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J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia
Like Cassandra after Agamemnon’s Greeks emerged from the Trojan Horse, I have had little time to derive any satisfaction from being justified in my longstanding warnings about the risks to international security centered in the Horn of Africa: Threats from radical Islamist groups the ignoring of which, in another moment under the inspiration of the Homeric muse, I called America’s Achilles’ heel. There have been simply been too many other battles to fight.
Even after the capture at the beginning of June of Somalia’s sometime-capital, Mogadishu, by armed forces of the so-called “Union of Islamic Courts,” some continued to deny the strategic significance of the event. At the joint hearing of the Subcommittees on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations and International Terrorism and Nonproliferation at the end of June at which I testified, one witness questioned whether the Somali Islamists were extremists, while another tried to deny the link between them and the radical currents of the global jihadi movement.
Fortuitously, the Fates may have been smiling, delivering definitive ripostes to my two colleagues for Independence Day. As Americans were watching the fireworks, Islamist militiamen in Mogadishu shot two people dead as the new regime shut down a cinema showing satellite television coverage of the World Cup (even the Taliban allowed people to watch soccer, even if cheers were limited to cries of “Allahu akbar!“). At almost the same moment, the Associated Press in Nairobi obtained an hour-long recruiting video issued by the Somali Islamists which clearly showed Arab radicals fighting alongside the local extremists and invited foreign fighters and contributions for “the sacred, holy jihad in Somalia” and “the holy war that began in Somalia” (the latter a reference to Osama bin Laden’s old claim that al-Qaeda’s first victory against America was won in the Mogadishu street battle chronicled in Black Hawk Down).
So how is America reacting to a situation that is looking a lot like Afghanistan as the Taliban were settling in (or, as Yogi Berra put it, “déjà-vu all over again”)? Unfortunately, even if one grants there were other international security concerns last week – including the Fourth of July test firing of missiles by North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-Il – the U.S. response has been disappointingly weak: last Friday the U.S. participated in the second meeting of the hastily-convened International Somalia Contact Group consisting of representatives of the African Union, the United Nations, the European Union, the U.S., Sweden, Norway, Italy, Tanzania, and a few others (the first meeting only took place on June 15).
Given the dynamics of this multilateral approach, if the Contact Group does anything at all, it’s likely as not to adhere to what legal scholars call the fictio juris, that is, the “fiction of law,” so beloved of diplomats, multilateralists, and other denizens of the transnational set. Unfortunately, in the global war on terrorism, fictions, legal or otherwise, can be lethal. And the case of Somalia bears this out. This morality tale might be called “A Tale of Two Cities” after the two towns involved, Baidoa and Hargeysa.
For nearly two years now, the international community has engaged in game of make-believe by recognizing the now-Baidoa-based “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) headed by a failed warlord named Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmad as the government of all that was once the Somali Democratic Republic. After the collapse in early 1991 of the Siad Barre dictatorship – and with it the Somali state – Abdullahi, a onetime protégé of Libya’s Mu’ammar Qaddafi and Ethiopia’s Marxist tyrant Mengistu Hailemariam (now deposed and living as a guest of Zimbabwe’s equally lovable Robert Mugabe), tried to set himself as the warlord-ruler of a statelet known as “Puntland.” When that enterprise came to naught, he joined the queue of other wannabes who hived themselves off to a Kenyan resort on the shores of Lake Naivasha where in 2004 the well-intentioned international community was trying to conjure up yet another government for Somalia after the ignominious collapse the previous year of its previous attempt, the farcical “Transitional National Government” (TNG). At this confab, armed with a bag of cash provided by Yemen’s President Ali Abdallah Salih (whose son is a business partner of Abdullahi’s), Abdullahi emerged as the president of the TFG, while the runners-up were offered other positions, including seats in the 90-member (!) cabinet or 275-seat “Transitional Federal Assembly.”
