Even after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, we are still in Somalia. Are we forgetting another “Forever War”?
By Jared Smith
Washington has supplied the Federal Government of Somalia with financial aid and defense contractor advisors for decades. Special Forces have been deployed for “limited purposes”, but accompanied by periodic, sustained air campaigns. The number of troops and methods of aid have varied over the years, but for the most part have, at the minimum, remained constant. A United States presence in Somalia has become one of the only stable things about the country, or that’s what the West tells itself at least. With the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the American people have seen the end to a war that has lasted for the entire lifetime of some, and it begs us to answer the Somali question: What do we do with another forever war? In a country where citizens go to terrorist convened courts instead of state sanctioned ones, questions begin to arise about our military’s usefulness there. It is time for the United States to read the writing on the wall and leave Somalia for good.
Harakat Shabaab al-Mujahidin, known more commonly as al-Shabaab, has been a powerful force in creating the current chaos in Somalia. Since their inception, they have been a militant group bent on instituting their will onto the populace. Much like the other burgeoning Islamist movements of the late 20th and early 21st century, the group looks to topple the Somali regime and assert theocratic rule. In 2006, they splintered from their parent group, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), after an insurgency and subsequent coup orchestrated by the ICU had been rebuked by the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and crushed by a TFG-sanctioned Ethiopian invasion. By 2008, the group had seized control of most of southern Somalia, and in that same year were designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States. These mujahideen were welcomed into the close ranks of al-Qaeda, and were promoted, in 2012, into the “global network” of rising Islamist movements by second emir of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 2016, the US government recognized al-Shabaab as an “associated force” of al-Qaeda. It is no surprise why the United States, in its international and multilateral military efforts in the War on Terror, has chosen to close in on al-Shabaab.
A vast majority of the American military Top Brass are reluctant to disengage our forces there, and they are not without reason. As mentioned above, there is little doubt of operational and ideological links between al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab. The mindset remains the same for the Warhawks still squawking over our shaky withdrawal from Afghanistan: we’d rather fight them over there than here. Our military might is best used when extending our own borders and preventing international actors from interfering with our domestic tranquility. United States’ drone strikes however stir-up civilian resentment when wayward bombs fall onto the heads of innocent civilians, caught up in the crossfire. Worse, a report done by top United States military officials concluded that a 2020 al-Shabaab attack that left one soldier and two defense contractors dead was the result of “insufficient planning” and “poor leadership”. Why should we deploy more Americans when the ones we do send end up dead due to institutional shortcomings?
Former President Trump issued a withdrawal order for special operations forces in Somalia in the waning weeks of his presidency, shocking many military leaders. It speaks, however, to a growing bipartisan position that foreign forever wars are not the issue of American military power, and should no longer be indulged. President Biden has reversed this decision, and instead recommitted to deploying members of the United States Armed Forces to mitigate the mess in Somalia. No good comes from policy reversals though, obvious from American actions in Somalia almost thirty years ago.
In April of 1992, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 751. An international approach, it was designed to combat the growing humanitarian crisis and prevent weak governance in Somalia from becoming a fully-fledged failed state. The United Nations Operation in Somalia was intended to provide escort and protection to international aid being delivered to the nation, at the time being pillaged by local warlords. The first Bush administration, in the face of intensifying civil conflict, authorized additional troop deployment to the area. What appeared as a noble pursuit faded fast, when on October 3, 1993, two US Black Hawk helicopters were shot down over Somalia’s capital city by those same warlords intercepting aid. Eighteen US soldiers were killed, and the images of derelict and destroyed helicopters and deserted service members were widely disseminated. In the hands of the Clinton administration, the decision was made by the president to completely withdraw from Somalia after the embarrassment and losses endured when those helicopters went down over Mogadishu. The reverberations from the tragedy rippled throughout United States foreign policy. In 1994, when the Rwandan genocide began, United States leaders were disinclined to intervene. Citing the recent loss in Somalia as an example of what happens when the United States enters a fight with no skin in the game, leaders were persuaded to stay away from the conflict—though the moral imperative for military intervention was much stronger in Rwanda’s case than in Somalia. Regardless, our hasty withdrawal is what created the power vacuum that would bring the ICU, and later al-Shabaab, into the fold, and create a standing invitation for our eventual return.
Tricia Bacon, professor, and director of the Policy Anti-Terrorism Hub at American University, highlights the need for a more holistic view of the situation in Somalia. Recognizing al-Shabaab’s “shadow government”, and their vast extrajudicial court system presents a very different picture of their control over Somalia than a purely territorial analysis, she explains. Their influence extends far beyond the walls of the border towns they occupy, and in notoriously corrupt Somalia, it is no shock to learn that al-Shabaab runs massive extortion rackets, “filling up coffers” while undermining authority. Breaking up these “pervasive extortion networks'', Bacon says, is the key to combating al-Shabaab and other insurgent groups worldwide.
The group is both difficult to counter militarily and simultaneously winning over the minds of a growing number of citizens. It brings us back to the question posited above—one that now, is hopefully quite easy to answer. If the United Nations failed to stabilize the country, with the United States comprising the bulk of the force, it is doubtful that the go-it-alone approach will be any better. The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, in their 2021 post-mortem on twenty years of American involvement in Afghanistan, pointed out the dangers of rebuilding regimes in “countries mired in conflict”, and included Somalia as a country to watch for such perpetual reconstruction campaigns. Governments have come and gone in Somalia, and now it is time for ours to leave the stage.
Lessons learned from previous withdrawals will be important to apply to Somalia when the day finally comes to leave. Critics will point out the dangers of piracy or exclaim about the now exacerbated spread of extremism in the Horn of Africa. But, warlords and pirates are still omnipresent even with United States forces there, and their ranks only grow. Besides, the extremist threat is not unique to Somalia. Extremists in North Africa find their hideouts in Sudan, Egypt, and Libya as well, but there is no organized military presence seeking to drive them out of their host countries—to the public’s knowledge, that is. Fundamentalist propaganda and the desire for jihad will only grow as long as we prolong the fight. Reorienting ourselves for a new age of American-Somali relations looks like investments in aid for the growing number of Somali people put out by the fighting, and an international approach to humanitarian and economic assistance that relies more heavily on regional partners who are better suited to operate in the area. The West, mainly Americans, must also have open arms for the refugees displaced by the continued campaign of violence in the country. In Afghanistan, we left military equipment behind that trickled down into the hands of the Taliban. In Somalia we leave the Danab, an 850-soldier Somali unit. These commandos have been receiving training from and fighting alongside our Special Forces in the region and against al-Shabaab for years. The hands most capable of winning the fight for a country’s freedom are not those of a foreign protector from a far away land, but the native warrior, who fights for their home. The best lesson to take with us to Somalia from our previous conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan—or any other prolonged, asymmetrical war—is simple: Leave on your own, or a few years and a couple billion dollars later, you will be kicked out anyway.
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