The East African Front
More al Qaeda turf.

By Robert Daguillard, a Washington, D.C.-based journalist
December 21, 2001 8:30 a.m.

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.