the Islamic Courts Union, the Hawiye-backed sharia courts, to power. The ICU's rise was the result more of happenstance than strategy, but by quickly bringing an unprecedented degree of order to Mogadishu, the movement generated nationwide enthusiasm, and the sharia-court model was soon replicated across the country. At first, Washington encouraged the TFG to negotiate with the ICU, but it stopped as soon as it understood that al Shabab was effectively operating as the ICU's military arm and was intent on enforcing a harsh version of sharia law. The ICU's policies quickly became unpopular with the public, but Ethiopia nonetheless grew nervous about having a hostile jihadist army that close and so sold to the U.S. government the notion that al Qaeda was controlling the ICU. It was a small step from there to Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia.
The move, which occurred in December 2006, with U.S. support, was a catastrophe. By then, the ICU had exhausted the Somalis' patience, and it dissolved overnight, its leaders scattering into the bush in southern Somalia or fleeing to Eritrea. Ethiopia was forced to occupy Mogadishu to prop up the unpopular TFG, and its presence ignited a complex insurgency. Rampant human rights abuses by the Ethiopian army and the TFG's forces, including the firing of mortar on hospitals and the indiscriminate shelling of civilians, turned the population against the government and its patron, the United States. Washington aggravated the outrage by dropping bombs on terrorist targets and thereby allegedly killing scores of civilians. Jihadists from the Middle East, sensing an unprecedented opportunity to find a foothold in the shifting sands of Somalia's conflict, poured resources into the hands of al Shabab. It recruited a host of angry, desperate young fighters. Experienced terrorists arrived from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan -- even Malaysia -- and brought with them suicide bombings and sophisticated tactics such as remote-controlled detonations. By the time the Ethiopian forces withdrew in early 2009, al Shabab's influence had spread throughout southern Somalia.
Under the Bush administration, Somalia became a front in the war on terrorism. A messy decades-long conflict was recast as an ideological battle between secular democracy and Islam, between "moderates" and "extremists" -- blunt categories that blurred important differences in ideologies and tactics. This oversimplification has both severely undermined the capacity of U.S. and other international representatives to relate to the Somali public and allowed al Shabab to unify an otherwise diverse array of actors into a motivated armed opposition.
NEITHER NOR
There are now two dominant camps in Somalia, the vocally pro-Western TFG and the vocally radical al Shabab. Although they seem diametrically opposed, both are alliances of fortune, and the line between them is thinner than is often believed. Both are mostly driven by clannish and economic interests that often trump ideology in determining allegiances. Yet many experts and diplomats, including Secretary of State Clinton, make much of the groups' differences and argue that the TFG is Somalia's "best chance" for peace, a label that has been attached to every Somali government since 2000. The current optimism centers on the designation of a new president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, a Muslim cleric who had been vilified by the State Department when he chaired the ICU but was conveniently resurrected as a peacemaker in late 2008, in the run-up to Ethiopia's withdrawal from Somalia. Sheik Sharif has attempted to position the revamped TFG as a moderate Islamist government, primarily by promising to implement sharia law. But his willingness to engage with Ethiopia and the West has hampered his efforts. The TFG has been categorically rejected as a proxy of the West by the bulk of Somalia's armed political opposition, and although it has won some hearts and minds, it has failed to generate much grass-roots support. The TFG's paramilitary forces -- a ragtag cluster of groups beholden to various warlords with posts in the government -- are a shambles. Even though the United States and its allies have tried to prop up these underpaid forces with ammunition and training, they, as well as members of the TFG and foreign peacekeepers, have been accused of selling munitions to al Shabab for profit -- a claim that seems to be substantiated by the precipitous drop in munitions prices on Mogadishu's black market. Except among hard-liners in al Shabab, loyalty is in short supply.
Even if the TFG were able to control more territory, this would serve little good: the government is simply incapable of governing. The parliament has swollen to an unwieldy 550 members. Most of its members reside safely outside the country, and the remainder are paralyzed by factionalism and infighting; just getting a parliamentary quorum in Mogadishu requires Herculean support from the UN. The ad hoc addition of Sheik Sharif's Islamist faction to the TFG's clan-based structure, and the parliament's promise to implement some still unspecified form of sharia law, has turned the TFG into a muddle of Islamist and democratic ideologies. The government's only real value is to provide a legitimating façade for the international community's opposition to al Shabab.
