Matt Yglesias

The Accidental Warlord

Jeffrey Gettleman has a great piece in the NYT about the strange story of Mohammed Aden, who left Somalia for the United States when he was 22, went to college, and was living with his wife and kids in the suburbs of Minneapolis before he went back home to become the leader of a clan group that’s created an island of relative peace and stability around Adado, Somalia.

Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan

Looks like American commandos have killed wanted terrorist Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. This is one of the guys whose presence in Islamic Courts Union-controlled was cited as a reason for U.S. support for the December 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia that plunged the country into chaos leading to the deaths of huge numbers of people. That didn’t work in terms of dislodging our key suspects, but now we’re managing to kill terrorists anyway.

The risk in Somalia, however, is that as a consequence of the invasion and the ensuing insurgency, the Somali Islamist movement is now a lot more radical and al-Qaedaish. One doesn’t want this country to turn into a new recruiting grounds for international jihad at just the moment that al-Qaeda’s global appeal is on the wane.

The Biggest Challenge in the World

For years now, I’ve been cataloguing the wreckage that’s resulted from the disastrous American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia back during Christmas of 2006. At the time, the invasion was generally cheered by conservatives and ignored by the mainstream. Ever since, terrible things have been happening. For example, Antonio Guterres is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees so he knows a lot about bad situations. And what does he think is the very worst situation? Well, it’s Dadaab in Southern Kenya where 280,000 Somalis are currently living:

Laura Heaton at Enough Said observes that “The camp was built to accommodate far fewer inhabitants, but since the beginning of the year, Dadaab has seen an influx of 4,000-5,000 new arrivals each month.” At the moment, UNHCR is trying to expand the camp to accommodate its many inhabitants but is having trouble getting Kenya to agree to offer up more land. All that aside, the sheer quantity of people is staggering. “Camp” doesn’t really fit the bill when you’re really talking about a small city all full of absolutely desperate people.

Failed Meddling in Somalia

Here’s a good fifty minute summary of how pointless the 2006 American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was:

Remember, just because instability in the developing world can pose a problem for American security doesn’t mean that American intervention in unstable parts of the developing world will actually make things better.

Bobs Agree We Should Put Blue Helmets on Merchant Ships

Robert Wright, a hippie globalist one-worlder like me, and Bob Kagan, a neocon warmonger, both agree on an idea for dealing with the pirates problem—put a couple of armed United Nations peacekeepers on merchant ships going through the region. The idea here is that arming merchant ships would solve the problem, but that you can’t arm merchant ships because countries don’t let armed ships dock at their ports. Putting the guns in the hands of the UN solves the problem:

I have my doubts about this. My impression is that the biggest problem with arming merchant ships is that ship owners actually don’t want to see firefights happening in the vicinity of their cargo. If you think about the idea of holding a ship for ransom, the premise is that the amount of money being asked for is less than the value of the cargo.

Given that reality, if you own a cargo ship and some guys in a small craft amble up next to you with a shoulder-launched rocket what you really want is for your crew to surrender. If your crew starts shooting, then they’re putting your ship at risk of getting blown up by a rocket. It’s true that over time, a sufficient number of bloody exchanges would serve as a deterrent to piracy both because pirates would get killed and also because pirate counterattacks that end up sinking ships don’t get any ransom. But on an individual level, it still makes more sense to surrender than to fight so it’s not clear that anyone would want blue helmets on their ship.

A different idea would be to go “Anbar Awakening” on the whole situation. Suppose there were a group of armed Somali possessing maritime skills and a spirit of derring-do. The international community could find leaders of these Somalis and provide funds to assist them in their brave effort to battle the pirates who’ve been plaguing their community. It’s true that to some this would look like paying protection money to extortionists. But if you call the protection money “aid” and call the pirates you’re paying off “former pirates” and call the process by which the pirates you’re paying try to kill their rivals “anti-piracy operations” then I think it looks perfectly legitimate to recruit some former pirates to conduct anti-piracy operations that are financed by international aid.

This is a less morally tidy approach, but it’d almost certainly be cheaper. You could call ‘em the Somalia Coast Guard, reach an agreement with them about fishing rights and so forth, and they’d be national heroes.

