This paper summarizes the US mission in Somalia, analyses how it is being implemented, and assesses whether US policy in Somalia is working. It also outlines three scenarios for future US engagement.
1. Introduction
As US President, Donald Trump has banned almost all travel to the US by citizens of Somalia, and relaxed military requirements for targeting people suspected of ties to al-Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group that emerged in 2005 and operates across the Horn of Africa.1 His presidential proclamation of September 2017 stated:
A persistent terrorist threat … emanates from Somalia’s territory. The United States Government has identified Somalia as a terrorist safe haven. Somalia stands apart from other countries in the degree to which its government lacks command and control of its territory, which greatly limits the effectiveness of its national capabilities in a variety of respects. Terrorists use under-governed areas in northern, central, and southern Somalia as safe havens from which to plan, facilitate, and conduct their operations. Somalia also remains a destination for individuals attempting to join terrorist groups that threaten the national security of the United States.2
In line with this assessment, the Trump administration has significantly increased the US’s military activity in Somalia, primarily in the form of airstrikes. This has, in turn, increased the level of US political and media attention on the country’s engagement in Somalia.
In April 2019, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren asked the incoming commander of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), General Stephen Townsend, whether the US was at war with Somalia. Townsend’s response was: ‘No Senator, we are not at war with Somalia but we are carrying out our operations against violent extremist organizations in Somalia.’3
In January 2020 Somalia briefly made US media headlines when three US security personnel (one service member and two Department of Defense contractors) were killed in an attack by al-Shabaab on the Manda Bay naval base in Kenya. This was the latest in a long-running spate of al-Shabaab attacks, including, in February 2016, a laptop bomb on a flight departing Mogadishu; the massive truck bomb in central Mogadishu in October 2017; and attacks on Nairobi’s DusitD2 hotel in January 2019, and on the US base at Baledogle in September of that year. In a statement to the US Senate Armed Services Committee shortly after the Manda Bay attack, General Townsend described al-Shabaab as ‘the largest and most kinetically active al-Qa’ida network in the world’, and as being the ‘most dangerous to US interests today’.4
Apart from the number of airstrikes, US policy on Somalia has been broadly consistent in its strategic aims across several administrations. Since the early 2000s, Washington has sought to help stabilize Somalia by working with a variety of local and international partners, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, the African Union (AU), the UN, the European Union (EU) and various Somali forces.5 The plan has been to achieve US national objectives by building an effective set of Somali state institutions, including local security forces, and using US military power to help contain and degrade al-Shabaab. However, this strategic goal has been frustrated by Washington’s understandable reluctance to pour large amounts of resources into Somalia’s fragmented and notoriously corrupt political system.6
Since 2007, therefore, the US has supported AU personnel fighting alongside the federal Somali authorities against al-Shabaab, which Washington designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization in March 2008. Despite some limited progress in building a Somali National Army (SNA) and drafting a new national security architecture in 2017, the war against al-Shabaab is effectively at a stalemate. There has been very little change in terms of the territory controlled by the main conflict parties across south-central Somalia over the past few years, while in-fighting between the federal government and regional authorities persists. Furthermore, in AFRICOM’s assessment for the final quarter of 2019, there had been no significant progress towards the goal of creating a ‘security cocoon’ around Mogadishu.7 In sum, given the current strategy and levels of resource investment, there are no signs that either side can achieve a decisive victory.
The stalemate leaves the US without a clear strategy for ending its intensified military engagement in Somalia. It also underscores questions about why the US should be militarily engaged in Somalia at all. The US counterterrorism effort in Somalia began in the 1990s with the search for prominent figures associated with Al-Qaeda and those responsible for attacking the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. From 2006 there was the added fear that al-Shabaab would become the de facto government in south-central Somalia, enabling the group to spread instability across the wider Horn of Africa region, as well as potentially threatening shipping lanes off the Somali coast.
Given the real but limited nature of US national security interests in Somalia, this paper makes the case that US policy should focus on securing two linked negotiated settlements. The first would involve the US redirecting more of its financial and political leverage towards securing a genuine political deal between the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) and the regional administrations (Jubaland, Southwest, Galmudug, Hirshabelle and Puntland) of the Federal Member States (FMS). Concluding a genuine political deal will require buy-in from key Somali stakeholders; and for that buy-in to happen there will need to be a less antagonistic and domineering approach on the part of the FGS, and sustained dialogue with the FMS and other parliamentarians and opposition parties. The US role should be to facilitate such a dialogue – even though that process can only succeed if the key Somali stakeholders prove willing to compromise.
