Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Jason Hartwig.
He is a security sector reform professional.
Not sure what that means.
Most recently, he worked for the U.S. mission to Somalia as a military assistance coordinator.
And previously was in the U.S. Army as an armor officer in Iraq, World War II and Afghanistan.
Here he's got this important piece at warontherocks.com.
How to end the civil war in Somalia.
Give away the conclusion in the headline.
Negotiate with Al Shabaab.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Jason?
Great.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
You know what?
I'm really happy to have you on the air here and happy to see this article.
I don't know if I've ever seen anyone more than on the kind of libertarian fringe maybe say, hey, let's not have a war in Somalia anymore.
I guess most people don't even know we have one at all.
But it's been about 13 years now.
And I think you're saying here what probably the American people, if they knew much about it anyway, would feel like.
But you're finally saying what was unsayable maybe a few years ago out loud plain as day.
We can't defeat this Al Shabaab group.
So let's deal with them.
Yeah, I mean, so people have been saying there's been a couple of pieces recently that have come out, you know, as we're opening negotiations with the Taliban, pointing out that maybe we should we should negotiate with Al Shabaab as well.
I actually kind of framed my initial draft of the piece like that.
And the reviewer rightly pointed out there's a lot of incongruencies in the comparison between the Taliban and Al Shabaab.
And so it sort of drops that comparison.
What may be new is is someone who's sort of seen behind the curtain and been part of the policy process in the U.S. side coming out and saying we probably ought to change course.
But at the same time, I mean, I think you raise a good point that there has been a bit of a sea change and that obviously, you know, two to four years ago, saying something like this would be piracy and I'd be a professional pariah and maybe I still will be.
But I'm leaving for the academy.
So that kind of liberated me to say exactly what I thought.
You know what it is, too, is first of all, obviously, your experience here, as you say, but, you know, it's just the calendar you look at.
It's almost 2020.
And even David Petraeus would have to admit the war on terrorism as conceived and implemented by these men has not worked on its own terms.
So here we are.
I mean, Al Shabaab only declared their loyalty to al-Qaeda a few years into the war anyway.
Right.
And they ain't gone yet.
So it seems it's fair enough.
It should be fair enough for anyone, whatever their experience, any citizen of this country to question whether any of this should be continuing on a status quo basis the way it is now.
As McChrystal had advised about Afghanistan, just keep muddling through forever.
Sure.
So, I mean, I think there's, in the Somali context, there's three things, you know, sort of drew us to Somalia, why we're engaged in Somalia.
And first and most important, if you're looking at the terms of national interest, is Somalia is located in a very strategic location in the world.
It's got one of the longest, if not the longest, coastline in Africa and, you know, essentially can act as a choke point to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea.
So you're seeing increased military competition in Djibouti, which was once a part of Somalia.
And, you know, ethnically, the inhabitants of Djibouti are all Somali.
So, you know, there's competition between the Chinese and U.S. there and an escalation of building bases.
Piracy in Somalia from 2007 to 2012 was an enormous problem of international shipping that eventually brought about a large naval task force, part of which is funded by the EU.
And still, the EU naval force is still off the coast of Somalia.
So there's that national interest piece.
Then secondarily, there's, you know, what I sort of point out of the crusading ideology of the war on terror, where anything that looked like terrorism was declared terrorism.
And we kind of lumped insurgencies that had, I would argue, more localized concerns in with, you know, sort of corporate al-Qaeda.
And, you know, I think that's where, you know, you and I would kind of agree.
And then there's the third point, which is the sort of humanitarian concerns.
And that's, you know, if you go back to Black Lockdown, you know, the reason that we initially got involved in Somalia was this enormous famine.
And Somalia is always sort of teetering on the brink of famine.
I mean, just two years ago when I was there, we were able to stave off famine that could have been very severe.
In 2012, it was really awful.
And that's what accounts for a lot of the fatalities in Somali conflict.
And then, you know, because of the war, there's a lot of negative externalities associated with it.
So Kenya right now hosts the largest refugee camp in the world in Dadaab.
Both Ethiopia and Kenya have enormous Somali populations that, you know, when conflict is ongoing in Somalia, that spills over to Kenya and Ethiopia, two of the largest trading partners the U.S. has in Africa.
So, I mean, those are the things that brought us there.
My argument is that we're just using the wrong lens to think about the problems that we're looking at the symptom, which is terrorism, that al-Shabaab is using regionally.
And, you know, I don't really think there's much of a threat against the homeland.