Pirates Still Hijacking

Looks like a few French and American special forces operations aren’t going to put a stop to Somali piracy:

The latest trophy for the pirates was the M.V. Irene E.M., a Greek-managed bulk carrier sailing from the Middle East to South Asia, said Noel Choong, who heads the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur. [...] On Monday, Somali pirates also seized two Egyptian fishing boats in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia’s northern coast, according to Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, which said the boats carried 18 to 24 Egyptians total.

My understanding is that the fishing issue needs to be understood separately from the question of hijacking cargo ships. There’s a genuine issue as to whether or not other countries’ fishing boats have been exploiting the anarchy in Somalia to gain access to Somali fisheries. The whole issue of fishing rights off the coast of Africa is way outside my area of knowledge, but as a general matter the fishing issues seem to fall into a “legitimate grievances” box that the international community ought to be seeking to settle in a reasonable way. That’s the counterpart to cracking down on hostage taking and cargo hijacking.

What “Sid Meier’s ‘Pirates!’” Can Teach Us About Piracy

I don’t know how many of you have played the game “Sid Meier’s ‘Pirates!’”—either the old computer game or the newer XBox version—but for a while I was a devotée of the XBox game and I think it illustrates some key points about pirate policy that endure for the modern day. The main one is that anti-pirate military patrols are pretty much a lost cause. The ocean is just too big. A pirate only gets taken down this way because of hubris—you might deliberately try to attack and seize a military ship and wind up biting off more than you can chew. But the risks of actually getting caught are tiny relative to the rewards of successful piracy.

The only countermeasure that really works well is to escort a dedicated merchant vessel with small anti-pirate military craft. This, however, is rarely done for the exact same reason that we’re hesitant to do it today—it’s expensive. Arming the merchant vessels themselves is a geopolitically and legally dicey move in today’s environment. But “Pirates!” illustrates that this is inherently problematic as there are serious tradeoffs between cargo capacity, speed, turning performance, and cargo capacity that give dedicated pirate ships an intrinsic advantage against any kind of economically reasonable hybrid vessel.

So how can the pirates be stopped? Well, fundamentally the viability of your enterprise is “Pirates!” rests on the geopolitical chaos on land. The Caribbean islands are politically fragmented between Spanish, Dutch, French, and English colonies with possessions of different nationalities mixed together and everyone always at war with someone else. Consequently, out by the main range of islands you’re never far from a friendly port where you can duck in to resupply, to sell your wares, to recruit more crew, to fix your ship, whatever. When things can get problematic is if you start spending time in the parts of the mainland that are uniformly under Spanish control. Here, if the Spanish get hostile enough that they won’t let you dock in their cities you can get in real trouble. Not because the Spanish ships are so militarily formidable, but simply because the sheer distance to safe harbor reduces your options. If your pirate crew is actually strong enough to defeat the Spanish garrison on land, you’re fine. But if not, you might be done for.

To make a long story short, to curb the Somali pirate problem you need to fight them on land. This was recognized by everyone back in December but it hasn’t materialized since nobody really wants to try to mount a serious operation to bring Somali territory under control. And far be it from me to question that decision. I don’t want to either. But given that reality, while we can try to mitigate the pirate problem at sea, we’re never going to resolve it and suggestions that the Obama administration should snap its fingers and make this problem go away are absurd. What we need to do is wait until such time as someone or other establishes some kind of coherent control over Somali territory and then deal with piracy issues as part of our relationship with that person / group / organization or whatever it may be.

Unfortunately, the last time it appeared that a coherent de facto government was emerging in Somalia—the Islamic Courts Movement—we helped sponsor an Ethiopian invasion that plunged the country back into chaos. We need to stop doing that! You can read about Somalia in greater detail on the ENOUGH Project’s website, but the baseline point I would make is that we could start helping in Somalia by resolving to not do things that make the situation worse anymore.

Marque and Reprisal

Tim Fernholtz observes that the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which I’m mostly familiar with from its work in the booming field of climate change denialism, has put out an innovative approach to the pirate situation—more pirates:

Washington, D.C., April 9, 2009— News that Somali pirates had seized an American ship and, after being repelled, held her captain hostage drew a response from analysts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: the United States should consider authorizing private parties to attack pirate ships under little used instruments called “letters of marque and reprisal.” [...]

“The world has changed a lot since nations last made significant use of letters of marquee and reprisal. If Congress were to decide to issue them, it would certainly have to revisit the concept,” said CEI Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer. “It’s the type of free-market solution to a real problem that Congress should consider but hasn’t in any serious way.” Lehrer added.