Of course, none of the members of this self-selecting crowd had much of a constituency back in Somalia or – as evidenced by the inability of the long-suffering Kenyan government to get the TFG caravan moving until the middle of 2005 – any great desire to go back to the country they were ostensibly appointed to govern. Eventually, the Kenyans managed to evict the TFG – the story of how they succeeded would give reality television a run for its money – but the international community had little success imposing the TFG’s writ on the Somali people. “President” Abdullahi has never entered his capital as “head of state” and such members of his “government” as have remained with him have swatted it out in Baidoa, a provincial town in south-central Somalia, ever since the Kenyans turned them out. When it meets, for example, the “Federal Assembly,” convenes in a grain warehouse, although the presiding officer is careful not to take roll calls for quorum.
While Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer insists like the trooper that she is that the TFG represents “a framework for progress that the Somali people support” and “a legitimate and viable roadmap for rebuilding legitimate and effective governance in Somalia,” there is little evidence to back up either claim. Under questioning by members of Congress, Dr. Frazier was frank enough to admit that the TFG can’t even claim to actually control the entire town of Baidoa – a point tragically underscored last week when three people were killed and four wounded when a firefight erupted around a UN World Food Program convoy in territory nominally controlled by the Abdullahi “government.”
In an provocative essay in the current issue of The Nation Interest entitled “In Praise of Warlords,” John Hulsman of the Heritage Foundation and Alexis Debat of George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute argue that stability is the key to successful interventions abroad and that “it is imperative to work with local elites – and this includes the warlords – to ensure the stability that is so vital to any state-building enterprise.” It’s hard to argue with this realist advice, but applying it to Somalia would require that the State Department reverse course. The devil, as usual, is in the details. Hulsman and Debat have a very specific idea of what they mean by the “warlord” which they would counsel us working with:
A “warlord” is a leader whose power has been attained by non-democratic means but who exercises authority usually on the basis of an appeal to ethnic or religious identity, and who usually controls a definable territory where he has a near monopoly on the use of force. A warlord, as opposed to a gang leader or petty crook, operates within a clear and defined political framework.
By this standard, in the TFG we have at best a gang led by a crook who is certainly not a warlord worthy of that exalted titled as defined by Hulsman and Debat. To be fair, while he may not be much of a statesman, Abdullahi is a clever hustler: even as he has no doubt figured a way to profit from the TFG’s newfound international support, he continues to earn a nice return from his stake in Mudan Airlines, which makes twice weekly runs between Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Bosaaso, Somalia, ferrying in, among others, would-be jihadis responding to the promotional video of the Mogadishu Islamists. All in all, not a bad racket: make money flying in extremists and then collect international support to shore yourself up against the same radicals.
In diplomacy, it’s one thing to work with the powers that be – one might even say that it is the essence of statecraft. Legal fictions exist, if for nothing else, to lend “social respectability” in terms of international society to the sometimes necessary bargains which civilized nations must strike with devils having little or no provenance. However, one trick that fictiones juris cannot perform, however, is to create reality. As the maxim of Roman law has it: Fictio cedit veritati, fictio juris non est ubi veritas (”Fiction yields to truth: where there is truth, the fiction of law does not exist”). For the sake of U.S. interests and security, as well as that of the Somali people, one certainly hope there is more to America’s counterterrorism strategy in the Horn of Africa than making believe along with an ad hoc group of international partners that a gaggle of ne’er-do-wells holed up in an abandoned grain warehouse in a outback like Baidoa actually governs a Texas-sized country – much less that it is our first line of resistance to the well-armed forces of the Islamist extremists in Mogadishu, radicals who have now shown themselves to be clearly linked to global jihadi networks.
Dangerous Fiction: A Tale of Two Cities, Part II
Last week, I began this “Tale of Two Cities” by pointing to the danger inherent in confusing real effectiveness for the juridical fiction of international diplomatic recognition. Specifically, I argued that putting too much stock – and, in this case, almost any confidence is overreaching – in the reliability of the so-called “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) of Somalia, a ragtag outfit camped out (at least at the time of this writing) in the town of Baidoa, as an ally in what may prove to be the inevitable battle against the Islamist radicals: Those who have seized control of Mogadishu and seem poised, even eager, to transform it into the fashionable pied-à-terre for global jihadi terrorists who haven’t already found a home there (like Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Saleh Ali Salih Nabhan, and Abu Taha al-Sudani, who are wanted for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as 2002 attacks on Israeli civilians in Kenya).