But, I mean, you can make that argument that maybe there's a small threat of an al-Shabaab attack on the homeland, partially because we're involved in a war there.
And instead, we should be thinking about it as a civil war.
And, you know, in the piece I sort of lay out, there's three ways a civil war goes.
There's decisive victory, which honestly is what you kind of hope for, that has the lowest chance of recurrence.
You know, when one side sort of crushes the other, think of like our civil war.
Everything's kind of said and done, and the winner imposes the rule.
It's a victor's peace, and that peace generally tends to last longer and is more stable.
Or the conflict can muddle along, in which case we certainly have continued terrorism, al-Shabaab.
Or you can negotiate and enter the conflict.
And right now, Somalia actually has a lot of ingredients that go towards a decent negotiated settlement.
We have essentially a mutually hurting stalemate.
Neither side is strong enough to win.
There is an enormous international peacekeeping force.
It's actually more of a peacemaking force.
It has a warfighting mandate funded by—and troops provided by the African Union.
It's funded by the EU.
So there's 20,000 African troops, you know, from five troop-contributing countries currently fighting in Somalia.
If they fold it over into peacekeeping with a robust mandate, that's one of the first ingredients you have to having sustainable, stable settlement there.
So, you know, I think part of it is we just need to realize that there are differences and insurgencies that use terrorism, and we can't treat everyone as sort of al-Qaeda circa 2006 or 2007.
Yeah, in other words, terrorism is a tactic, not some malevolent supreme being out there that we're fighting against.
Right, exactly.
All right, now, so let me see here.
There's so many different things to pick up on, but first of all, I guess I want to ask you now about support for the government that the U.S. really has created in Mogadishu there.
And, you know, I guess if you want, maybe compare it to Afghanistan as far as whether you think it can stand without foreign support, whether it really has any form of kind of popular sovereignty, or is it just a foreign-imposed creature?
I know you say in the article there's really no question that al-Shabaab is really, just like the Taliban, they're a much more welcome security force among the population, at least a certain part of the population, where they're embedded than the people that the Americans say are the new democratic, you know, glorious leaders of the future.
Right, yeah.
So, I mean, I do think, you know, the point that I often make is if you pulled AMISOM, you know, the Afghan Union Mission in Somalia out, so those, you know, 22,000 at the time, now, you know, a little over 20,000 troops, al-Shabaab would be in Mogadishu very quickly.
So, yeah, I don't think the federal government will be able to stand on its own.
You know, a significant portion of key members of the government hold, you know, second passports, so I think they would probably jet pretty quickly.
You know, for example, the president of Somalia right now is a U.S. citizen and was working in the Department of Transportation in Buffalo before he was elected president.
Yeah.
Well, but what does that say about their ability to negotiate if al-Shabaab is in a position of strength and they're in a position of really none without foreign support?
Yeah, well, I mean, that's what kind of tips the scales, and that's why you move towards negotiated settlement, because al-Shabaab can't win with foreign support, and for a lot of the rattling that the troop-contributing countries from AMISOM make, so say Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Burundi, that they want to leave, they're benefiting immensely from these deployments.
They use a lot of the EU funding to essentially fund either part or all of their military spending.
So I think one of the problems may be down the road getting AMISOM to leave.
So there's going to be these foreign troops there for a while, and al-Shabaab essentially can't win as long as they're there.
And al-Shabaab is absolutely hurting from the drone campaign.
I make the statement there that, sure, you're not going to win with it, but you're killing a lot of these leaders.
Also, I mean, al-Shabaab is really an amorphous group.
There's a large scale of Somali business interests that are involved in al-Shabaab, and one of the interesting things in Somalia is it's a very entrepreneurial country, very entrepreneurial society.
The business community is actually rather socially conservative, and so al-Shabaab's predecessor, the Islamic Courts Union, partially came to power because the Somali business community kind of threw in with them, because one, there was an alignment ideologically, and then two, the point I make, that this Islamist group was able to provide more predictable and cheaper security, and so the business community kind of went along with them.
So the business community has some interest in continuing conflict in Somalia because corruption is so rampant that I think the security dollars being fueled into Somalia is partially what drives the intensity of the conflict, and if you start to take that out, you would reduce the conflict.
But also, I mean, these are businessmen.
They're willing to make a deal, and they're going to be fighting as part of that negotiation.
But yeah, I think it wouldn't surprise me, and I mean, obviously it wouldn't surprise me to admit the argument, that al-Shabaab, at least significant elements of it, would be willing to deal.
