Lessons in Somalia

Financial Times is reporting this morning that the European Commision and the Arab League are criticizing the US for using gunships against Islamists in Somalia;

On Tuesday the Pentagon confirmed that an AC130 aircraft was used to target “the principal al-Qaeda leadership in the region”. The attack marked the first overt US military intervention in the Horn of Africa nation since its doomed invasion in the 1990s.

The strike was criticised by the European Commission, as well as the Arab League which claimed it had killed “many innocent victims” and demanded that Washington refrain from further attacks. There were no accurate casualty figures.

And even though the FT.com story says that we missed our targets in Somalia, Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, in their Inside the Ring column today are reporting;

Defenses sources said Aden Hashi Ayro, who led the Hizbul Shabaab, a violent army of young Islamists within the Somalian Islamic Courts Union, “is thought to have been wounded.” The Islamic Courts Union captured the capital last year, but a combined Ethiopian-Somalian government force routed the Islamists last month and regained Mogadishu.
    The sources said the United States obtained bloody clothes at the scene where five to 10 al Qaeda-linked suspects were killed.
    The sources declined to say how the clothing was obtained, but one source said U.S. commandos were operating in Somalia.
    Ayro is no small fish. He was trained in one of Osama bin Laden’s terror camps in Afghanistan before the 2001 U.S.-led invasion to topple the hard-line Taliban regime. He operated with al Qaeda members in Somalia and was thought to have associated with the three main targets of Monday’s attack: Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and Abu Taha al-Sudani. 

And the frontpage of the Washington Post announces there are now a small number of US troops in Somalia.

A report in USA Today reports (by way of Captain’s Quarters) that Somalian warlords have decided to join the transitional government there;

The warlords and the government have agreed to collaborate for the restoration of peace in Somalia,” said government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari.

This proves two things I’ve been saying for years; the only thing people in that region understand is overwhelming force and it’s better for neighbors to handle miscreants in their particular regions than for the US to act like a global policeman.

That piddling US mission to Somalia in the 90s was meant to be a meals-on-wheels mission, not an armed force to rebuild a failing society. Our forces operated out of tiny fortresses while the enemy ranged the country-side (like our wild west days). The Clinton Administration thought they could frighten Aidid into succumbing to our desires by conducting pin-prick operations which scared no one and tempting him with carrots.

Ethiopia applied overwhelming force and drove the Islamists out of the country. It’s the same type of neighborhood policing that should have been taking place in the Middle East and with North Korea for the last few decades and we could have avoided the new arms race among those miscreants in Iran and North Korea.

But because Old Europe and the Old Arabs can’t see past the nose on their collective face, they’ll be left behind and they’ll grow more irrelevant on the world stage.

Category: Terror War