War Is Boring

Courtesy of a Facebook friend, here’s a photo of a Somali child soldier to brighten your day.

“Somali government soldiers have on [last] Friday afternoon retaken Yed in Bakool district, which is geographically located in the boarder between Somalia and Ethiopia, after having undergone heavy combat with Al Shabab, a rival Islamist faction which operates in Somalia and controls most of the southern and central regions in Somalia.” So reports Mohamed Omar Hussein from Somali Weyn.

Fifteen days after twin suicide bombings killed 76 people in Kampala, Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni used an African Union summit in the capital city to declare war on the Somali group responsible for the July 11 bombing — as well as on foreign fighters aiding the group. “The terrorists should be wiped out of Africa,” Museveni said on Monday. “Let us act and sweep them out of Africa and to where they came from in Asia and the Middle East.”

Damned if You Do
Somali piracy wasn’t inevitable. It’s the result of a tragic chain of events playing out over 20 hard years for the East African nation. U.S. intervention represents several key links in that chain. It’s not a stretch to say that piracy is partially America’s fault. This hijacking of U.S. designs is characteristically 5G.

Daniel Abbott edited a book of essays on fifth-generation warfare in the 21st century. The Handbook of 5GW is available for Kindle. I wrote the chapter on “Piracy, Human Security and 5GW in Somalia,” excerpted below.

The warning was a dire one, especially considering its source. In the July issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine — the unofficial professional journal of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard — an officer of the Indian navy, Akash Chaturvedi, claimed that Islamic extremists had teamed up with sea pirates in Somalia to form a “nexus of piracy and terrorism [that] will be dangerous for both the world economy and security.” The world must act, Chaturvedi insisted, to prevent “another 9/11 — this time at sea.”

For most of its more-than-decade-long existence, Somalia’s Al Shabab Islamic group was a threat only to the weak, American-backed Transitional Federal Government … and to everyday Somalis caught in the crossfire as Shabab fought to take over this lawless East African country. If anything, Shabab was a terror importer, drawing in recruits from the U.S., Yemen and other countries. It’s for that reason that many observers, myself included, downplayed the threat Al Shabab posed to other countries.

On Sunday, two bombs exploded in Kampala, Uganda, killing 74 people while they were watching the World Cup finale. The Somali Islamic group Al Shabab claimed responsibility, calling the attack retaliation for Uganda deploying peacekeepers to Somalia and “massacring” civilians.

Mark Canavera is an old classmate of mine from Furman University in South Carolina. After college, I headed to grad school; Mark headed to Africa to begin a career in aid work. We caught up recently over email.

When hundreds of thousands of Darfuri refugees flooded across the Chad-Sudan border in 2003, fleeing a campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by the Sudanese government and its militia proxies, the U.N. and various aid groups raced to help. Humanitarian workers built a vast and sophisticated network of refugee camps to house as many as 300,000 people. The European Union and, later, the U.N. deployed peacekeepers to protect the camps. By 2008, the refugee camps in eastern Chad had become a self-contained society, one of the biggest and seemingly most permanent in all the world.

In June last year, Islamic extremists targeted radio reporters Moqtar Hirabe and Ahmed Omar Hashi in Mogadishu’s Bakara Market. Hirabe died in a hail of bullets; Hashi was severely injured. In the aftermath of the attack. War Is Boring readers helped raise around $2,000 to pay for Hashi’s medical care and for a flight out of the country for him and some of his family. This year, readers added another $150 to provide for Hashi’s wife and kids as the family prepares to resettle in the U.S. or Europe.

Last year, former Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama terminated the mission that sent MSDF refueling ships to the Indian Ocean, where they refueled ships involved in Operation Enduring Freedom. Hatoyama and his cabinet objected on the grounds that the mission was not sanctioned by the U.N., a key provision for deployment of Self Defense Force personnel. They had a point.