Time to get out of Somalia

Why UPDF, the AU and Western powers should let Al Shabab take over power in Somalia

THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | Last week, Al Shabab militants made a devastating attack on a UPDF base in Somalia. They claimed to have killed 138 of our soldiers and taken many more hostage. The UPDF has not yet made public the number of dead, injured and missing. But whatever the details of this tragedy, this is a wake-up call to Uganda to pull out of that troubled country. We have been in Somalia for 16 years and it hard to see any fundamental difference we have made to create a stable political order there. On the contrary, it seems our presence has stifled the evolution of a more militarily strong political group able to wrestle control of the whole country from myriad clan militias. Yet such a group is the only one that can secure effective control and thus reestablish the Somali state.

The problem of Somalia is primarily an internal political one. Somali elites need to evolve some minimum political consensus on how to create a stable political order through a negotiated settlement. The best outsiders can do is facilitate this internal political dialogue among Somali elites. The other solution would be to leave Somalis to fight among each other until one side secures a decisive military victory or all sides get exhausted by fighting and find mutual accommodation more profitable than further combat. In this case, Somalia needs a strong-man ahead of a powerful organisation that can impose order on that country.

President Yoweri Museveni and his planners think that, with more money, better organisation, improved training, advanced military equipment, limited corruption and greater vigilance, UPDF can avoid the disaster that befell it last week. This is illusory. There is no way any army in the world can avoid a surprise attack from enemies fighting on their home turf over such a prolonged period. Perhaps Museveni and his planners should learn from the American experience in its many wars abroad ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, or the Israelis in Lebanon. In all these cases, the world’s best militaries armed with the best technologies of surveillance were unable to avoid surprise attacks from their enemies.

It does not matter how well trained an army is, how high its morale, or how it is financed and equipped. Any foreign military occupation faces serious disadvantages. Foreigners can never penetrate a society deeply enough to gather all the necessary intelligence needed to ensure total safety. Neither can they be free of their biases and prejudices about the society they occupy. And prejudice leads to misunderstanding and/or bad judgements. So, the risk of a successful surprise attack is in-built in the act of occupying another country for many years. You can be vigilant for long and go without any incident. However, the local militias need to succeed only once in five years to surprise you with a devastating attack.

Uganda and all those involved in Somalia should learn a lesson from the USA-NATO occupation of Afghanistan, which lasted 20 years. The Americans have the best-trained, best-organised, best-equipped, best-motivated and best-led army in the world – or so they claim. They spent $2.1 trillion dollars trying to “rebuild” Afghanistan; $800,000 to train and equip an Afghan army of 300,000. Arrayed against them were the Taliban – poorly-trained, poorly-equipped, poorly-financed and poorly-led (or so we were led to believe). But after 20 years, the Americans retreated from Afghanistan and left the Taliban, whom they specifically went to kick out of power, to take over the country. All the fears of blow back have not come to pass. Alarmist claims that “Islamic militants” want to take over the world and establish a caliphate are exactly that – alarmist propaganda meant to sustain America’s endless wars.

UPDF can send more troops, more equipment and increase vigilance. It can even get the most advance surveillance technologies in the world to monitor Al Shabab. But it will never defeat the Al Shabab even in the next 100 years. We need to stop these Western-driven judgements of Al Shabab as a terrorist organisation, Islamic extremists or radical militants. These judgements make it difficult to see Al Shabab for what it is – a political movement with political objectives using Islam as a rallying cry. America has its ultra-Christian right in its politics. No one sees its religious roots a reason to exclude it from participating in the nation’s politics. By labelling Al Shabab terrorist, we have lost the opportunity to work with them to recreate the Somali state.

One can argue that the Christian right in America organises peaceably while Al Shabab organises and acts violently. First, this would be historically incorrect. For many decades, right wing white supremacist movements in America have employed terror to get their way, attacking and bombing black churches and synagogues. At no time did the USA declare them terrorist, persecute them and exclude them from political life. The idea of militant political Islam violent enough to be totally excluded from politics is a Western propaganda tool. Violent movements are products of occupation. Ending occupation is the solution. The Taliban has been defined the same way but America accepted its mistake and left them to take over the country.

Together with the Europeans and the Americans, UPDF has spent years training a national army for Somalia. More than a decade later, there is little to show for it. On the contrary, most of those trained in Uganda to form the national army desert immediately they go home and return to their clans and sub clans – or join Al Shabab. Essentially, we have been training and arming the very enemy we are fighting. Even those who do not desert have proven incapable of fighting. A well-trained, well-equipped and relatively well-paid battalion of 736 national army troops gets scattered by 30 poorly armed, poorly trained and unpaid Al Shabab militants.

Every army needs a cause to fight. Al Shabab has one. The national army does not. And that makes all the difference. Western notions that to solve the problems of Somalia requires liberal democracy: a free press, free, fair and regular multiparty elections and a vibrant civil society are fanciful. Somalia needs order – the ability of the state to gain and monopolise the use of violence. It seems to me that only Al Shabab has the capacity to ensure that. We should therefore leave Somalia and let Al Shabab take over like the Americans did with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

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amwenda@independent.co.ug