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 had.
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 us, 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 Christina Goldbaum.
She wrote this important piece for The Atlantic.
Oh, I should say she's a freelance journalist based in East Africa.
And she wrote this piece for The Atlantic and it's reprinted at defense1.com.
That's Northrop Grumman propaganda for you there, but it's interesting.
And it's called The War on Terror Still Grows in Somalia.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Christina?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here and very happy to read a good article about the war in Somalia, which happens so rarely.
So I guess, is it okay if we start out like you do in the article with some recent statistics of the escalation of America's Somalia war under Donald Trump?
And then maybe we'll rewind and talk a little bit about how it got this way and where we're going.
Sure.
So there has been a very noticeable uptick in drone strikes in Somalia over the last two years.
To give you a sense of the numbers, in 2015, there were five American airstrikes.
In 2016, there were 13.
And then in 2017, we saw a huge jump to at least 34 airstrikes that year.
And so far this year, we've seen 21 American airstrikes.
So the U.S. is on track to meet the same number that we saw in 2017 in Somalia.
So it is a pretty considerable jump in American air power that we're seeing in Somalia to fight al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab.
And part of that comes from these policy changes we've seen from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.
So under Obama, there were very serious limitations to American airstrikes in the Horn of Africa and Somalia.
It was his policy known as the presidential policy guidance, which affected counterterrorism outside of conventional war zones.
Essentially, those limitations meant that there had to be high-level interagency approval for any strikes, that the target had to pose a threat to Americans, and there was a near certainty that no civilians would be killed in the airstrikes.
And under this administration, we've seen kind of the slow erosion of those limitations.
So in March of 2017, Trump designated parts of Somalia an area of active hostilities, which pretty much exempted large swaths of the country from these Obama-era 2013 rules.
And there no longer had to be any specific self-defense rationale to airstrikes in these particular areas.
Then in September of 2017, there was a cabinet-level committee of top leaders of national security agencies who approved new rules called the PSB, or the Principal Standards and Procedures, which essentially replaced the presidential policy guidance under Obama.
And that meant that in Somalia, there no longer had to be any kind of high-level interagency vetting for strikes.
They didn't have to only hit high-level leaders.
They could target foot soldiers in al-Shabaab.
General Waldhauser, who is the head of U.S. AFRA Command, decided to maintain a requirement of near certainty that no civilian bystanders would be killed.
But again, this massive policy change kind of paved the way for much broader and more frequent operations.
And that's essentially what we've seen in this time since this massive policy change.
And as a result, al-Shabaab is nearly defeated?
I wouldn't go that far.
Al-Shabaab is certainly, the organization has been affected by the increase in strikes.
So it's what, you know, policy folks would call a tactical-level disruptive effect.
So it makes it harder for the group to carry out attacks in Mogadishu and elsewhere.
It's disrupting their ability to communicate with one another because they're wary of using their cell phones, which means that these kind of top commanders who are spread out throughout the country, especially in southern Somalia, are now communicating with handwritten notes that are literally driven on motorcycles or in vehicles from one town to another in order to communicate and plan attacks.
It means that this kind of network outside of Mogadishu, which is referred to by the U.S. military as Mogadishu Attack Network, which is how al-Shabaab essentially builds and then transports vehicle-borne IEDs into Mogadishu, that network, it's been disrupted.
It's more difficult to, again, communicate between these different tasks, between these different leaders in the organization.
It also meant that, you know, for a while at the beginning of this year, we saw the group sending a lot of its foot soldiers out of southwest Somalia, where the majority of these drone strikes have been concentrated, and further north, essentially trying to get them out of, you know, this area they thought they were more likely to be killed in American airstrikes.
So, again, it certainly disrupted their activity.
It essentially made it harder for them to, you know, operate and function.
But I wouldn't go as far as to say that that means that al-Shabaab is on the ropes in any way.
You know, we've seen this happen in different periods of the group's existence, where maybe they spend a couple months or a year kind of regrouping, but only to adapt to the new environment in which they're operating.
