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Thursday March 28, 2024

Kenya’s sorrow: the US connection

The systematic murder of 147 Kenyan university students by members of the Somalia-based Shabab organisation on April 2 is raising an uncomfortable question: was the massacre an unintentional blowback from US anti-terrorism strategy in the region? And were the killers forged by an ill-advised American supported Ethiopian invasion that transformed

By our correspondents
April 25, 2015
The systematic murder of 147 Kenyan university students by members of the Somalia-based Shabab organisation on April 2 is raising an uncomfortable question: was the massacre an unintentional blowback from US anti-terrorism strategy in the region? And were the killers forged by an ill-advised American supported Ethiopian invasion that transformed the radical Islamic organisation from a marginal player into a major force?
As Kenyans were mourning their dead, opposition figures were openly opposing Kenya’s occupation of southern Somalia and bringing into question Washington’s blueprint for fighting terrorism: drones, Special Forces, and regional proxies.
Speaking in the port of Mombasa, former prime minister and opposition leader Raila Odinga called for the withdrawal of Kenyan troops, as did the Speaker of the National Assembly, Justin Muturi. Speaking at the funeral for one of the victims, Senator James Orengo said, “We know very well the consequences of a war of occupation. We must withdraw our troops from Somalia to end this.”
Absent from most of the mainstream American media was an examination of exactly what role the US has played in Somalia over the past decade, and how Washington has helped create the current crisis.
A little history.
When military dictator Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, Somalia fell into the chaos of clan warfare, sparking off a US military intervention in 1992. While billed as a ‘humanitarian intervention’, the Americans aggressively sought to suppress the plague of warlords that had turned the nation’s capital, Mogadishu, into a shattered ruin. But the expedition derailed in 1993 after 18 US soldiers and hundreds of Somalis were killed in the infamous Black Hawk down incident. The US withdrew the following year.
Which doesn’t mean the US went away, or that it didn’t apply a new strategy for Africa, one designed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The genesis of that plan came from James Carafano, a West Point graduate and head of Heritage’s foreign policy section, and Nile Gardiner, director of the think tank’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, who drew up a document entitled ‘US Military Assistance for Africa: A Better Solution.’
The strategy called for the creation of a US military command for Africa, a focus on terrorism, and direct military intervention using air power and naval forces. The authors argue against putting US troops on the ground, instead enlisting those of allies. Those recommendations were adopted by the Bush administration – and later the Obama administration – lock, stock and barrel. African Command (Africom) was created, as along with the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, to train troops in 16 nations that border the vast area embraced by world’s biggest desert.
While targeting ‘terrorism’ is the strategy’s public face, Carafano and Gardiner argue that US “vital interests” are involved on the continent, “With its vast natural and mineral resources,” Africa, say the two scholars, “remains important to the West, as it has been for hundreds of years, and its geostrategic significance is likely to rise in the 21stcentury.”
A major rationale behind the strategy is to checkmate Chinese influence in Africa and short circuit Beijing’s search for raw materials. China gets about one third of its oil from Africa, plus platinum, copper, timber and iron ore.
The new policy made its début in Somalia when the US actively aided Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion to support the unpopular and isolated the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFGS). The invasion overthrew the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which had brought Somalia its first stable government in 15 years.
The ICU was a coalition of Islamic organisations that included a small group calling itself the ‘Shabab’, Arabic for ‘Youth’. While the ICU was Islamic in ideology, it was more moderate than the Shabab. The ICU also had more support than the TFGS, because it had routed the clan warlords who had dominated Somalia since 1991.
However, those warlords – united in an organization incongruously called the “Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter-terrorism” – were strongly supported by the US CIA. Claiming that the ICU was linked to Al-Qaeda, Washington leaned on Ethiopia to invade. When they did, US Special Forces based in Djibouti accompanied them and gave them intelligence and equipment. The US Navy shelled a town in Southern Somalia, killing, according to Oxfam and the United Nations, 70 civilians and wounding more than a 100.
The powerful Ethiopian Army crushed the ICU, but the brutality of the occupation that followed fired up a resistance movement led by the Shabab. Given that Ethiopians and Somalians are traditional enemies, and that the former is largely Christian, the latter overwhelmingly Muslim, one wonders what Washington was thinking when it backed the invasion.
At the time, the Shabab was not affiliated with Al-Qaeda – it did not do so until 2012 – and its concerns were mainly local. The organization was more like the Taliban in Afghanistan, albeit with a more extreme interpretation of Islam. But that distinction was lost on Washington, which pressed the African Union (AU) to send in troops. In 2007, the AU, with UN compliance, established the African Union Mission in Somalia (AUMIS) and deployed 9,000 troops to support the TFGS.
The US also footed the bill for private mercenary organisations, like Bancroft Global Development, to train Ugandan and Burundi troops in counter-insurgency warfare. The fact that Bancroft is a private company shields it from public scrutiny, including by the US Congress.
While the initial AUMIS deployment was not very successful, it finally drove the Shabab out of the nation’s capital, Mogadishu, although that was, in part, a reflection of the Shabab’s loss of support among Somalians, alienated by the group’s brutality. Eventually the organisation was driven out of all Somalia’s major cities. But even with numerous setbacks, a recent attack in the capital that killed 15 people and wounded 20 demonstrates the Shabab still has a bite.
Kenya – another recipient of US aid whose soldiers are trained by US Special Forces – invaded southern Somalia in 2011 and seized the Shabab-controlled port of Kismayo. While publically the reason for the invasion was Shabab kidnappings of Kenyans and tourists, apparently Nairobi has long had its eye on the port of Lamu as part of a development plan for the northeast part of the country.
Again, the Shabab was scattered rather easily, but only then to resort to guerrilla war and attacks on civilian targets in Kenya and Uganda.
The response of the Kenyan government has been to target ethnic Somalians living on the Kenyan side of the border with Somalia, threatening to close down one of the largest refugee camps in the world, and squeezing the country’s Muslims. Those are actions liable to alienate Kenya’s large ethnic Somali population and its minority Muslim communities.
The blowback attacks have soured most Kenyans on the invasion. A poll taken last fall, six months before the Garissa University bloodbath, found that a majority of the country wants its troops out, and two in three Kenyans thought there would be more terrorist attacks.
What seems clear is that the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for using military force in Africa has been a disaster. It has destabilised Somalia by overthrowing the ICU, spreading the war to Uganda and Kenya. It turned Libya into a failed state, which in turn unleashed a flood of arms that have helped fuel civil wars in Mali, Niger and the Central African Republic.
The widespread use of drones may kill some terrorist leaders, along with large numbers of civilians, and, rather than destroying organisations like Al-Qaeda and the Shabab, it ends up atomising them into groups that are smaller and harder to track, but no less capable of committing mass murder. Indeed, for organisations like the Shabab and Al-Qaeda, drones have proved to be the 21st century’s most effective recruiting sergeants.
The solution in Somalia (and Syria and Yemen) is political, not military. In short, talking beats bombing and works better.
Excerpted from: ‘Kenya’s sorrow: the US connection’.
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org