By Dan Simpson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Reports that the United States is providing military assistance to the so-called government of Somalia to help it conquer uncontrolled parts of the capital, Mogadishu, reveal continued folly in U.S. policy toward that tormented country.
I could view the situation with icier detachment if I had not served as the last U.S. ambassador and special envoy to Somalia in 1994 and 1995. This role allowed me to get to know some Somalis and to gain a certain understanding of the country, so it is difficult for me to view it coolly, from afar.
The Somalis have made an awful mess of their country. There has been no government with national authority since 1991, moving its population of 9 million toward two decades of chaos. (I, for one, refuse to take seriously the appeal that an absence of government might have for America's own tea party movement.)
No government in a place like Somalia means no health care, no education, no infrastructure maintenance and the absence of law and order that comes when everyone is armed to the teeth and perhaps high on drugs.
Somalia has suffered an amazing amount of foreign intervention from 1991 to the present. The United Nations and then the United States intervened in the early 1990s to prevent Somali militias from interfering with humanitarian efforts to meet famine and other disasters in Somalia in the wake of the collapse of government and subsequent clan fighting.
The problem came when the United Nations and the Clinton administration turned from the humanitarian mission to nation re-building. It would have been difficult to keep the humanitarian program going without foreign troops unless a viable government were in place to assure law and order. But it was a question of how to get from a state of almost total disorder to the re-creation of viable government.
When the world tried to take on that chore, the Somalis began to concentrate their efforts on making the foreigners' presence unbearable. Worse, the foreigners had their own view of which Somalis should be running the show.
The Somali leader who had led the forces that had overthrown the previous dictator was Gen. Mohamed Farrah Aideed, who was not only unacceptable to many Somalis but also had a personality and sense of entitlement to the job of president that made him unacceptable to most of the foreigners, including the Americans.
By the time I got there in 1994, the "Blackhawk Down" killing of 18 American troops and the subsequent withdrawal of almost all of the rest had taken place and the United Nations was reduced to paying the Somalis just to meet with each other, a sad state of affairs. Soon, the U.S. government decided, against my recommendation, that it was too dangerous to maintain an embassy and special envoy there and we were withdrawn. U.N. forces were taken out months later.
Since then, there have been two streams of effort on the part of the world to try to reestablish government in Somalia. One cobbled together a government after months of talk in Kenya. This produced the one that now holds a few blocks of Mogadishu with the help of African Union forces. The other has been up-and-down efforts of an Islamic group called the Shabab to establish rule in Somalia.
The American government has decided that the Shabab is too infected with Islamic extremism, including perhaps influence by al-Qaida, to be permitted to take power, even though it probably would if the African Union withdrew. In the name of keeping the Shabab out, the United States provided air and intelligence support for an invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in 2006. The Ethiopians eventually found trying to keep the provisional government in power such a miserable business that they withdrew last year.
Now, apparently, U.S. forces are providing arms, advisers and other military support to the African Union and newly trained forces of the provisional government to try to enable them to enlarge the small area of Mogadishu they currently control.
There is reason to believe this effort will fail, partly because the Shabab are determined and their forces large, partly because the African Union forces are not highly motivated to die in Somalia and partly because the provisional government forces are likely to fragment into clans, be ineffectual and eventually loot the American arms, perhaps diverting them to the Shabab and other militias.
So why, apart from the only lightly documented charge of Islamic extremism among the Shabab, is the United States reengaging in Somalia at this time?
Part of the reason is because the United States has its only base in Africa up the coast from Mogadishu, in Djibouti, the former French Somaliland. The U.S. Africa Command was established there in 2008, and, absent the willingness of other African countries to host it, the base in Djibouti became the headquarters for U.S. troops and fighter bombers in Africa.
Flush with money, in spite of the expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense obviously feels itself in a position to undertake military action in Africa, in Somalia. Whether it makes sense to do so, or whether the Somalis would be more likely to set up and consolidate a working government in Mogadishu in the absence of foreign intervention, is another question altogether.
When I left the issue in 1995 I was persuaded that the best thing for Somalia -- and therefore for America and the rest of the world -- was to leave the Somalis to sort out their problems. Given what has happened since, and what is likely to happen now with the new U.S. military effort, I still think so. Why not let the Shabab take the place and then do business with them?
Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com, 412 263-1976 412 263-1976). More articles by this author
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