As
President Bush prepares to leave office, the pundits will start to produce
their balance sheets. It is hard to know what they will list under
“achievements”, but easy to predict their “disasters”: Iraq, Afghanistan,
economic meltdown, soaring debt and America's loss of global stature.
One other debacle should feature
prominently in that second column, but probably won't because it has occurred
in a faraway country that most Westerners know only through the film Black Hawk
Down - or from recent reports of rampant piracy including the seizure early on
Sunday of a Saudi tanker, carrying more than two million barrels of oil, which
had an immediate effect on crude prices.
I am referring to the Bush
Administration's intervention in Somalia in the name of the War on Terror. It
has helped to destroy that wretched country's best chance of peace in a
generation, left more than a million Somalis dead, homeless or starving, and
achieved the precise opposite of its original goal. Far from stamping out an
Islamic militancy that scarcely existed, the intervention has turned Somalia into
a breeding ground for Islamic extremists and given al-Qaeda a valuable foothold
in the Horn of Africa.
Rewind to the early summer of
2006. For 15 years, since the fall of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, feuding
warlords had made Somalia a byword for anarchy and terrorism - the archetypal
failed state. A tenth of its population had been killed. A million had fled
abroad. At that point the warlords were finally routed, despite covert CIA
backing, by a remarkable public uprising in support of the so-called Islamic
Courts movement that promised to end the lawlessness.
Somalia
had always practised a mild form of Islam, but the Courts received a bad press
in the West, being widely portrayed as a new Taleban determined to impose the
most draconian forms of Sharia on a terrified populace. That was certainly what
I expected when I visited Mogadishu in early December 2006. But what I actually
found was a people still celebrating the return of peace and security.
Gone were the checkpoints where
the warlords' gunmen extorted and killed. Gone were their “technicals” - the
Jeeps with heavy machineguns on the back with which they terrorised the
citzenry. For the first time that most Somalis could remember, they were
walking around their shattered capital in safety, even at night. Businesses
were reopening. Exiles were returning. Mountains of rubbish were being carted
away.
“It's like paradise compared to
even one year ago,” according to Mohammed Ahmed, a doctor who had returned from
working at the West Middlesex Hospital.
The Courts had certainly imposed
what would be seen in the West as some fairly repressive moral codes. They
cracked down on the narcotic qat that rendered half the menfolk senseless,
banned sexually explicit films, encouraged women to cover their heads and
discouraged Western music and dancing. There had been two public executions.
But that was a price most Somalis were happy to pay, and while the Courts'
disparate factions undoubtedly included extremists with dangerous connections
and intentions, they also included moderates with whom the West could have done
business.
European nations favoured
engagement. Washington did not. It accused the Courts of harbouring the
al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
in 1998. The Courts hardly helped their cause by claiming territory in Kenya
and Ethiopia.
Weeks after my visit the US
supported - morally, materially and with intelligence - an invasion by
predominantly Christian Ethiopia, Somalia's oldest bitter enemy. That replaced
what was, for all its faults, Somalia's most effective government in memory
with a deeply unpopular one led by former warlords, which had been cobbled
together by the international community in Nairobi two years previously.
“The Americans see an extremist
under every Muslim stone,” one European official complained bitterly, and the
consequences were entirely predictable. An insurgency that began early in 2007
has steadily gathered strength, while the reviled Government in Mogadishu has
come to depend utterly for its survival on thousands of Ethiopian troops that
were meant to withdraw within weeks.
As the fighting has worsened
10,000 Somali civilians are thought to have been killed, more than a million
have fled their homes, and more than three million - 40 per cent of the
population - now urgently need humanitarian assistance. Although the UN World
Food Programme is still getting some aid into the country the situation is deteriorating
and scores of humanitarian workers have been killed or abducted. Exploiting the
lawlessness, pirates have turned the waters off Somalia into some of the most
dangerous in the world.
In Kenya last weekend Abdullahi
Yusuf, Somalia's President, finally admitted that insurgents now control most
of the country and have advanced to the very edge of Mogadishu. His Government,
he said, was close to collapse.
There are several insurgent
forces, but one of the most powerful is the Shabab - a group of virulently
anti-Western jihadists that has now eclipsed the Islamic Courts movement of
which it was once part.
Somalia's nightmare may be only
just starting. President Yusuf predicts wholesale slaughter if the Shabab seize
Mogadishu. Diplomats fear that the Shabab will wage all-out war with other
insurgent forces, including those of the Islamic Courts, for control of the
country once Ethiopian troops - the common enemy - are withdrawn.
And unlike the Courts, the Shabab
has no truck with moderation: in the port city of Kismayo last month a young
girl who complained that she had been raped was stoned to death for adultery,
while in Balad two dozen Somalis were flogged for performing a traditional
dance.
Whatever happens, Somalia will be
another horrendous legacy for Barack Obama, but somewhere on the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border one man will be celebrating. Shabab openly supports
al-Qaeda. It has adopted suicide bombings and other tactics. “Al-Qaeda is the
mother of the holy war in Somalia... We are negotiating how we can unite into
one,” Muktar Robow, a leading Shabab commander, recently told the Los Angeles
Times. “We will take our orders from Sheikh Osama bin Laden because we are his
students.”
All in all, hardly a resounding
triumph for the War on Terror.
Source:Timesonline