2. What Is the US Mission in Somalia?
At his confirmation hearing in August 2018, Washington’s current ambassador to Somalia, former acting assistant secretary of state for African affairs Donald Yamamoto, outlined four goals for US policy in Somalia:11
- Support for the building of democratic institutions and holding politicians accountable;
- Building effective Somali security forces;
- Implementation of stabilization and economic recovery programmes; and
- Delivering humanitarian assistance across the whole of Somalia.
These goals were broadly consistent with the Trump administration’s Africa strategy, publicly released in December 2018, which emphasized countering threats posed by ‘radical Islamic terrorism’, advancing US commercial interests on the continent, and using aid efficiently and effectively.12 The administration’s pivot away from counterterrorism towards ‘strategic competition’ between states as the focus of its 2018 national defence strategy also included a ‘blank slate review’ of all US combatant commands, including AFRICOM. The results of this shift will no doubt shape future US policy on Somalia.
In practice, successive US administrations have not given equal weight to these goals. The bulk of resources and the focus of Washington’s intermittent diplomatic efforts in Somalia have focused overwhelmingly on counterterrorism efforts against Al-Qaeda in East Africa and, since 2006, al-Shabaab. This trend dates back to the late 1990s, especially following the near-simultaneous truck bombings of US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in August 1998, which killed over 200 people. US officials suspected that Al-Qaeda militants involved in the attacks had operated out of Somalia, and that they continued to receive assistance from some locals. By the mid-2000s, however, US covert efforts in Somalia were focused on using the CIA to fund local warlords to help assassinate or otherwise remove Al-Qaeda figures from Somalia and curtail their operations there.13 This plan imploded in mid-2006, when local Somali business leaders joined forces with a broad-based Islamic Courts Union to defeat those warlords and other gangsters who were in effect controlling Mogadishu.14
Just six months later, however, the US supported a military intervention, led by soldiers from neighbouring Ethiopia and Somalia’s so-called Transitional Federal Government (TFG), to topple the Islamic Courts Union.15 The Islamic Courts were quickly driven from Mogadishu, but thousands of Ethiopian soldiers occupied the city in order to protect the TFG, which was a government in name only and in practice confined to operating in only a few blocks of the capital city. It was this Ethiopian-led intervention that turned al-Shabaab from a tiny radical faction into a large and well-funded insurgency.16 In recent years, too, a small faction of the Islamic State has emerged in Somalia, and has also been the target of a handful of US strikes.17
Today, the US mission in Somalia involves both political and military tracks. On the political track, the recent focus has been on helping build an effective set of Somali state institutions, including security forces – primarily the SNA and federal and regional police forces.18 The US has endorsed a federal model of government for Somalia, including a new constitution that remains in provisional, draft form after more than seven years, due in large part to the lack of political settlement between Somalia’s federal and regional authorities. Since the early 2000s, US diplomatic efforts have oscillated between engaging federal and regional authorities. By early 2020, the official US position was that ‘reconciliation between the Federal Government and Federal Member States is [a] vital step towards reestablishing governance, security, and prosperity for all Somalis’.19
The US has endorsed a federal model of government for Somalia, including a new constitution that remains in provisional, draft form after more than seven years, due in large part to the lack of political settlement between Somalia’s federal and regional authorities.
After the collapse of Somalia’s central government in 1991, it was not until 2000 that various international actors supported the establishment first of a Transitional National Government for Somalia in Djibouti, and then of the TFG in Kenya in 2004. While the Djibouti process saw considerable participation from members of Somali civil society, the TFG that emerged in 2004 was led by Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who had been president of Puntland, and forged largely from warlords, few of whom had any legitimacy in south-central Somalia. The TFG first set foot in Somalia in 2005, and was brought to Mogadishu in late 2006 by thousands of Ethiopian soldiers.20
This ‘transition’ lasted for a further six years, until a new federal government was established in September 2012; the new administration was formally recognized by the US in January 2013. Meanwhile, because of frustrations with the TFG over corruption and inefficiency, and the transitional authorities’ limited reach across the country, US diplomats also engaged intermittently with Somalia’s regional administrations. This included engagement with Puntland and Somaliland under the then assistant secretary of state for African affairs Johnnie Carson’s ‘dual track’ approach between 2010 and 2012.21 Since 2013, US policy has also engaged with the newly established FMS across south-central Somalia (Jubaland, Southwest, Galmudug, and Hirshabelle). The FMS were intended to form the building blocks of a united Somalia, under a federal system of governance that enables greater power sharing, political reconciliation, and security force integration. In practice, however, these entities were largely clan-dominated, with regional leaders focused on protecting their own authority and territorial control, limiting the FGS’s ability to project its power beyond Mogadishu. Hence, the FGS has tried to ensure its preferred candidates won out in subsequent subnational electoral processes, as occurred recently in both Galmudug and Southwest states.
On the military track, Washington’s principal goal since 2007 – when the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) deployed to the country – has been to degrade and contain al-Shabaab, including by targeting certain key leaders. Successive US administrations have considered al-Shabaab to be an ‘associated force’ of Al-Qaeda, for the purposes of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. To that end, Washington has provided considerable security force assistance to the countries that contribute to AMISOM, both back home in terms of training and equipment, and in Somalia where their personnel also receive field mentoring.22 More recently, as discussed below, the US has also provided security assistance to Somali forces. These assistance programmes are considered necessary to establish greater stability in Somalia and to facilitate AMISOM’s drawdown and eventual exit.
11 C-SPAN (2018), ‘Ambassador Confirmations’, 23 August 2018, https://www.c-span.org/video/?450381-1/senate-foreign-relations-committee-considers-ambassador-nominations.
12 See The White House (2018), ‘Remarks by National Security Advisor John R. Bolton on The Trump Administration’s New Africa Strategy’, Speech to the Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC, 13 December 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-national-security-advisor-ambassador-john-r-bolton-trump-administrations-new-africa-strategy/.
13 Naylor, S. (2015), Relentless Strike, New York: St. Martin’s Press, Chapter 23.
14 See Ahmad, A. (2015), ‘The Security Bazaar: Business Interests and Islamist Power in Civil War Somalia’, International Security, 39(3): pp. 89–117, doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00187.
15 The Ethiopian intervention had initially taken US special forces by surprise, and it subsequently took three to four months for US forces to link up with Ethiopian operations in Somalia. Naylor (2015), Relentless Strike, p. 335.
16 For the relevant background, see Hansen (2013), Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
17 Warner, J. and Hulme, C. (2018), ‘The Islamic State in Africa’, CTC Sentinel, 11(7): pp. 21–28, https://ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CTC-SENTINEL-082018-final.pdf.
18 Somalia also has an air force, coastguard and navy, but these have received much less attention and international assistance than have the army and police.
19 U.S. Embassy in Somalia (2020), ‘United States Restarts Limited Direct Assistance to the Somali National Army’, press release, 12 February 2020, https://so.usembassy.gov/united-states-restarts-limited-direct-assistance-to-the-somali-national-army/.
20 Menkhaus, K. (2007), ‘The Crisis in Somalia: Tragedy in five acts’, African Affairs, 106(424): pp. 357–390, doi:10.1093/afraf/adm040.
21 Somaliland declared its independence from Somalia in 1991.
22 For an analysis of the support provided to AMISOM’s troop-contributing countries and why they joined the mission, see Williams, P. D. (2018), ‘Joining AMISOM: why six African states contributed troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 12(1): pp. 172–192, doi:10.1080/17531055.2018.1418159.