This seems to me to be a complete misunderstanding of how such letters work. You could imagine a situation in which, say, Venezuela decided it was pissed off at Saudi Arabia. Venezuela might start issuing “letters of marque and reprisal”—basically licenses to pirate—to private citizens interests in seizing Saudi oil tankers. If people took Venezuela up on the offer, this would probably reduce the volume of Saudi oil exports, thus simultaneously hurting Saudi Arabia and helping Venezuela by boosting the price of their own exports. Of course the Venezuelans would be opening themselves up to a global military response—war for oil and so forth. The point here, though, is that Saudi ships are full of valuable stuff, namely oil. Nobody in their right mind would want authorization to try to seize control of Somali pirate boats. They’re tiny and worthless. All of Somalia is desperately poor. Nobody wants to rob them.

Bush’s Somalia Blunder

I’m going to quote this whole post from Robert Farley:

Osama Bin Laden has released an audio tape denouncing Somali President Shariff Sheikh Ahmed, and calling for Somalis to resist the new government’s rule. Shariff Sheikh Ahmed is formerly the head of the Islamic Courts Union, which Ethiopia overthrew in 2006 with American assistance. The United States was concerned that the ICU was closely associated with Al Qaeda, and that it might harbor terrorists. Bin Laden’s tape is either an elaborate ruse to make the Bush administration look incomparably stupid, or further evidence that the Bush administration was incomparably stupid.

Note that the consequences of this policy have included a massive humanitarian disaster and the growth of the Somali piracy problem. More Somalia-blogging here.

Gettleman on Somalia

If you have the chance, please do read Jeffrey Gettleman’s article on Somalia in Foreign Policy magazine. It’s not only a great piece in its own right, but it’s a useful corrective to some of the imperial hubris that’s often wafting around in Washington:

In more than a dozen trips to Somalia over the past two and a half years, I’ve come to rewrite my own definition of chaos. I’ve felt the incandescent fury of the Iraqi insurgency raging in Fallujah. I’ve spent freezing-cold, eerily quiet nights in an Afghan cave. But nowhere was I more afraid than in today’s Somalia, where you can get kidnapped or shot in the head faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. From the thick, ambush-perfect swamps around Kismayo in the south to the lethal labyrinth of Mogadishu to the pirate den of Boosaaso on the Gulf of Aden, Somalia is quite simply the most dangerous place in the world.

The whole country has become a breeding ground for warlords, pirates, kidnappers, bomb makers, fanatical Islamist insurgents, freelance gunmen, and idle, angry youth with no education and way too many bullets. There is no Green Zone here, by the way—no fortified place of last resort to run to if, God forbid, you get hurt or in trouble. In Somalia, you’re on your own. The local hospitals barely have enough gauze to treat all the wounds. [...]

It’s crunch time for Somalia, but the world is like me, standing in the doorway, looking in at two decades of unbridled anarchy, unsure what to do. Past interventions have been so cursed that no one wants to get burned again. The United States has been among the worst of the meddlers: U.S. forces fought predacious warlords at the wrong time, backed some of the same predacious warlords at the wrong time, and consistently failed to appreciate the twin pulls of clan and religion. As a result, Somalia has become a graveyard of foreign-policy blunders that have radicalized the population, deepened insecurity, and pushed millions to the brink of starvation.

There’s an enormous tendency in this town, and in establishment circles more generally, to see American involvement in a situation as by definition offering a solution. And certainly the United States has involved itself constructively in many situations around the world over the decades. But it’s not some kind of law of nature that us poking around somewhere is a good idea. And in Somalia, at least, our involvement has been hugely destructive. Not, I think, because we meant badly. But because we’ve been unable to simply accept that the internal politics of Somalia and the regional politics of the Horn of Africa just aren’t something that the American people or the American government are knowledgeable about or competent to deal with. We’ve engaged fitfully, thoughtlessly, and in a manner that usually involves us getting manipulated by the much-better-informed and much-more-committed players on the ground.

The End in Somalia

The disastrous American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia seems to have reached its ultimate conclusion today as the Ethiopian-backed nominal government totally collapses and Islamist insurgents capture Baidoa. Now we’ll have to reach some kind of accommodation with the Islamists, which is what we should have done back in late 2006, but we’re now going to be dealing with a more radicalized and anti-American crew than otherwise would have been there.