There may be some ill-reconcilables.
They would probably go off and join the Islamic State.
The Islamic State has, I don't know, like blast estimates from the U.N. with something like 400 or 500 fighters running around in North Somalia, and they're really not a significant threat.
And they're really just al-Shabaab guys who changed their brand name anyway, right?
Yeah, for the most part.
I'm not an expert on that, but yeah, that is my understanding.
So, I mean, can you contrast that with the Taliban?
The Taliban have said all this time that, look, we're just going to wait you out.
You have to leave eventually, and we demand you leave eventually.
And those are our only conditions, essentially, or we'll keep fighting.
But you're saying these guys are more willing to negotiate than that.
It just seems like, you know, because the balance is they're the ones in the position of strength.
Why give up now?
I don't think that they're in—it's a stalemate right now.
I mean, you can't take away—my argument is you can't necessarily take away the variable of external support.
I understand that, but I just mean if it's a stalemate with one side being the guerrilla force and the other side being foreign-supported, then really it's advantage to the guerrillas, even if it's essentially a stalemate in the middle, right?
You know what I mean?
It could be.
I mean, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, believe me, I want a peaceful solution to this thing.
I'm not trying to poke holes in your theory here.
I'm just trying to understand, you know, how it is really that Shabab could be coaxed into negotiating now when it seems like they don't really have to.
Well, the point I made in the piece is, you know, the solution to help is a little bit of the same, in that, you know, increased military pressure, you know, provides guarantees that external forces are going to remain.
Something that's never been offered to al-Shabaab is actually a chance to enter the government.
So I think one of the problems the U.S. in particular often has when we discuss negotiations, and I saw this when I was in Afghanistan in the Army in 2010, is when we talked negotiations, it was like, we're winning, and they're going to kind of surrender to us, and we're going to negotiate their surrender, and we're going to figure out amnesty, and we're going to figure out how to, you know, sort of reincorporate them into society.
My argument is, no, like, they are essentially another government that you're negotiating what a coalition government will look like.
Now, I mean, there's some really negative stuff that could be associated with that.
Human rights and women's rights are probably going to be thrown by the wayside.
I mean, that's a question of the United States, and I don't really have time in the piece to get into it, but that's an internal discussion that we need to have, and that we are having a bit in Afghanistan, and, you know, my guess is behind closed doors, everyone's kind of like, well, you know, we're going to have to put women's rights and human rights piece on the back burner in order to achieve peace.
By the way, could you tell me, for my footnote, because I'm going to quote you later, what year you're talking about when the Army's conception was, here's how we're going to negotiate their surrender?
Well, I mean, that's, I think, you know, how the military's always thought.
I mean, that's kind of counterinsurgency theory.
Sure, yeah, I mean, it sounds exactly like, you know, what they said about Afghanistan as well, of course, yeah.
But I just mean, could you give me, like, circa timeframe for that?
I mean, so the idea is, well, I mean, that, when I was in Afghanistan, they were talking about that in 2010.
I mean, that's Richard Holbrook.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you meant that in terms of Somalia as well, or that anecdote with Somalia.
Yeah, I mean, it's my fault.
I keep skipping back and forth between the wars.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not your fault, sorry.
So there has been, over the last couple of years, I would say, an increased interest in focusing on defections from al-Shabaab.
I mean, that's al-Shabaab's former spokesman.
You know, he was a high-ranking member of al-Shabaab Muqtada Robo, defected a couple of years ago.
And, you know, I point out in the piece that was kind of horribly botched by the federal government of Somalia because he ended up wanting to run for president of his federal member state.
So Somalia is a federation.
So rather than provinces or states, they're called federal member states, and their governors are called presidents.
So he was running for president of his home state, and he probably wasn't going to win.
You know, folks I talked to sort of knew the backroom stuff that, you know, because it wasn't a popular election, that he didn't have the backroom support.
But he had a lot of popular support, and the federal government kind of panicked and just arrested him.
And so that sends a really awful signal to al-Shabaab.
At the same time, there was a former al-Shabaab leader who is the president of the southernmost state, Jubiland, Ahmed Madobe.
You know, and he is a—there is an entire annex in the U.N. monitoring group for Somalia for the sanctions on Madobe's subordinates and the human rights abuses they've committed.
So we do business with pretty awful guys.
You know, that's out there.
So, you know, really what we need to present to al-Shabaab is Ahmed Madobe.