Now I want to turn my attention to the flipside of that dangerous fiction and another town in the former Somalia. If there is grave risk in making believe a potential ally is worth anything just because he or she enjoys the benefits of international legal recognition, there is equal if not greater danger in failing to appreciate another potential partner’s attributes just because he or she may lack that little bit of diplomatic cover.
This is the tale of Hargeysa, the capital of former British Somaliland Protectorate which achieved its independence in 1960 a full week before the former Italian colony of Somalia, entered into a disastrous (and for Somalilanders, quasi-genocidal) union with its larger relation, and, on May 18, 1991, as the rest of the former Somali Democratic Republic collapsed into a ruin from which it has yet to emerge, reasserted its sovereign independence as the Republic of Somaliland.
As I have previously noted, Somaliland’s trajectory since has been nothing if not extraordinary, being characterized by both social stability and democratic politics – the northern region’s progress standing in stark contrast to the free fall of the rest of the former Somalia. And despite being cut off from international financial institutions, direct bilateral assistance, and other sources of development and investment capital – all for want of diplomatic recognition – the Somalilanders have rebuilt Hargeysa, which was leveled during the Siad Barre regime’s brutal campaign against them, and resettled close to one million of their displaced citizens. All of this has been done on remittances from the diaspora and the paltry $35 million that the government makes each year on transshipments from the port of Berbera to landlocked neighboring Ethiopia.
Needless to say, Somaliland’s success has attracted the ire of both the ineffectual TFG in Baidoa and the Islamists in Mogadishu who repulsed both by its democratic constitution – Sheikh Hassan Dahir ‘Aweys, head of the Islamists’ majlis al-shura, has pronounced democracy “contrary to Islamic teachings” and “anti-Islam” – as well as the prominent role that women play in its politics (the foreign minister of the government in Hargeysa, for example, is a woman, Edna Adan Ismail).
The Islamist threat to Somaliland is existential, not theoretical. In 2003-2004, the same extremists who are now ensconced in Mogadishu purposely targeted four foreign aid workers in Somaliland. Last September, Somaliland’s security services managed to foil a plot by the same radicals to disrupt the parliamentary poll by attacking voting stations and killing the seventy-six international observers, including seven Americans led by retired Ambassador Lange Schermerhorn. Fourteen of the terrorists have already been tried and convicted by Somaliland courts and a number of others have been taken into custody.
With this record, one would have thought Somaliland would be a natural ally for the U.S. and the international community in their efforts not only to contain the Islamists in Mogadishu, but also to orchestrate regional counterterrorism efforts. Alas, Somaliland is not yet recognized and hence does not figure into the perspective of those who prefer form over substance.
Meanwhile, the Somalilanders in Hargeysa are left to their own not-inconsiderable ingenuity while resources from the International Contact Group and others flows to the make-believe “government” in Baidoa that would have a hard time making a case that it was even the effective municipal authority of that provincial town. This last, rather inconvenient fact did not, of course stand in the way the UN Security Council from having its president for July, Ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sablière of France, read out a statement last Friday reaffirming the TFG and its grain warehouse kaffeeklatsch of a “parliament” as “the internationally recognized authorities to restore peace, stability and governance to Somalia.” One should not be surprised by the surrealism of the whole exercise when one considers that the habitués of Turtle Bay hardly batted an eye when UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed François Lonseny Fall, the discarded prime ministerial puppet of General Lansana Conté of Guinea – itself a country well on its way to failed state status – as the world body’s chief envoy for Somalia, arguably the most failed state on the planet.