So there was, you know, a large period of quiet last year between the end of October and I think the end of February, where in Mogadishu, where you see, you know, vehicle-borne IEDs in the city, you know, usually a couple times a month, there's this long period of quiet where there weren't any VBEDs.
And then after that, there was, again, this kind of uptick, which could be this al-Shabaab adjusting and adapting to the new environment in which they're operating in.
So, again, it's a significant disruption.
Doesn't mean they're defeated.
I'd say that's far from the case.
They're still very operational.
Well, and so what about insurgent math and their recruitment?
Because it seems like Stanley McChrystal would say, for every insurgent that you kill, you get two more.
Is that the same thing here?
I think with al-Shabaab, it's actually a little bit more complicated.
So since 2013, they found it very difficult to recruit ideological recruits.
This is in part because, I mean, again, the organization changed drastically from when it first, you know, was starting in 2006 and 2007 to now.
So they found it very hard to recruit young men who are ideologically aligned with the organization.
And I wouldn't say necessarily that there's a strong backlash in the Somali public against American airstrikes.
Surprisingly, almost a lot of people do think that they are very effective in Somalia, or at least recognize that the Somali National Army itself would never be able to kind of begin to confront al-Shabaab alone.
But what al-Shabaab's been doing since around 2013, 2014, and this is according to recent mid-level defectors who I've spoken with in Mogadishu, is demanding that clan elders in rural parts of Somalia hand over a certain number of kids in their kind of small territories.
So in a single town, they might say that every family needs to give them, you know, one of their young kids.
These are kids who are 7, 8, you know, around 10 years old.
Give them over to al-Shabaab to be put in one of their Islamic schools where they're trying to indoctrinate young kids.
And because the group still controls large swaths of territory, especially in southern Somalia, they're able to exert the authority to, you know, tell clan elders, demand that they, you know, every one of, you know, the people who, you know, kind of lives in a certain town, give over these kids.
So that's been, you know, for the last couple of years, their main recruiting strategy.
Again, I wouldn't necessarily say that we've seen an increase in recruitment as a result of drone strikes specifically.
But again, as we're talking about how, you know, this terrorist organization adapts to changing circumstances, and I would say that al-Shabaab is an organization that, you know, we've constantly seen adapting and working on a shoestring budget and still having a big impact.
That's one of the ways that they have adapted to not finding as many ideological recruits, is essentially by demanding and kidnapping young children and putting them in their hardline Islamic school.
And now, so tell me all about the Syrian National Army, if you could, and how many men and how powerful it is, and what's their role in fighting al-Shabaab here?
I think you're mentioning that if you ask somebody in Mogadishu, they'd tell you that the SNA can't do it without the drones providing air cover, huh?
Yeah, I mean, the Somali National Army is still, I mean, I think a lot of people would agree, is very far from being a functional fighting force.
The U.S. has been training a segment of the Somali National Army called DANA, which is their special forces, and they've worked, you know, hand-in-hand with American soldiers on the ground.
They're probably the most functioning part of the Somali National Army.
But even then, I mean, I think without, a lot of the ground operations say that they have seen some successes with, have been those that are advise and assist missions with American forces as well, and with, you know, American helicopters, say.
So I don't think, again, I don't think anyone would say that the Somali National Army is functioning on its own now.
It's also becoming a more and more complicated task of training the Somali National Army, because you have the EU training them, you have the UK training them, you have Gulf countries training various factions of the SNA, and you also have the Americans.
So there's been, I think, a lot of difficulty trying to create a kind of coherent national army when you have so many different actors who are not necessarily talking to one another or training the SNA in a single manner.
So I think there's still a lot of questions about how you create a functioning army for Somalia.
And I would, I mean, I've lived in Somalia for the last year and a half, and I would say we're still at least a decade away from seeing a kind of functional, independent Somali army in the country.
Right now, so we've seen reports, I think this year, maybe from last year too, that not only do we have CIA and special operations guys, and I don't know to what degree the special operations guys were based there previously, but it was announced that they were going to go ahead and send in the infantry too.
