Despite the Biden administration’s talk of bringing America’s endless wars to a close, the U.S. remains at war in Somalia in a conflict that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
According to a new Costs of War Project report by Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ Ṣóyẹmí, U.S. military involvement, assistance, and training have all contributed to perpetuating the war with al-Shabab. Rather than bringing that country closer to peace and stability, U.S. policy has instead been one of the drivers of the conflict. As Ṣóyẹmí says, “The U.S. is not simply contributing to conflict in Somalia, but has, rather, become integral to the inevitable continuation of conflict in Somalia.”
It’s bad enough that the U.S. has no vital security interests at stake in this conflict, but current U.S. policy is also exacerbating Somalia’s security problems instead of alleviating them. That makes the House’s failure to pass a war powers resolution for Somalia last month that much more disappointing. The U.S. urgently needs to reassess what it is doing in Somalia and in other countries where its programs of military assistance have been linked with the intensification of conflict. At the very least, the Biden administration should end direct U.S. involvement in the war in Somalia.
In the report, “Making Crisis Inevitable: The Effects of U.S. Counterterrorism Training and Spending in Somalia,” Ṣóyẹmí details how U.S. support for the Somali government and the training of its forces serve to keep the conflict going. She explains that backing the government in a top-down, coercive approach runs counter to the decentralized way that Somali politics and conflict resolution work.
While the U.S. may think that it is helping to promote security by assisting the central government, this approach is a terrible fit for the political conditions in the country. Then there is the much greater size of U.S. counterterrorism spending relative to the Somali government’s own revenues, which creates incentives to continue with the same militarized approach that has failed over the last decade and a half. This is why Ṣóyẹmí argues that “the U.S. might be doing more than merely exacerbating Somalia’s insecurity, and might be an active impediment to stability and conflict resolution in Somalia.”
U.S. involvement in the war in Somalia has been relatively modest in terms of troop numbers, but it has been ongoing for more than 15 years. The Obama administration labeled al-Shabab an “associated force” of al-Qaida in 2016, and used this to pretend that the 2001 AUMF applied to military operations against a group that did not exist when the authorization was passed. The war in Somalia is exactly the sort of intervention that ought to have been debated and authorized before it started, and not retroactively added to an authorization already on the books. Congress’s failure to do its job in this case has meant that the U.S. wages a low-level war indefinitely with minimal scrutiny.
Source : Statecraft