At the time of the invasion back around Christmas 2006, right-wing commentators were busy offering unusually stupid opinions. Robert Farley reminds me of a classic Corner post in which Deborah Glick and Cliff May teamed up to explain the “real” (i.e., fake) roots of European skepticism about the operation:

Israelis routinely assume that Europe’s pro-jihadist policy towards the Palestinians is a result of anti-Semitism or anger over Israel’s military victory in 1967. But the EU’s treatment of Ethiopia and the TFG [the secular Transitional Federal Government] indicates that Brussels’ hostility towards the Jewish state is part of a much further-reaching policy. Europe’s pro-jihad position toward the war in Somalia indicates that its support for jihad is over-arching rather than limited to specific battlegrounds.

According to Glick, European governments have adopt a wide-ranging pro-jihad stance “in the hope that their support will deflect jihadist violence away from them.” Also, the people who write for The Corner are idiots.

Good News (By Somalia Standards)

The situation in Somalia continues to be extraordinarily bad, but the resignation of Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed from the presidency of Somalia’s de jure but powerless government counts as good news. His hardline stance has, along with incredibly irresponsible behavior from the US and Ethiopia been a significant contributor to Somalia’s problems. I wouldn’t say that this makes a turnaround likely, but it’s certainly more likely than it was before.

Everything Working as it Should

The blog is mostly to criticize, but for a moment let’s offer some praise. The UN Security Council has voted to authorize a multinational military mission to try to bring the Somalia piracy situation under control. And it seems the mission is going to be led by China. And it seems that rather than freaking out, the US Navy is happy to see the spirit of international cooperation at work. Good job all around! This is international relations and international security at its best.

Now if only we hadn’t screwed Somalia up in the first place….

Terrible to Even Worse in Somalia

Things are getting worse and worse in Somalia:

The pirates off Somalia’s coast are getting bolder, wilier and somehow richer, despite an armada of Western naval ships hot on their trail. Shipments of emergency food aid are barely keeping much of Somalia’s population of nine million from starving. The most fanatical wing of Somalia’s Islamist insurgency is gobbling up territory and imposing its own harsh brand of Islamic law, like whipping dancers and stoning a 13-year-old girl to death.

And now, with the government on the brink and the Islamists about to seize control for the second time, the operative question inside and outside Somalia seems to be: Now what?

“It will be bloody,” predicted Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst at the International Crisis Group, a research institute that tracks conflicts worldwide. “The Ethiopians have decided to let the transitional government sink. The chaos will spread from the south to the north. Warlordism will be back.”

US press coverage of this situation keeps ignoring the US role, but had American policymakers tried to dissuade Ethiopia from invading two years ago rather than encouraging the invasion, we could have saved thousands of lives, avoiding this piracy problem, and had a more manageable Islamist situation. But at the time, most conservatives applauded the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion to be a smashing success and thought maybe we could learn a thing or two about the utility of harsh measures in sticking it to the wogs.

Kristol’s Next War

In addition to being a booster of the two actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bill Kristol and/or his publication has, at one time or another, also called for the United States to go to war with North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Sudan. And now he’s got another war he’s like to start:

And while [Bush is] at it, perhaps he could tell various admirals to stop moaning about how difficult it would be to deal with the pirates off the coast of Somalia (isn’t keeping the shipping lanes open a core mission of the Navy?) and order the Navy to clobber them. If need be, the Marines would no doubt be glad to recapitulate their origins and join in by going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates’ safe havens.

I’m not one to say that we should blindly defer to the preferences of the military brass, but surely they’re due some deference. Is the Navy really “moaning” about how difficult it would be to stop the pirates, or are they perhaps accurately describing difficulties? Where does Kristol get off adopting a condescending tone on this subject? The Marines “would no doubt be glad” to spearhead an amphibious assault on land-based Somali targets? Has he asked anyone about that? I think a lot of Marines feel that the Corps has a lot on its plate in Iraq and Afghanistan. And certainly I’ve never heard someone with legitimate knowledge of the regional situation indicate that a simple “destroy the pirates’ safe havens” operation would work. You’d need to address the fact that the whole country is in a persistent state of anarchy.