And I don't know, I guess this was mostly on training missions, but they were saying not special forces, but just regular army infantry were going.
So I didn't know if they were being used in the field out there to meet al-Shabaab head on or what else going on with that.
And how big are the American bases there as well?
It doesn't sound like they're trying to build a Navy base and this kind of thing, right?
I mean, a couple of things.
The first is that in October of 2016, there were 50 American boots on the ground in Somalia.
By the next year, there were 500.
So we've seen a huge influx in terms of the number of American soldiers in Somalia, certainly.
We've also seen a huge buildup in an American outpost called Baladogla, which is located near Mogadishu.
It's where some of the training happens for Denab, the special forces of the Somali army.
And also, it's kind of a staging ground for operations in Southwest, where al-Shabaab has been concentrated over the last few years.
So we have seen many more American soldiers.
We've seen this kind of buildup of American bases.
We've seen even the CIA, they've been training units of the Somali national intelligence agency, the Somali version of the CIA, essentially, that they use to collect intel that is then used by Denab and the Americans who work with Denab.
And we've seen that organization, that unit, also grow a lot in the last couple of years, from 50 a couple of years ago to now there's around 500.
And so we've definitely seen this kind of increase in presence and increase in American investment in Somalia.
And interestingly, now as the Pentagon is discussing this potential cut of commandos and closing of outposts in West Africa, Somalia is not a country that will be touched by that kind of reduction of U.S. special operations numbers or investments.
There's still going to be a lasting and robust presence of U.S. special operators in both Nigeria and Somalia.
So again, there's going to be big discussions going on right now about this potential cut, but Somalia is a place I think where we will see an enduring American footprint of the American military there.
And as I mentioned in this article, part of the problem with that is we've seen this kind of increase in military resources going into the country.
We've seen some disruption, success from that.
But Somalia, it's been constantly described to me by people who work with the U.S. mission, with the EU mission, with the U.N., as one of the most complicating operating environments to work in, in terms of state building.
There's many different clans, there's many different players in the state building process, all of whom have benefited from this pouring in of foreign aid over the last decade.
That it's kind of a question of, to me it's a question of, is this a war without end?
The U.S. military can help disrupt Al-Sharab's presence in the country, but if there aren't effort, the same kind of resources being poured into helping create a stable state, and again, doing that in one of the most complicated environments you can imagine, then we could just get these constant periods of disrupting a terrorist organization without actually yielding any long-term results, in terms of having a stable and secure country in the Horn of Africa, which is a very important geography for many other nations, including the U.S.
Well, and as you describe it in the article, the aid that we do give completely distorts everything and ruins everything in the capital city as it is.
So, if they do more, there's only reason to believe they would make matters that much worse, rather than better.
Yeah, I mean it is, and again, this isn't just the U.S., this is gulf money that's poured in, this is money from the EU, it's from the U.K., it's the U.N.
It's kind of this war zone economy now in Mogadishu, where when you have a ton of foreign money coming in because the country is unstable, then of course you end up with people in the capital, politicians, other powerful elites, who benefit from that foreign aid pouring in, and then therefore they benefit from the status quo of there being a certain degree of conflict.
And so that kind of economy definitely exists in Somalia, and it creates a cycle that's hard to break, where you have to figure out how to incentivize these powerful elites and politicians to really, truly invest in, put the political will into state building and peace building.
And again, if you're making a lot of money or reaping all these benefits from the fact that there is instability, then re-incentivizing people for why peace should matter is a really difficult thing to do.
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And by the way, before we go back in time here, I want to talk about a little of the setup here.
But you mentioned the conflict going on with Boko Haram in Nigeria and then the jihadis left over from the Libya war in Mali and all this going on in Northwestern Africa, I guess you'd call it.
Well, I don't know if you saw this.
I think it's brand new out today.
The piece by Nick Turse in The Intercept where the Pentagon is spinning their fear of a Boko Haram, Libyan al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab super state that will rule all of North Africa if we don't stop them.
And that's the threat that we're preventing, they say.
