Seeding al-Shabab in Somalia

Looking back on the past few years of U.S.-Somali policy, there are really two big questions. The first is a normative one: Should the U.S. should have backed the Ethiopian invasion? And the second -- a more hard-nosed, realist question -- is whether the U.S. (and other nations) should provide more support for the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) formed after the invasion.

On the first question, let's stipulate that the ICU was not perfect. It banned music, movies, and other aspects of modern culture (it even prevented people from watching the World Cup). It instituted shari'a law, and often executed people who violated that law. Members of ICU were also frequently linked to al-Qaeda, though the group's leadership denies those connections.

On the other hand, the group was initially popular with the Somali people, who saw the ICU as a source of stability in a war-torn country. It's possible that the ICU might have overstayed its welcome by repressing Somali culture, a pattern that often plays out when Islamist movements take control of governments (see: Hamas, Hizballah, the Taliban).

But popular pressure also might have driven the ICU to moderate. The "U" in ICU, remember, stands for "union." The group included hard-line elements -- but also moderate Islamists, the kinds of people who have a legitimate place in Somali government. The current Somali president, in fact, Sharif Ahmed, is a former ICU commander.

That scenario never played out, of course, because of the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion. The ICU crumbled; the hard-line elements peeled off to join al-Shabab. The group was actually founded in 2004 -- but it didn't exist as a distinct force until the Ethiopian invasion.

Ethiopia's invasion was deeply unpopular and unwelcome in Somalia, in no small part because of the brutality of the invading forces. This is an excerpt from a 2007 Human Rights Watch report on war crimes committed by Ethiopian troops:

When the insurgency launched rocket or mortar attacks, the Ethiopians responded with barrages of rockets, artillery, and mortar shelling of areas of Mogadishu perceived to be the areas of origin of the attack or strongholds of the insurgency.

[...] The Ethiopian rockets were inherently unable to target specific military objectives... there is strong evidence that the indiscriminate bombardment of populated neighborhoods by Ethiopian forces was intentional. Commanders who knowingly or recklessly order indiscriminate attacks are responsible for war crimes...

One man with a military background told Human Rights Watch, "The Ethiopians would shell on a line-start with one area and move to the next, and the next day they started all over again, the same way."[152] Another man observed, "The shells were coming in a sustained format: each shell fell 40 meters from the other. In some areas, you would find 10 houses next to each other destroyed."

By supporting the invasion, the U.S. associated itself with that brutality, and created deep anti-American resentment in Somalia. Eliza Griswold wrote an excellent dispatch about the country in the December 2008 issue of The Atlantic. Here's how Ken Menkhaus, a professor of political science at Davidson College, described the anti-U.S. sentiment:

"In order to pursue a handful of people, we've laid waste to an entire country. In my 25 years of experience working in the country, I've never seen anything like this level of fierce anti-Americanism. Rightly or wrongly, the Somalis hold the U.S. responsible for the occupation: a sub-contracting out of the War on Terror." Somalis are waiting to see if a new U.S. administration will take a new--more even-handed--approach.

To summarize: The U.S. had two choices in Somalia. One was to leave the country in the hands of the ICU, a diverse group of Islamists that was considered by many Somalis to be a legitimate government. The other was to depose the ICU through a brutal Ethiopian invasion, install a feckless transitional government, and create a powerful hard-line Islamist insurgency (with overt links to al-Qaeda) which feeds off the resentment and anti-Americanism of the Somali public.

Doesn't seem like much of a choice, does it?

Helping the Somali government

The second question -- should the world provide more support for the TFG? -- is a little murkier. It's clear that the international community could do more: An international peacekeeping force, for example, might help to expand the government's control -- if not in Mogadishu, then at least in other Somali provinces. The TFG currently controls, at most, a handful of city blocks in Mogadishu.

As Joshua Foust noted in a CJR piece earlier this year, the U.S. and U.N. should also focus on addressing local concerns -- curbing illegal fishing in Somali waters, for instance. That would help to ameliorate Somalia's poverty and desperation. U.S. policy towards Somalia has been absurdly one-sided, focusing on terrorism at the expense of the Somali people. We've seen time and time again that such one-sided policies actually make countries breeding grounds for terrorism.

But the extent to which the U.S. can help the TFG is limited. The TFG is already widely viewed as illegitimate; it was imposed from the outside after the Ethiopian invasion, and it survives because of U.N. aid and African Union peacekeepers. (Just yesterday, in fact, Somali president Sharif Ahmed asked the U.N. for more help.) Close ties to the U.S. would only deepen the perception of illegitimacy.