A durable agreement should be forged as soon as possible. However, arriving at a deal will undoubtedly be complicated by Somalia’s election timetable, with voting in legislative elections (and through this process the selection of a new president and prime minister) now likely to occur in 2021. There are also added complexities and unknowns raised by the arrival of COVID-19 in Somalia. Whatever new FGS administration emerges from the electoral process, ensuring a sustainable deal with the FMS is essential. It should entail agreement on the architecture of the Somali federation – including distribution of power, responsibilities, resources and revenues – and a comprehensive security strategy. The difficulties already experienced in implementing the federal government’s 2018 Transition Plan for assuming principal responsibility for securing Somalia mean that this will need to be thoroughly revised as part of a new security strategy.
Successive US administrations have supported the objective of an agreement along these lines between the FGS and the FMS, but no deal has thus far been achieved.8 Facilitating such a deal is critical to stabilizing Somalia, and will be more likely to happen if the US is able to persuade Somalia’s other key external partners to pursue the same goal. While the US has limited leverage over Somalia’s leadership, it does play a key role in the country’s security equation. Washington has the ability to withhold considerable security force assistance and reduce military operations that appear to be highly valued by the FGS.9 This remains the case even if the FGS has increasingly turned to other countries – notably Turkey and Qatar – for security support. Moreover, as Somalia’s largest creditor, the US also has an important role to play in deciding how potential debt relief will flow to the country’s authorities.10 For the US, using these potential sources of leverage would not require substantial new resources. Indeed, it might even mean using significantly fewer ‘hard’ military resources, but it would need the US to step up its diplomatic engagement on Somalia.
As Somalia’s largest creditor, the US has an important role to play in deciding how potential debt relief will flow to the country’s authorities.
If the FGS and FMS could work together to prioritize coordinated military operations against al-Shabaab, Somali forces would likely make considerable progress in improving the security situation. However, even in the best-case scenario, a decisive victory over al-Shabaab would be neither assured nor quick. In order to be decisive, the FGS and its partners would have to crush both al-Shabaab’s key military capabilities and the will of the group’s supporters. The former is difficult because al-Shabaab are adept at avoiding decisive battles, except on their own – usually very localized – terms. Al-Shabaab have also infiltrated parts of the FGS, and appear to have supporters and sympathizers – including some politicians – willing to work with it throughout Somali society. It will therefore be exceedingly difficult to deliver a fatal military blow to al-Shabaab of the kind that the Sri Lankan armed forces inflicted on the Tamil Tigers in 2009, for example.
The war against al-Shabaab has become one of attrition. Hence, the main issue facing leaders on both sides is how to balance the multidimensional costs of continuing the conflict against their interests in negotiating its end. Neither side is yet ready to negotiate, but even if the FGS or al-Shabaab do somehow gain a significant upper hand militarily, there is no avoiding a negotiated settlement of some sort with the other’s supporters. Battlefield successes are useful to bolster morale on the victorious side and persuade the enemy that negotiation is best. But they can only provide political opportunities for the victors to impose terms that the other party accepts, and these must include setting out the losing side’s legitimate place in any new political dispensation. It would certainly be better for Somali civilians if such negotiation happens sooner rather than later. For outside parties that are interested in stabilizing Somalia, this suggests that the principal objective should be framed as political reconciliation rather than military victory. Again, it would be better to do this sooner rather than later.
From that point, the US should therefore support a follow-on negotiated settlement between the Somali authorities and al-Shabaab. (The case for such a settlement is set out further in Box 2.) The practical details of any talks should, of course, be determined by the parties to the conflict, and would need careful calibration between the FGS, the FMS and other political stakeholders, relevant clan leaders, as well as al-Shabaab. In the interim, the strategic function of US military strikes should be to coerce al-Shabaab’s leadership to negotiate. And if preliminary talks were to begin in earnest, Washington could even signal that subsequent US strikes would be for collective defence purposes only – i.e. to protect US, AU and Somali security personnel – and take greater precautions so as to harm as few civilians as possible to avoid boosting al-Shabaab’s recruitment and propaganda.
The following chapters of this paper summarize the US mission in Somalia, before analysing how it is being implemented and assessing whether US policy in Somalia is working. The paper concludes by sketching three scenarios for future US engagement, based around the ideas of maintaining the status quo, pursuing a negotiated end to the civil war, and disengaging militarily.