Yeah, I saw that article.
I mean, I think that was kind of the idea, let's say after 9-11, when the US and Washington suddenly became very afraid of these terrorist organizations operating in kind of these scary Africa backwaters where there was no stable government to begin with.
And what if terrorism flourished there?
I think as Nick Turse points out in that article, a lot of people who were looking at that assessment viewed it as a bit sophomoric or a very extreme idea of what could possibly happen if the US military pulled out of that part of the country.
I mean, certainly the former head of US Africa Command, AFRICOM, Bolduc, has said that there are still legitimate concerns of terrorism thriving across the continent if there is no effort put into or no resources put into combating terrorism.
However, I would agree with people that Nick Turse spoke with to say that if this idea of a kind of massive catastrophe in North Africa where you have all of these terrorist organizations suddenly working together and supplanting the state in all these different countries, it's pretty extreme.
And I have a lot of difficulty actually imagining that coming true.
But again, as we're looking at this kind of shift in defense policy now where we're focusing less on counterterrorism, or Madafons focused less on counterterrorism and more on the threats posed by China and Russia, of course you're going to have AFRICOM where US Africa Command, where people I think are already questioning what is the US military doing in Africa, really trying to justify its presence and resources by painting this kind of very scary picture of what happens if the US doesn't focus on counterterrorism in parts of Africa.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny.
I'm old enough to remember when America knocked off the secular dictatorship in Libya.
And in fact, I even remember what you talk about in this article when George Bush hired the Ethiopians to invade and overthrow what you I think quite correctly call this conservative, moderate, Islamic Courts Union government in Somalia that his CIA support for these warlords had provoked into existence in the first place, really.
And then the war against them that led to all of this crisis.
And so it's kind of hard to take these guys seriously, that they're the ones that we have to depend on to protect us from the threats that they personally in some cases created here.
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question of how we learned lessons from that period.
I mean, that wasn't even that long ago.
That was less than two decades ago that I think even after when the CIA started getting involved with warlords in Somalia, you know, in the early 2000s, you know, maybe five or so years afterward.
People in Somalia were admitting that that was a huge mistake.
That kind of plan of, OK, we'll invest in these warlords to help us target and kill members of Al-Qaeda and then create a stable Somalia was, you know, an utter failure.
And then there was a lot of local backlash to the Ethiopian invasion.
This is also, you know, keep in mind that Ethiopia and Somalia have, you know, for a long time had very strong animosities.
There's a lot of local backlash against the Ethiopian invasion, against what the Ethiopian military was doing as they were invading Somalia.
And that did help, you know, create this splinter group from what was a very moderate Islamic Support Union that became Al-Shabaab.
So I think it is good to question, you know, whether the U.S. has learned the lessons in Somalia, at least from that period.
Or at the very least, kind of learned as Braun Bruton put it well to me, that it's very difficult for, you know, a foreign nation or foreign actors to successfully meddle in Somalia.
And until, you know, Somalis themselves are taking the reins and demonstrating and using political will to create a more stable country, you know, essentially no amount of foreign meddling will necessarily create that stability for the country.
And that's a lesson to, you know, have learned in Somalia.
And also a lesson we could have learned from elsewhere, you know, in the Middle East and other parts of Africa as well.
Yeah.
Well, let me challenge you a little bit on that then.
Because, you know, in that case, your article really should say we should just leave these people alone instead of, geez, it's really hard to figure out how exactly to get this right.
We can't get this right and we should stop.
Yeah.
I mean, again, I'm a journalist.
I'm reporting on what I see on the ground.
And, you know, I do include Braun Bruton's voice.
He's been a very, you know, has been a big advocate for either, you know, leave Somalia alone or have there be direct U.S. military intervention that will wipe out al-Shabaab and then hand it over to the Somalis.
But again, like what we've seen is a lot of confusion.
And I think also, in addition to confusion, if we're looking at a much larger trend of what happens when the State Department's authority is eroded, you know, over the last 20 years, and then that is accelerated under this administration, Somalia is kind of the perfect example of then what happens when the Pentagon is leading foreign policymaking.