The entire story has all the makings of an opera buffa, except the very real specter of global jihadi terrorism renders it more akin to a Greek tragedy where the obstinate refusal to look beyond certain conventions – in this case the “non-recognition” of Somaliland and the “recognition” of the TFG – condemns many of the characters to disaster.
In the interest of avoiding that fate for the peoples of Somaliland and Somalia, their neighbors, and the international community, I suggest that American policymakers pursue the following courses of action to address the security challenge at hand, at least in the short and intermediate terms as a more coherent long-term strategy towards the Horn of Africa is crafted:
First, we need to get beyond increasingly abstract discussions about “international recognition” and down to the concrete question of whether or not there is any utility in keeping the TFG’s life support going (I happen to think that the patient should have been pronounced terminal some time ago, but perhaps someone else might be able to turn up signs of life). In the event that there is some use in supporting the TFG, the U.S. should make clear to “President” Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmad and such followers as he may still have that American support for the TFG’s “sovereignty” extends only as far as the TFG can make its heretofore entirely notional authority respected. The TFG needs to be disabused of any delusions that America supports any of its irredentist claims to the territory of Somaliland or is going to back its charade of claiming international standing.
Our only interest as Americans in supporting the gang in Baidoa at all is only insofar as it proves itself to be useful to our interests in general and effective as a counterweight to the Islamist radicals in Mogadishu in particular. Certainly we should expect that any assistance we choose to give will not be used by the TFG to undermine the one stable part of the former Somalia, Somaliland. If we provide the TFG with any support at all, it ought to be with this condition attached as well as the clear understanding that we expect results and will not hesitate to pull the plug on Baidoa should it not be found wanting in either respect for our preconditions or general effectiveness.
Second, the U.S. should somehow find the mechanism to help the government in Hargeysa build up its capacity to defend itself – and, indirectly, others – from the terrorist and other radical threats emanating from the rest of the former Somalia. I’d prefer direct engagement to build long-term ties, but could live with American resources getting where they need to go through some other channel, including private military companies.
The government of Somaliland President Dahir Rayale Kahin stretches its meager resources quite far, but it faces an almost overwhelming task of securing almost 1400 kilometers of land borders, including 500 kilometers directly opposite the Islamists in Somalia, with its logistically challenged and under-armed army (in contrast, as I have noted before, the Islamists are armed to the teeth). The Somaliland coast guard, under the Ministry of the Interior, has precisely three speedboats to patrol some 900 kilometers of coastline (not that I’d underestimate the effectiveness of the crews considering that this year alone they have stopped 184 Arab jihadis headed for Somalia). And Somaliland has a good intelligence service – the foiled terrorist campaign during the parliamentary election last year was only one recent triumph – but it lacks communications and other equipment that would increase its effectiveness.
Somaliland is an eager supporter in its region of America’s counterterrorism efforts, going so far as to offer U.S. forces the use of the Cold War-era American facilities at Berbera on the Gulf of Aden. This offer may be critical in giving us a full range of options, especially since Foreign Minister Mahmud Yusuf of Djibouti – where the nearest U.S. forces, the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, is based – told the London-based al-Sharq al-Aswat newspaper that America will not be allowed to use the base in his country to take military action against the Islamist militants in Mogadishu.
In short, even aside from the moral imperatives of our national principles and commitments which ought to dispose us to look with sympathy on Somaliland’s struggle for recognition of its democratically expressed self-determination, in a global war on terror where we are reduced to often buying “coalitions of the willing,” why wouldn’t the U.S. support a friendly secular democracy that is already voluntarily fighting America’s enemies?
United States policy in the Horn of Africa needs to jettison the fictions, juridical and otherwise, that will bring nothing but disappointment in their wake. Our policy choices, while informed by America’s ideals, should be driven by a realist concern for her interests that measures results by privileging effectiveness and rewarding positive progress. A war on terror is no place for wishful flights of fancy, much less potentially lethal fictions
– J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C. In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.
Dr. Pham is the author of over one hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).
In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies.
© 2006 J. Peter Pham