Box 1: Timeline, 2013–20
January 2013: The US officially recognizes the new Federal Government of Somalia (FGS).
May 2016: The US appoints its first ambassador to Somalia since 1991.
March 2017: The FGS adopts a new national security architecture framework, incorporating a decade-long timetable for full operationalization and implementation.
May 2017: Somalia’s international partners commit to the London Security Pact, which endorses the new national security architecture framework.
December 2017: An operational readiness assessment of the Somali National Army (SNA) is completed by a range of partners.
December 2017: 1,000 troops withdraw from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), as authorized by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2372 (2017). AMISOM struggles to generate the additional 500 authorized police.
December 2017: Citing corruption concerns, the US pauses security force assistance to non-mentored elements of the SNA.
February 2018: The FGS develops a conditions-based Transition Plan for assuming security responsibility from AMISOM by the end of 2021. AMISOM agrees to reconfigure to support the Transition Plan.
March 2018–February 2019: An operational readiness assessment is conducted of regional forces in Somalia’s Federal Member States.
December 2018: The US establishes its first permanent diplomatic mission to Somalia since 1991.
February 2019: AMISOM commanders decide their operational plans to support the Transition Plan.
April 2019: 1,000 troops withdraw from AMISOM, as authorized by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2431 (2018).
Mid-2019–present: SNA and AMISOM forces conduct Operation Badbaado, with the objective of recovering settlements in the Lower Shabelle region from al-Shabaab.
February 2020: The US resumes lethal direct security assistance to one SNA unit engaged in Operation Badbaado.
March 2020: 1,000 troops withdraw from AMISOM, as authorized by the UN Security Council in Resolution 2472 (2019).
1 For background on al-Shabaab, see Hansen, S. J. (2013), Al-Shabaab in Somalia, London: Hurst.
2 The White House (2017), ‘Presidential Proclamation Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats’, 24 September 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/09/24/enhancing-vetting-capabilities-and-processes-detecting-attempted-entry.
3 United States Senate Committee on Armed Services (2019), ‘Hearing to consider the Nominations of General Tod D. Wolters and General Stephen J. Townsend’, 2 April 2019, p. 51, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/19-31_04-02-19.pdf.
4 United States Africa Command (2020), ‘U.S. Africa Command 2020 Posture Statement’, 30 January 2020, http://www.africom.mil/media-room/Document/32561/2020-posture-statement-to-congress.
5 For an overview, see Williams, P. D. (2018), ‘Subduing al-Shabaab: The Somalia Model of Counterterrorism and Its Limits’, The Washington Quarterly, 41(2): pp. 95–111, doi:10.1080/0163660X.2018.1484227.
6 Transparency International (2019), Corruption Perceptions Index, https://www.transparency.org/research/cpi/overview.
7 Lead Inspector General Report to the United States Congress (2020), East Africa and North and West Africa Counterterrorism Operations, February 2020, p. 24, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Feb/11/2002247158/-1/-1/1/Q1FY2020_LEADIG_EA_NW%20AFRICA_CTO.PDF.
8 For a recent example, see United States Mission to the United Nations (2020), ‘Remarks at a UN Security Council Briefing on the Situation in Somalia’, 24 February 2020, https://usun.usmission.gov/remarks-at-a-un-security-council-briefing-on-the-situation-in-somalia-5/.
9 In December 2017, for example, the US withheld security force assistance to non-mentored SNA units, citing concerns about corruption. It restarted a ‘pilot project’ supporting SNA units involved in operations in Lower Shabelle in mid-2019. Houreld, K. (2017), ‘U.S. suspends aid to Somalia’s battered military over graft’, Reuters, 14 December 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-somalia-military-exclusive/exclusive-u-s-suspends-aid-to-somalias-battered-military-over-graft-idUSKBN1E81XF.
10 At the end of 2018, Somalia had an estimated external public debt of $5.3 billion, of which the US was owed approximately 20 per cent, or just over $1 billion. In February 2020 the IMF and the World Bank declared Somalia eligible to receive debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative. See International Monetary Fund (2020), ‘IMF and World Bank Consider Somalia Eligible for Assistance Under the Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative’, Press Release 20/48, 13 February 2020, https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2020/02/13/pr2048-imf-and-wb-consider-somalia-eligible-for-assistance-under-the-enhanced-hipc-initiative.