This opposition largely takes the form of the African Union's mission to Somalia, known as AMISOM. But so far, this effort has been as ineffective as previous international interventions in Somalia. With support from Washington and the United Nations, the AU is desperately trying to increase AMISOM's contingent from 5,000 troops to 8,000 and is arguing that these forces should be free to launch preemptive attacks on al Shabab. In August, Secretary of State Clinton promised to help the AU increase its supplies of munitions to the TFG forces. Like the Ethiopian forces that came before it, AMISOM is widely viewed as a combatant in the conflict and has been accused by the local press and some clan leaders of firing indiscriminately on civilians. Both al Shabab and legitimate authorities among the clans and Mogadishu's local clerics council have called for ousting the troops. Under these circumstances, bolstering the AMISOM contingent is a fool's errand. At the height of its occupation of Mogadishu in 2008, the 15,000 forces led by the Ethiopian army made no headway against the al Shabab-led insurgency. A decisive military response against today's more powerful and better-organized radical camp would require far more troops than AMISOM or the TFG could ever muster.
That said, the radical camp is in no better shape than the TFG. Based in the port city of Kismaayo, it is an awkward coalition of opportunistic clan factions, fundamentalist nationalists, and a few vocal al Qaeda supporters who are committed to the Salafi strand of Islam, control substantial resources sent from the Middle East, and have capitalized on the international hysteria surrounding terrorism. Al Shabab's hold on power, especially its purported control over territory, is weak. Although it holds sway over much of the country's southern half (except for the central districts of Galgaduud and Hiiraan), it does not govern so much as occupy territory through a mixture of public relations, manipulation of local clan conflicts, and outright intimidation. At the approach of a hostile militia, al Shabab often melts into the bush and keeps away until reinforcements arrive. Its blunt efforts to impose sharia law have irritated clans across the country, as have its attempts to ignite local conflicts. Its meddling in Galgaduud, for example, prompted warring Hawiye subclans there to form a counterforce of local clans and business factions. This alliance is often described as a moderate Islamist movement because it has adopted the banner of Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama (ASWJ), an apolitical, nonmilitary organization that represents the practice of Sufi mysticism. Thanks to the group's heavy reliance on financial and logistic support from the Ethiopian army, al Shabab has already managed to depict it as another proxy of the West.
As al Shabab has gained ground, it has attracted opportunists and consequently has fractured along both ideological and clan lines. The inclusion of more pragmatic, nationalist factions, such as Hizbul Islam, itself an alliance of convenience, led by Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, has challenged the dominance of the radical leaders. Sheik Aweys is a wanted terrorist suspect, but he is distinctly less radical than his counterparts in Kismaayo. He has periodically appeared open to negotiation with the TFG. Al Shabab may be a brutal local political movement, in other words, but it is not a transnational terrorist organization that might one day pose a serious threat to U.S. national security. It has stirred only a few hundred true fanatics -- not thousands -- and attracted many more thugs, mostly teenage boys. The disturbing acts of violence that have dominated media reports, including beheadings and amputations and the pulling of gold fillings from the teeth of ordinary Somalis, are often committed by illiterate children rather than radical leaders. There has been little reporting in the West of the fact that a wide majority of al Shabab factions have actively cooperated with international humanitarian relief efforts -- if only for a fee -- and that many of them have publicly condemned terrorist activities and banditry.
The presence of al Qaeda operatives in al Shabab's ranks is indeed alarming, but it is as much a tactical arrangement as an ideological alignment. And the utility for al Shabab of having foreign jihadists fighting by its side will decrease as doing so begins to impede the group's hopes of governing Somalia: many Somalis condemn the presence of foreign fighters in the country on the grounds that they are bound to promote non-Somali values or act like brutal colonizers. Unless the outsiders learn to adopt nonviolent Sufi Islamic practices, their involvement will not last. Sheik Muktar Robow, the former spokesperson of al Shabab and once a backer of al Qaeda, has publicly argued this point. And in fact, differences of opinion have developed between the radicals in Kismaayo and their Hizbul Islam hosts.
The tenuous nature of these alliances means there is no clear horse on which the U.S. government can bet. Both the TFG and al Shabab have backers among Somalis, but neither can count on a critical mass. The ostensibly moderate ASWJ has local supporters, but its factionalism and its dependence on Ethiopia are likely to undermine its capacity to generate a national constituency. No doubt this is a problem for the advocates of state building, who were counting on the TFG to be the solution to anarchy. But the weakness of all the parties is also something of a blessing: it means that al Shabab is less powerful than is often feared. The implications of this are clear. With no side capable of keeping the peace if it wins the war, the U.S. government, as well as the rest of the international community, should not focus its efforts on backing any one group. It should also forget about grand political projects to create a central government authority, which are likely to be futile.
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