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 as
Rudolf Scharping, Germany's defense minister, onto something when
he announced earlier this year that the United States has decided
to make Somalia its next target in the war on terrorism? On Wednesday,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flatly denied he or any other
U.S. official had ever made such an announcement to the NATO allies,
leaving Scharping to backtrack from his statements and face (again)
calls for his resignation.
The German
minister has acquired a reputation as something of a bungler of
late, having endured a political storm earlier this year over his
alleged use of government planes to visit a mistress at a Mediterranean
sea resort. However, whether he was off target on Somalia remains
an open question. The Pentagon has only denied it had announced
an upcoming Somalia campaign. Speaking to the media Thursday, Pentagon
spokeswoman Victoria Clarke insisted that a final decision on whether
a military intervention will actually take place is up to President
Bush. And East African governments and local warlords are already
hedging their bets and trying to make the best of a possible U.S.
intervention.
U.S. officials
have been gathering information on suspected al Qaeda training camps
in Western Somalia, near the Kenyan border. However, the Ethiopian
government and Somali warlord Hussein Mohammed Aideed are apparently
hoping that American troops looking for terrorists in East Africa
will also help them settle their old accounts. That, in fact, may
be the price the United States has to pay if it wants to root out
al Qaeda's Somali operations.
On Monday,
Ethiopia accused its Eritrean neighbor of mobilizing troops in a
buffer zone set up after a two-year border war between the two countries
ended last December — a charge immediately denied by Eritrea.
In a bid to gain American attention, Ethiopia also claimed that
Eritrea is helping al Ittihad al Islamiya, a radical Somali Islamic
group believed to have ties to Osama bin Laden. Speaking to reporters
in Nairobi, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin said Eritrea
has sent nine military officers to advise and train terrorist groups
active along the Ethiopian-Somali border, a claim Eritrea has also
denied.
Minister Seyoum
insisted Ethiopia has no ulterior motive in expressing support for
the U.S. led antiterrorist coalition. Yet, he also knows that al
Ittihad is one of 39 groups the United States declared terrorist
organizations on December 6 and that any government connected with
them will look suspicious in Washington's eyes.
According to
Washington-based Somalia expert Jeffrey Morrison, al Ittihad, created
in the early 1980s, appealed at first to young, university-educated
men disgusted with the dictatorship of President Siad Barre. Over
time, it became an armed militia and, when the 1991 collapse of
the Barre regime left Somalia with no central government, al Ittihad
was able to expand its influence across the country. Top U.S. officials
are quite convinced that al Ittihad has ties to al Qaeda and to
members of Somalia's fledgling Transitional National Government.
Although it enjoys international recognition, the 15-month-old TNG
only controls parts of the capital, Mogadishu, and clashes there
between government forces and Somalia's warlords are common. Reconciliation
talks are scheduled to open Thursday in Nairobi. However, warlords
believe the U.N.-recognized president, Abdulkassim Salat Hassan,
has no more legitimacy than the next militia leader. In fact, a
leading warlord, 38-year-old Hussein Mohammed Aideed, has called
on the United States to take out al Ittihad and to clamp down on
the transitional government.
The irony here
is that Hussein Mohammed Aideed is the son of the late Mohammed
Farrah Aideed, the very warlord whose forces killed 18 U.S. servicemen
trying to apprehend him in 1993. Americans still remember the crowds
of Aideed supporters dragging dead U.S. soldiers through the streets
of Mogadishu. So, the United States Armed Forces may soon return
to the scene of one of their greatest humiliations ever. If they
do, the younger Aideed, aware of the contingencies of Somali politics,
will be on hand to extend them a warm welcome.
The question
is: Do we really have any choice? Well, did we have any choice when
the Northern Alliance, which brutalized the population of Kabul
for years before losing power to the Taliban, signed on to the antiterrorist
coalition? Was there an alternative to effectively leaving our now-ally
Russia a free hand in Chechnya, especially as the Bush administration
was preparing to raise eyebrows in Moscow by abandoning the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty?
Al Ittihad
does not "control" Somalia in the way the Taliban once
held sway over most of Afghanistan. It has suffered crushing defeats
at the hands of the Ethiopian army in 1996 and experts such as Jeffrey
Morrison believe its military strength has peaked. However, al Ittihad
has been able to blend into Somali society and to maintain its contacts
with the TNG. It is a factor and will continue its stated quest
to establish a radical Islamic state in Somalia.
The next question
is: What happens if, and when, the United States gets rid of al
Ittihad? Will the country at last get a strong central government?
Nothing could be less certain, for settling the Somali question
will mean making concessions, but of a kind not altogether unfamiliar
to U.S. policymakers. The West had to agree to substantial influence
in the new Afghan government for the Northern Alliance. In the Balkans,
the birth of the postwar Bosnian federation initiated a NATO-European
Union policy that effectively created quasi-mini-states in former
war zones without changing national borders.
Decentralization
and the recognition of fiefdoms has been the name of the game since
the end of the Cold War. In Somalia, a comparable arrangement would
mean the warlords will retain a substantial amount of influence,
especially if they help us reach our immediate objective: Chasing
al Qaeda out of East Africa.
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