One might further note that the whole situation is a big unintended consequence of the Christmas 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. Something that was done with full US support and loudly cheered by The Weekly Standard. But thought he consequence was unintended, it was widely predicted by people who knew what they were talking about. I harp on this because it’s a subject I was prescient on, but I wasn’t prescient due to any incredible leaps of genius — I just listened to the International Crisis Group rather than, you know, The Weekly Standard. But now Kristol wants to go off on yet another half-baked invasion scheme. Or, rather, he wants to posture as favoring such. Because the best wars to monger for are the ones that don’t actually happen.

Today in Piracy

Excellent animated primer on the Somalia pirates issue:

Next, Peter Lehr makes the case for Somali pirates in The Guardian while Robert Farley offers the counter-counter-intuitive argument that piracy is bad. And to repeat yesterday’s point to some extent the pirate issue needs to be dealt with on land in terms of bringing some measure of stability and security to Somalia.

Wonking Out on Somali Pirates

Most of the coverage I’ve seen of the Somali pirates issue has viewed this primarily through the lens of amusement — modern-day pirates! But of course there are real policy issues here. In particular, at the end of the day it’s not easy to fight pirates at sea. The ocean is extremely large, boats move around, and circumstances are generally unfavorable to law enforcement. You need to fight the piracy on land. If you tried to run a pirate ring out of San Diego, you wouldn’t get very far — there are police in southern California. But Somalia has, obviously, been in a state of political chaos for a long time now. And when the country looked like it was heading for a measure of political stability under the Islamic Courts Movement, the US decided it would be smart to back an Ethiopian invasion-and-occupation of the country that ultimate wound up resulting in more chaos than ever. But whatever you think of the past, going forward you would ultimately want to solve this issue on land. In other words, by creating some kind of political stability in Somalia.

If you’d like to learn more about these issues, I’d recommend the International Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa page and also the ENOUGH Project’s Somalia page (which doesn’t seem to be loading at the moment, but should come back). Either that or we can make more jokes about how pirates are funny. Arrrr funny.

Somalia in Peril

Longtime readers will know that I’ve taken some on-again, off-again interest in the situation in Somalia ever since that country was subjected to a little-noticed Christmastime invasion by Ethiopian forces operating with American support. I’ll admit, though, that my interests has largely been driving by a point-scoring desire to pursue an internet feud against those who very self-confidently asserted that I was all wrong to think this operation was going to end in disaster. At this point, though, the situation is sufficiently disastrous that there’s no more need for I told you so’s. And, in fact, it’s all incredibly tragic — things have been bad for so long in Somalia that people are inured to it, but things have actually gotten much worse over the past year and show some signs of getting even worse.

All this by way of introducing Ken Menkhaus’s report on Somalia. It makes for very interesting reading, and offers a really useful summary of both how we got to the current point and also what the current lay of the land looks like politically. He tries, of course, to point the way toward a more constructive policy approach. I’m skeptical that any such thing will be done, but it is worth observing that our latest round of blundering appears to have generated some terrorism blowback already so it’s actually reasonably important that we start to get this stuff right.

Ethiopia Leaves Somalia

Via Eric Martin, Mark Steyn’s thoughts in the immediate aftermath of Ethiopia’s US-backed invasion of Somalia:

One difference between the Ethiopians in Somalia and the Americans in Iraq is that the former aren’t fighting with one hand behind their back just in case some EU ally or humanitarian lobby group or fictitious Associated Press source leaks some “war crime” or other to the media. In fact, the Ethiopians have the advantage of more or less total lack of interest from the Western media. So they’re just getting on with it.

In this he spoke, as Eric documents, for a broad swathe of the American right which uniformly praised the invasion and suggested that its success showed that the US military ought to behave more brutally. Of course, the invasion almost immediately got bogged down in an insurgency battle at which point conservative stopped talking about. The ensuing humanitarian crisis became, of course, much worse for the Somali people than was life under the Islamic Courts Movement. And piracy began to flourish off the Somali coast. Somali Islamists have begun to contemplate an alliance with al-Qaeda. And now the Ethiopians are getting ready to pack up and go home leaving Somalia more radicalized and also more unstable than it was before. This is more or less exactly what skeptics like Eric, Spencer Ackerman, John Judis, etc. predicted at the time when we were greeted with widespread conservative derision by people who decided to stop following the story as soon as the facts became inconvenient.

No One Could Have Predicted…

… that having the United States of America assist an Ethiopan invasion-and-occupation of Somalia in order to depose an Islamist government could further radicalize Somalis and push them into the arms of al-Qaeda. After all, most people welcome foreign invasions of their country.