A Rough Road From War to Peace

Bronwyn Bruton and J. Peter Pham
Foreign Affairs
Feb. 02, 2012

Summary:

By some measures, the ad-hoc alliance among Ethiopia, Kenya, and the African Union has come close to defeating the terrorist group al Shabaab. But a military victory could scatter the group's most radical leaders across the Horn of Africa.

For the better part of five years, much of Somalia's long-suffering population has been caught in a deadly stalemate between al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked militant group, and African Union peacekeepers, known as AMISOM. The peacekeepers are tasked with defending the country's weak Transitional Federal Government (TFG), which, despite years of backing from regional powers and the West, remains politically dysfunctional and incapable doing anything resembling governing. Fielding an army of its own remains a distant aspiration.

That is why quelling the insurgency has fallen entirely on AMISOM. Over the last 18 months or so the 12,000 strong force has honed its tactics and made gains, however stilting, against al Shabaab. Insistent that no American boots hit the ground in Somalia, Washington has backed the mission. (That is, of course, no American boots on the ground with the exception of last week, when a Navy Seal team rescued two aid workers in central Somalia, some 500 kilometers north of Mogadishu.) In return for their troop contributions to AMISOM, the United States has given Burundi and Uganda several hundred million dollars in salary, equipment, training, and logistical support. Perhaps more importantly, Washington now calls both countries allies.

But other powers are involved in the battle now, too. In November, around one thousand Ethiopian troops entered central Somalia in an effort to distract al Shabaab from the floundering Kenyan incursion of around 1,500 troops into the far south. Kenya's decision to invade seems to have been a long time in the making, but it was not coordinated with Washington or AMISOM; more, it proved ill-timed, since it coincided with Somalia's rainy season. For the first two months, Kenya's heavy military equipment was, literally, stuck in the mud just inside Somalia's border. As the Kenyan government helplessly watched its bills pile up, al Shabaab's fighters kept just out of rifle range. Since December, when the rains ended and the Ethiopians stepped in, Kenya has fared somewhat better. But Nairobi has yet to articulate a coherent strategy and, worse, it is belatedly asking for Western assistance to cover the cost of the occupation.

By some crude measures, the ad-hoc alliance between Kenya, Ethiopia, and AMISOM has strained al Shabaab, forcing the movement to contend with attacks on three separate fronts. Al Shabaab's decision to withdraw from Mogadishu last August might have been strategic, but its subsequent loss of Beletweyne and other towns along the Kenyan border has raised hopes that, although the group still controls large swathes of territory in southern Somalia, there may nevertheless be an end to the violence in sight.

Washington would cheer al Shabaab's defeat, but, as is often the case in the Horn of Africa, the United States should be careful what it wishes for. Al Shabaab's leadership is already divided among nationalist factions of clan-based militia leaders, who are mainly determined to oust the TFG and put their own clans in power. They count upwards of 7,000 in their ranks and make up the bulk of the group's members. In the wake of a military defeat, the nationalists, who enjoy the support of substantial constituencies on the ground, are likely to cast off the al Shabaab banner, but will retain their importance as clan-based militia leaders and clerics. They will continue to play politics, and, depending on the incentives they're offered, will act as influential spoilers or peacemakers in any emergent political order. Some of these leaders, including Mukhtar Robow and Hassan Dahir Aweys, have been linked to al Qaeda, but the United States would do well to tolerate them, because the Somali public generally perceives them as legitimate.

But there is a smaller group of hardliner al Shabaab radicals who, with their foreign supporters in the Gulf, have a transnational jihadist agenda and would prefer to target U.S. assets in the region. In a nightmare scenario, they might deploy a U.S.-passport holding Somali to attack inside the United States.

Until now, the nationalists and radicals have been held together by mutual benefit -- the radicals have gained a foothold in Somalia's slippery clan system and in return, the nationalists have received funds and technical training from abroad, including from the Middle East and South Asia. The nationalists, who are worried about keeping up the flow of remittances to the Somali public, have mostly prevented the radicals from striking beyond Somalia. A break between the two factions would liberate the radicals from that constraint, while making Somalia a less attractive haven.

The question then becomes whether al Shabaab's radicals would be able to re-implant themselves among the radicalized and disenfranchised youths in Kenya or the many frustrated opposition movements in East Africa -- for example, Uganda's militant Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). Addis Ababa, Kampala, and Nairobi all present attractive targets, but the entire eastern seaboard of Africa, and even Johannesburg, would theoretically be vulnerable to attack. It would be a strange twist of counterterrorist fate: the successful battle against Islamist militants would catalyze al Shabaab's evolution into a regional terrorist organization.

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