What happens when, you know, Navy SEALs on the ground are essentially being considered like diplomats because they're the ones in the room when conversations about state building and politics is happening.
And I think he talked to, you know, anyone in the State Department, and that's a really, you know, if we think that we've, that the U.S. has made mistakes in years past in terms of how to handle state building efforts, then when with an even weaker State Department and even more powerful Pentagon, that's something that I think we should all be, you know, it's very easy just to look at D.C. right now in terms of news.
It's something that we should be paying attention to.
Abroad as well, as we're seeing the kind of impact of, you know, what's happening in D.C. abroad.
Yeah.
Hey, by the way, sorry to go back to this real quick, but I'm interested.
What do you think is the best source or the best thing to read or know about how the Bush administration influenced the Ethiopians to get them to invade in Christmas 2006 there?
Other than just the post.
I would actually go back to, there was a lot of documents that came out from WikiLeaks about the support for the Ethiopian invasion into Somalia.
So, you know, primary source, I would go to WikiLeaks.
Otherwise, you know, there was a lot kind of written about that after the fact, certainly as some of those documents were made public, but also as public officials began to realize the negative impact that it had.
And Mark Mazzotti was actually reporting on a lot of that.
And Brian Bruton, again, at the Atlantic Council, was very vocal about the ramifications of that invasion as well.
Right.
Well, I mean, a lot of it was right there in The Washington Post, including special operations forces and the CIA helping with the invasion in real time as it began.
So and then the rendition of prisoners and all kinds of things.
Oh, and speaking of which, too, I wonder if I'm sure you probably heard of these stories by Jeremy Scahill and later by Eli Lake, who seemed credible in this instance anyway, that they had found torture prisons being run with, you know, American, you know, certainly some kind, the Americans were implicated in some way in the one that Scahill found.
I don't know if Lake reported on that part of it, but that people were being brutalized, to say the least, in the prisons of the American-backed regime there with some American complicity, I guess is the word I was looking for there.
Do you know about that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Scahill found, and this is, it was a few years ago when he was on a reporting trip to Mogadishu, where CIA black sites in Mogadishu, and even in there's a small green zone in Mogadishu National Airport compound, or MIA.
So he was looking into CIA black sites there, where interesting, the most interesting thing about that report was actually that they were, he had uncovered that the CIA was picking people up from Kenya and bringing them to Somalia in order to interrogate them.
So, so yeah, I mean, again, as we're looking at the CIA's presence in Somalia, I think that it's only grown over the last couple of years.
And you see that in a very visible way in these two units, Gashan and Oran, that are part of the Somali intelligence agency, that essentially work for the CIA.
They're trained by the CIA, they're housed inside the green zone.
They work directly with U.S. special operators to, you know, gather intelligence for their targeting purposes.
So that investment has certainly increased.
And, and yeah, I mean, I'm not sure, again, I think the kind of big question where you think is in America and Somalia is whether we're actually, you know, learning lessons of, of local intelligence.
If we're recognizing, you know, A, just how complicated things are, but B, if we've gotten any better at being able to identify who is al-Shabaab and who isn't, when oftentimes even the Somalis, it can be confusing about who is al-Shabaab and who isn't.
Because you say you can pick up someone's phone and say, look, you've called, you know, an al-Shabaab commander.
Like, you must be part of al-Shabaab.
And they'll say, no, I have to pay them taxes because my farm is in territory that's controlled by al-Shabaab.
That's why I've been in communication with them.
So there's all these different kind of levels of gray zones that I think people still question whether, you know, the American military has really figured out how to operate within that kind of a very complex operating environment.
Well, and now, so do you know if, well, two things.
Do you know if the CIA is still involved in the interrogations and the treatment of these people and the running of these prisons to whatever degree?
And then also, how are those human rights going these days?
I can't say definitively if the CIA still has black sites in Somalia.
I would speculate that they do.