You know, this is the best end state you can get.
You can, you know, become a regional president.
You know, maybe eventually you can even run for, you know, prime minister or federal president.
You know, Ahmed Madobe controls one of the biggest ports in Somalia.
So, you know, he's collecting all kinds of rent from that.
So, you know, life is pretty good for him.
And if you offer that to Shabaab and, you know, you don't have the threat of American drones hunting you, that's not necessarily a bad deal.
So, you know, I have no doubt that it's going to be still reconcilable.
And, you know, I don't—if I was putting percentages on this, like, I don't even know if I would say that I would bet over 50 percent that al-Shabaab would negotiate, because it's an unknown, because we just haven't tried.
But my point is we should try.
And, you know, in having spent pretty much my entire adult life in work and then studying it academically, I mean, ending conflicts is really hard.
It's one of the hardest things in human society.
But to me, you know, it's important to always—to still take a shot.
And, you know, right now the courses we've been taking aren't working.
And so it's worthwhile to, you know, at least make a tentative, you know, attempt to reach out and figure out a new solution.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, I got to tell you about WallStreetWindow.com.
It's the great Mike Swanson.
He made a killing on Wall Street back in the day, and now he sells advice for reasonable prices.
You need to know what to do to protect your assets.
WallStreetWindow.com.
Well, so back in 2008, they—you know, I guess essentially time was running out on the Bush administration, and so Condoleezza Rice made a deal with Sheikh Sharif, I guess his name was, who had been the leader of the Islamic Courts Union and said, OK, you can be the president after all.
What the hell?
Never mind the last two years of fighting here.
You can be the president.
But it can't be the Islamic Courts Union anymore.
It has to be—you have to take the job inside the transitional federal government that we've created for you.
And he said, OK, and took her up on that offer.
But then al-Shabaab, the youth, said, ha, you're a traitor, and turned on him, and I guess whatever parts of the Islamic Courts Union had gone with him, and stayed at war back then.
Yeah, I mean, part of that also is because there was the Ethiopian occupation, which is one of the more disastrous decisions I think the Bush administration made in Africa in supporting the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2007, because that sort of stirred up all this national sentiment, because the only war Somalia fought as a state, as a modern state, was against Ethiopia.
So having, you know, the largest state existential threat next to you invade is a pretty good way to ensure that there's going to not be a lot of popular support for the government that, you know, that force is propping up.
And with a Christian versus Muslim dynamic added as well.
But so now the AU forces there don't include the Ethiopians anymore?
Or they do still?
There are Ethiopians.
So Ethiopians are part of that force.
And the Ethiopians are kind of an interesting case, because the Ethiopians have a huge Somali population.
You know, the Oromo region, or excuse me, the Ogaden region of Somalia, or excuse me, of Ethiopia, is, you know, predominantly Ogaden clan Somali.
So they understand clan politics very well.
And their sector, there's not a ton of fighting, largely because they just figure out accommodation.
So I actually think Ethiopia would be a really important member of the negotiating team.
I have no doubt they have rather extensive, they also have a pretty good intelligence service.
I have no doubt they've got extensive contacts with al-Shabaab.
Well, so let me rephrase it then.
So if Condoleezza Rice had essentially made the same kind of effort you're talking about now, you think that possibly could have been more successful, and al-Shabaab maybe could have been brought in then?
Possibly.
So there's another point I want to make, too.
And this, you know, may be a separate piece I'll work on with a Somali-American colleague.
We didn't even get into the Somali politics piece of this.
And, I mean, Somali politics is really hard.
It's really fractious.
It's why, you know, even if the Islamic Courts Union or al-Shabaab had won, my guess is their ruling coalition would break down really quickly, just because Somali politics makes the country very hard to govern.
That's why, you know, sort of the international community sort of encouraged the Somali government to adopt a federated system, which, you know, I think is the right approach.
But Somali politics can absolutely torpedo all of this.
You know, it's sort of a huge unknown.
I don't think, you know, I would be the first to admit, having spent two years, I do not understand Somali politics very well.
They've been doing conflict politics for 30 years now.
They understand it way better than we do, and, you know, we're often going to be taken advantage of in that process.
Well, that's a great point.
I mean, it seems like, based on that wisdom alone, the best answer our side could come up with would be to let them decentralize power as much as possible.
The more you centralize it, the more central power there is to fight over.
And the more important it is, whoever rules, not just Mogadishu and its port, but the rest of the country too, then that's the power to abuse, the golden ring everybody wants to get their hands on.
