IT’S looking like the Obama administration may spurn a gift from the Bush team – a chance to lance the boil of Somalia.
“I’m very concerned now,” a Western diplomat based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, told me last week, as Ethiopian troops finished evacuating Somalia – leaving their neighbor to its own devices. The al Qaeda-affiliated local Islamist group, al Shabab, is quickly filling the vacuum.
Over the weekend, Somalia elected a new president – Sheik Sharif Ahmed, a former leader of the Islamic group that ruled the country until ousted by the Ethiopians, who has turned his back on the most extreme among his former Islamist allies.
But the Western-backed parliament that elected him controls nothing in Somalia. It is so powerless, in fact, that it had to conduct Saturday’s session in neighboring Djibouti. And al Shabab, which is quickly taking over large parts of the country, immediately vowed to fight the new president and any of his pro-Western allies.
Somalia, in other words, is back to being a potential terror camp as dangerous as Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Pre-9/11, America deemed Afghanistan to be just another failed state where a lot of humanitarian horrors occur, but not really our problem. We learned different.
President Obama vowed on the campaign trail last year to renew the Afghan fight – in order to face the terrorists where they came from. He’d better be ready to include Somalia in that brief – because it could be where the next Mohammed Atta is training for the next 9/11.
Bile Abdullahi, a Somali-born Minneapolis resident, was arrested on his way to Canada last month; he reportedly plotted to carry out a terror attack on the Washington Mall during Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
And several dozen teens recently disappeared from Minneapolis, presumably to join jihadists in Somalia. The remains of one of them, Shirwa Ahmed, were returned to Minnesota after he blew himself up in a Somalia terror operation.
Then-CIA Director Michael Hayden, pointed last November to Somalia as a significant al Qaeda growth area. That’s why the Bush administration in its final days laid the diplomatic foundation for an international force to act inside Somalia. (The Somalia-based pirates famously operating in nearby waters made action even more urgent.)
The Bushies got the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling on the Secretary General to study if a peacekeeping force could be sent there.
Britain, France and other major European countries are “not keen” on committing serious military assets to Somalia, a European diplomat told me recently – noting that there is no peace to keep, so we must instead concentrate on political progress. Certainly, the Europeans voting for the Bush resolution didn’t envision any Western powers acting inside Somalia.
“I am skeptical too” about such a use of force, said our new UN ambassador, Susan Rice, during her confirmation hearing. Rice – who was Obama’s closest foreign-policy adviser on the campaign trail – instead advocated a “multifaceted approach” for Somalia: provide emergency relief; push for “political reconciliation,” and, yes, take some (unspecified) steps to deal with the “terrorist challenge.”
That will hardly impress the Shabab, the Taliban-like group now taking over the country. The only “political process” they’re interested in is enforcing Islam’s strictest Sharia laws: They stone to death 13-year-old girls for the “crime” of being raped, and cut off the hands of suspected thieves.
In reality, any “national reconciliation” or the building of healthy institutions will only take place after the Shabab have been militarily defeated.
For that to happen, Rice, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CIA Director Leon Panetta and the other former Clintonistas crowding the Obama administration’s higher echelons must recover from an old trauma – the humiliating “Black Hawk Down” experience of the US and international forces in Mogadishu in the early ’90s.
To avert the next terror attack on American soil, we must act in places like South and Central America, Yemen, North Africa and certainly Somalia. That doesn’t mean sending troops everywhere: In many places, we need only help the local authorities to fight better against terrorists; in others, the right answer involves some clandestine “dark” operations.
Other nations may be willing to fight, too. The Ethiopians already intervened once to eject Islamist rebels from power in Somalia. I’m told they’re willing to fight the Shabab, too – if they get enough logistical and political support from us.
The alternative may be fighting there ourselves – or ignoring Somalia, as we did Afghanistan in the ’90s.
But the president surely doesn’t want to repeat that history.
Benny Avni is a UN-based columnist.
beavni@gmail.com
