This Washington Post story about U.S. troops in Somalia is bad journalism covering for questionable policy.
Why is it bad? Let’s count some reasons:
* A key driver of the story is about how President Trump, late in his term, ordered U.S. troops out of Somalia … and how the Pentagon circumvented that order until the Biden Administration could get back in place.
In the twilight of his presidency in December 2020, Trump ordered the withdrawal from Somalia of all American troops — about 800 soldiers — as part of his promise to end the U.S. involvement in “endless wars.” The U.S. teams, including those based in the southern city of Kismayo and at Baledogle Military Air Base, where Danab trains, had to leave.
Except they didn’t. Afraid of losing relationships, U.S. troops embarked on their risky rotation in and out of the country.
U.S. soldiers leaving the Baledogle base had to pull out sewage and power lines, remove computers, desks and other furniture, and take away drones, radar systems and other sensitive equipment. For each month spent in Somalia, the soldiers would spend a week and a half setting up equipment and another week taking it down and packing it up, four U.S. service members said. U.S. service members rotating into Somalia would get diarrhea for the first week, because water had stagnated in the systems, the four said.
Each return had to be treated like a tactical operation, one service member recounted. The flights between Somalia and Kenya alone cost $930,000 each time, he said, describing the constant movement as “intentionally inefficient, intentionally dangerous, intentionally costly and intentionally stupid.”
It goes without saying that I think Donald Trump was a dangerous and authoritarian president. Nonetheless, you know what else is dangerous to democracy? When military leadership decides it doesn’t want to obey the duly elected civilian authority and instead continues foreign warfighting operations. The Washington Post piece treats a Constitutional crisis like its a bureaucratic challenge, with no question of whether that’s good or wise or legal.
* It doesn’t really explain why U.S. troops are in Somalia, or under what authority. It just takes it as a given that the United States should be fighting — or assisting fighting — against al-Shabab, which is fighting the main government there.
But … possibly not? In July, Jonathan Guyer wrote a piece for Vox explaining what American involvement in the Somali war really looks like, now that the Biden Administration has formally reestablished our troop presence there.
For the Biden administration, success would mean keeping al-Shabaab’s threat within Somalia’s borders. “Simultaneously, we are working toward continued progress on the political side, where we start seeing greater cooperation, less corruption, an effort toward more inclusive politics,” a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me. “We’re listening to Hassan Sheikh’s agenda and having a conversation with him, and with other Somali actors, about how do they best bring stability to the country.”
Pushing toward political reconciliation will be difficult, as many Somalis see the government as corrupt; they “seek justice and an equitable way of resolving these things,” Samira Gaid, the director of the Hiraal Institute in Mogadishu, told me. “That’s what’s absent. And that’s what al-Shabaab offers.”
By putting US troops in Somalia, the US is back to where it was under Trump and Obama, according to analyst Abukar Arman. “I don’t think it is a good idea if the Biden administration’s objective is to pursue that same failed counterterrorism policy,” the former Somali diplomat wrote by email. “Somalis — save the political elite — consider the return of American troops and Biden’s policy toward Somalia business as usual: more drone strikes, more provocation of al-Shabaab, and more recruitment for the latter.”
As for the legal authority that U.S. troops are operating in Somalia, the Brennan Center discussed this in its “Secret War” report a few months ago:
Within a week of the attacks, Congress passed the 2001 AUMF to allow President George W. Bush to pursue those who had “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.”Shortly thereafter, the Bush administration concluded that the terrorist organization al-Qaeda had perpetrated the attacks and that the Taliban, the political leadership of Afghanistan, were providing al-Qaeda.
Successive administrations have interpreted the 2001 AUMF to cover al-Qaeda’s “associated forces,” despite those words not appearing in the statute. The executive branch has designated a broad array of terrorist groups, including those that did not yet exist on September 11, as associated forces. In doing so, presidents have unilaterally expanded the scope of the war on terror to organizations like al-Shabaab in Somalia, which was founded in 2006 and which threatens targets in East Africa, not the United States.
* Overall, the WaPo story is strangely credulous about the accomplishments of our Somali government allies.
An operation in central Somalia in 2021 illustrated Danab’s capacity to succeed even without U.S. boots on the ground. Acting on a tip from a resident, Danab soldiers say they arrested a man accused of kidnapping a French intelligence agent a decade ago and killed scores of insurgents. The soldiers also flabbergasted the local population in the town of Camaare during the seven-week operation by renting housing and buying food instead of commandeering it, said 2nd Lt. Samir Salim Omar.
That accomplishment suggests a darker backstory of some sort — but we’re left to imagine what it might be.
In sum: There are a tangle of messy questions about U.S. involvement in Somalia that this Washington Post story never addresses. What’s bewildering is that it’s not like the paper doesn’t know the American government has a history of dressing up its failures abroad. They’ve got experience with this stuff! Any story that's about how wonderful our troops and allies are doing in a war you probably don't really know much about — without any real mention of the possible downsides — ought to be viewed skeptically.