But just give everybody little brass ones instead, you know?
Absolutely.
I mean, Somalia could be a libertarian paradise at some point.
You guys may all want to move to Mogadishu.
What's funny is, you know, it's really interesting that you say that because, yeah, no, this is a really important point, I think.
I'm not accusing you, but it's what you're referring to anyway.
This is kind of a libertarian talking point, that if freedom works so well as a system, property rights and all that, then why don't you just move to Somalia where they're so free?
As though we don't know that the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command started their business in Somalia before New Year's 2001.
It was one of the first battlegrounds in the war on terrorism.
The CIA was backing these warlords, which is the conflict that led to the rise of the Islamic Courts Union in the first place, and then backed the Ethiopian invasion, as you said.
But guess what?
Before all of that, in the very late 1990s and before the September 11th attack, which no Somali had anything to do with, by the way, they actually had essentially no government.
And it wasn't because they believed in libertarian property rights theory or whatever.
It was because all the warlords were so exhausted that none of them were powerful enough to really consolidate control.
And it was actually the uncles and the old men and the real sort of bottom-up civil society types were the ones hearing the court cases, as you kind of talk about in here.
That al-Shabaab does better conflict resolution than the competition when it comes to dealing with the civilians on the ground.
And that kind of thing was breaking out all over, and their economy was booming.
And there were real serious studies by academic economists and all these people showing that it was one of the fastest-growing economies in all of Africa at the time.
And it really wasn't until American intervention came and put an end to all that that everything turned to chaos.
And then everyone blames freedom for the chaos.
Yeah, there's certainly some nostalgia about Somalia before 2001.
There is some good scholarship out there.
Ken Mankow, you know, his sort of historical— Yeah, great guy.
—government without governance.
But the one thing I would quibble with that piece is he's looking at like two case studies.
I mean, they were coming up from communism.
So again, this wasn't like anarcho-capitalist paradise.
This was just the very best they'd ever had it.
That's all.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, I do think there's a lot of interesting case studies.
And one of the reasons I was drawn to working in Somalia is this decentralized model that, you know, I think one of the big—you know, a more academic piece that I'm working on right now is, you know, when we get involved in interventions like this, you know, you're kind of trying to impose a technocratic state-building solution on a process that's inherently very violent.
You know, state formation is, you know, before the World War, you know, literally the most violent human process in history.
And, you know, people can argue over the benefits of, you know, the centralized state that you get on the back end.
But what I don't think you can argue is that it's going to be a violent conflict.
You know, when you start to take more taxes, there are going to be lots of business groups and interest groups, you know, or consolidate, you know, coercive power.
Others are going to be, you know, say warlords that don't want to give that up, and eventually some of them are going to be killed because they're going to sort, you know, that dispute out via arms.
So, you know, I think one of the questions the international community needs to ask is, do we want to be part of this violent, you know, state formation process?
And if the answer is no, then we need to think about how we support more decentralized solutions.
And, you know, I think Somalia is the perfect best case of that, that, you know, Somalia, the political ideology of Somalia just sort of lends itself towards decentralization.
If you look at Somaliland, you know, it's very relative.
But Somaliland and then Puntland, which is a semi-autonomous state in Somalia, but still technically part of Somalia, whereas Somaliland has tried to secede, they're relatively peaceful.
I mean, Puntland is seeing some increased violence from the Islamic State and al-Shabaab now, but, you know, Somaliland, yeah, it's not a place you necessarily want to live.
You're from the West, but, you know, I've visited Somaliland.
It's fine.
You know, it's a nice climate in Hargeisa, the capital city, and, you know, it's a functioning state.
Do you have an email list, Jason, for your writings?
So I've only got this one piece out, published right now.
I'd be very interested to read the next one.
I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but I really have to move on to my next guest here.
I'm running late.
Yeah, absolutely.
But I definitely would like to stay in contact with you about that next one, too, and I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been great.
Yeah, great conversation.
Thanks for having me on.
Okay, and I'm sorry we have to go, because there's so much more here, but maybe we'll talk again next time.
Absolutely.
All right, you guys, that is Jason Hartwig.
He's a veteran of the U.S. Army in Iraq, World War II, and Afghanistan, and he worked for the U.S. Mission to Somalia as a military assistance coordinator.
And this one is at warontherocks.com.
It's called How to End the Civil War in Somalia, Negotiate with Al-Shabaab.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
