The ugly truth is that Somalia’s three-decade-long nightmare will persist until the country’s own elites have the political will or interest to address it.
The ugly truth is that Somalia’s three-decade-long nightmare will persist until the country's own elites have the political will or interest to address it.
P resident Joe Biden’s May 16 decision to redeploy hundreds of U.S. special-operations forces into Somalia should not have come as a surprise. Despite months of inter-agency deliberation, it was abundantly clear that the Biden administration thought former president Donald Trump’s December 2020 order to withdraw from the Horn of Africa nation was a precipitous move based more on ticking off a campaign promise than on what best served the national interests of the U.S. Those views were even more hardened in the Pentagon; testifying to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, U.S. AFRICOM commander General Stephen Townsend faulted the lack of a U.S. ground presence in Somalia on a more resilient al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s most lethal affiliate in Africa.
What General Townsend neglects to mention, however, is that Washington has been able to successfully manage the threat al-Shabaab poses to the U.S. without having to station U.S. personnel on the ground. This is borne out by the fact that there hasn’t been a single al-Shabaab attack perpetrated against U.S. interests in the year and a half since the Trump administration pulled U.S. forces from Somalia. Part of this is because the U.S. counterterrorism community has developed into a highly proficient terrorist-killing machine, where targets can be neutralized without having to place U.S. personnel close to the front line. But another reason is that al-Shabaab is more interested in local objectives than planning a 9/11-style attack against the U.S. The group’s leadership is aware of the power and breadth of the U.S. intelligence and military apparatus, which has proven time and again why a direct assault against the U.S. is a bad bet for terrorists. Look no further than al-Qaeda, whose founder, Osama bin Laden, practically put targets on the backs of his followers the moment he green-lit the so-called “planes operation.” For al-Shabaab to follow the same path and risk extreme retaliation from the U.S. military would undermine the organization’s dream of establishing control over Somalia.
Nobody can dispute al-Shabaab’s menace and brutality. The terrorist group has no problem with slaying innocent civilians if doing so instills fear within the Somali population and puts its Somali government opponents on the defensive. The group was responsible for the deaths of over 1,300 people in 2020 alone. Shabaab fighters are responsible for the deadliest suicide truck bombing in history, an October 2017 attack that killed more than 500 people when it targeted a busy street in the heart of Mogadishu. Americans have also been targeted in the past, as in the January 2020 operation against the Manda Bay airfield in Kenya, which killed three Pentagon employees.
Yet both of these heinous attacks happened while U.S. troops were still stationed in Somalia, advising elite Somali counterterrorism forces and joining them on raids against al-Shabaab targets in the countryside. The risk to Americans, it seems, actually goes up when U.S. troops are inside Somalia. If the upcoming U.S. deployment is meant to mitigate the risk, U.S. officials have yet to explain in convincing terms how putting Americans at greater exposure will do the job.
Upon announcing the change in policy, the Pentagon has claimed that U.S. special-operations forces in Somalia will not be engaging in combat operations. As Pentagon spokesman John Kirby explained it, these forces “will continue to be used in training, advising and equipping partner forces to give them the tools that they need to disrupt, degrade and monitor al-Shabaab.”
The Pentagon’s assurances notwithstanding, the history of U.S. military involvement in Africa suggests combat will be a part of the picture. U.S. missions in Somalia, Niger, and Mali are technically not combat operations either, but in all three countries, U.S. troops have either found themselves in firefights or been ambushed during advising operations. In some of these cases, Americans have lost their lives.
If al-Shabaab fighters are consolidating their authority in the Somali countryside and challenging the government in Mogadishu, it’s because Somalia itself is in a constant state of turmoil. Divided across clan and regional lines, the internationally recognized government remains detached from the population it’s supposed to serve. The incessant corruption embedded in the Somali political system (Transparency International ranks the country 178 out of 180 on its Corruption Perceptions Index) provides reliable propaganda fodder for al-Shabaab’s recruitment drives. Somalia is just getting out of yet another governance crisis, in which the recently ousted president sought to extend his term, prompting competing factions within the Somali security forces to skirmish with each other. Some Somalis are so demoralized by their own politicians and the lack of an effective justice system that they travel to al-Shabaab-controlled territory to settle their disputes.
Somalia has a deep-rooted, decades-long governance and legitimacy problem. Over time, as opportunistic anti-government groups exploited the weaknesses of the Somali state to their own advantage, this governance problem morphed into a security issue. The result is a nation where territory is carved out, a sense of common purpose is lost, and regional institutions like the African Union are forced to staff a years-long peacekeeping mission where peace is in short supply. The ugly truth is that Somalia’s three-decade-long nightmare will persist until the country’s own elites have the political will or interest to address it.
U.S. officials, of course, argue that the redeployment to Somalia is focused on narrow goals: disrupt high-level al-Shabaab planning and target the terrorist group’s senior operatives. But Washington made precisely the same argument before the U.S. military began operations against al-Qaeda in October 2001, and the U.S. ended up staying for 20 years amid a fog of increasingly expansive objectives. Let’s not tempt a repeat, however speculative it may seem.