The West has repeatedly got Somalia wrong, and could once again be sleepwalking into another costly military misadventure, writes Nick Meo.

By Nick Meo

With unmanned drones in the skies and the launch of secret commando raids, Somalia must feel like familiar territory for the CIA veterans who have moved to East Africa. They are hunting terrorists in a failed state, ruled for decades by tribal chieftains and brutal warlords. Its desperate people are turning in fear to an Islamist militia. al-Qaeda senses a chance to re-establish itself in the Horn of Africa.

It's all strikingly reminiscent of Afghanistan, where many of the special forces operatives and intelligence agents have just come from, probably with British SAS colleagues alongside them.

Americans have been on Somali soil before – during America's disastrous intervention in the early 1990s, which ended after the firefight that was later made into the film Black Hawk Down. Since then, the outside world has tried hard to ignore the unlucky country. But now Somalia is showing signs of becoming a second crucible of terror, one that could cause the West as much trouble as the lawless borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned of the risk of al-Qaeda leaders moving into the African country, which terrorists see as a good base for spreading mayhem on a troubled continent. Security services fear that under the control of al-Shabaab – a militia similar to the Taliban which has taken over much of the south and most of the capital Mogadishu – Somalia could become a new bolt hole for al-Qaeda's leadership. They are under pressure in the badlands of Waziristan, in Pakistan, which have served as their main base since bin Laden's men were driven out of Afghanistan in 2001. The route from there to Mogadishu is long but unpoliced.

Hence American raids such as the one on Monday, when a terrorist mastermind was killed in a helicopter raid. Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was wanted in connection with the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in 2002. Americans are believed to be hunting other dangerous men who have arrived more recently.

If US commandos did land from their helicopters, as has been reported, it would have been the first time the US has had boots on the ground in the country since 1994.

Somalia's simmering and confused conflict has heated up considerably in recent years. In 2006 a conservative group called the Islamic Courts Union took over Mogadishu, and were welcomed by most Somalis for bringing security, at the cost of imposing moral repression. But they looked too much like the Taliban to Washington, which recalled training camps al-Qaeda had in the south of the country in the 1990s. So Somalia's old enemy, Ethiopia, was encouraged to invade and reinstall a government comprised of former warlords.

It didn't work. Hundreds of Ethiopian soldiers died in an unwinnable guerrilla war, the streets of Mogadishu became lawless again without the Courts militia to police them, and the ranks of the al-Shabaab ("the Youth") swelled as young men joined to attack the invader.

Earlier this year the bloodied Ethiopians pulled out. Their defeat has been a huge boost for al-Shabaab, which has transformed itself from the youth wing of the Islamic Courts into a much more radical movement, praised by al-Qaeda for resisting Christian Ethiopia and its US backers.

Since then the confused fighting has only got worse. Somali leaders, the United Nations, the African Union and foreign diplomats are all apparently unable to come up with a political solution.

Thousands of civilians have died, more than a million have fled their homes for miserable shanties outside the capital or across the border in Kenya, and nearly half the population needs aid to survive. It is one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world, and makes an ideal breeding ground for terrorism.

America's alarm was heightened earlier this year when it emerged that the children of Somali immigrants had travelled from Minneapolis to their parents' homeland to join the jihad. Three of them are believed to have died, including one who may have become the first American suicide bomber.

There are fears that the sons of Britain's Somali community may also be answering al-Shabaab's rallying cry. Somali immigrants to Britain went there to flee war. Most are interested in making money, not fighting jihad. But elders are concerned that the virus of jihad may be taking root among the young. Like the sons of law-abiding Pakistani immigrants, there are those among the second generation who believe their faith is under attack from America, and some are willing to defend it.

So far the fighting has been confined to Somalia, but there are fears that attacks could be launched in Britain and the US. One of the aims of the special forces' secret war in Somalia is to prevent that.

But the West has repeatedly got Somalia wrong, and could once again be sleepwalking into another costly military misadventure.

"What you have in Somalia is a dangerous mix, and it is a place that we should keep an eye on," says Roger Middleton, an expert on the country with Chatham House. "How much al-Qaeda contributes to the war, we simply don't know."

Source: Telegraph, Sept 15, 2009

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