And in terms of, I mean, when it comes to human rights and dealing with Somalia generally, I think my biggest question has always been when you're operating as AFRICOM does under this kind of idea of African solutions to African problems, which sounds great on the surface, but could also be interpreted as you're using members of the Somali National Army, members of the Somali intelligence agency.
When those people are operating under, you know, commands from American soldiers and they say kill civilians, then who is held accountable?
And can Americans, even if they are planning, you know, and conceiving these operations, you know, if there are civilians killed, if they accidentally target civilians because they haven't sufficiently vetted information about who the people are that they are targeting, then who is held accountable?
Is it the Somali National Army?
Is it the Somali intelligence agency?
Can Americans also be held accountable for that?
And that's a question we have not seen answered.
But we've seen it come up not just in Somalia, but Human Rights Watch came out with a report about American trained, American trained army in Cameroon who has seen brutalizing civilians.
And again, what is the culpability of the U.S. there if we are funding and training that kind of an army?
When a politician recently in Uganda was brutally arrested and, you know, other supporters of him were brutalized, the Ugandan army that was doing that were, you know, armed with the same kind of weapons that the U.S. had paid for and armed them with in years past.
So, again, like those kinds of questions in terms of accountability and what happens when America's African partners commit human rights abuses, those haven't even been touched yet.
I think that's, again, a very big question moving forward.
If the U.S.'s modus operandi across the continent is to work through these African partners.
And that's something I think deserves far greater scrutiny.
Yeah.
Well, I don't have my laugh track button with me, but it's illegal.
The Leahy law says that you can't support governments that abuse human rights.
And unless you have a waiver.
Unless you have a waiver.
So, I don't know.
Maybe they have a waiver in this circumstance.
Christine, I'm not sure.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
But, again, for all those reasons, that's why I think that's going to be a very big question moving forward.
And hopefully it will come under greater scrutiny as we see this kind of continued support for local African militaries.
Right.
And by the way, you know, where we started this with the near certainty, the rules under Obama that when you do a drone strike, you have to have near certainty that no civilians will be killed.
Well, they still killed civilians quite regularly under that program.
So, do we know how much worse it's gotten for the civilians under the new regime?
That's a good question, actually.
So, again, if you look at this kind of history of, you know, Obama expanded, like look at the CIA, expanded their ability to conduct drone strikes.
He scaled it back only after there were many civilians killed.
The administration was called out for that.
And then we've seen that scaling back be completely dismantled.
In Somalia, it's always been very, very difficult for independent groups to track and identify when civilians have been killed.
And a part of that is, again, because of the gray zone in which Somalia exists, where to an extent you could say that, you know, and you could claim that anyone is al-Shabaab.
And so, and because these strikes happen in al-Shabaab held territory, you know, as a foreigner, as a human rights researcher, you can't actually go out there and see who exactly is killed.
And so then you're forced to kind of rely on, A, local accounts and interviews over the phone with people.
When people are brought to Mogadishu, then, you know, you can interview them there.
And see, you know, what, try to figure out from, you know, what they're telling you from other eyewitness accounts, what it was that happened where they were killed.
But I think there has been relatively no accountability for any civilians that are injured or killed.
I do believe there are civilians who have been accidentally injured and killed in American drone strikes.
But we don't have any good sense of those numbers because it's so difficult for watch groups, for watchdogs, for journalists to, you know, verify every single incident where that happened.
And I mean, AFRICOM has denied any, any allegations, every allegation of civilian casualties in Somalia, which would mean that in one of the most complicated operating environments where it is incredibly difficult to decipher who is and who isn't al-Shabaab, where if you're tracking, you know, vehicle-borne IED and there's a bit of cloud cover and someone happens to get into that vehicle because they're hitching a ride, you know, you might not see that.
To claim in those very difficult, in a very difficult environment that there have been absolutely no civilian casualties really makes me question the extent to which they're investigating civilian casualties.
And, you know, I would hope moving forward as there, again, has been this very noticeable increase in drone strikes that, you know, more organizations and a lot of resources, more watchdog groups can begin to really look into that question because right now there's essentially no kind of independent accountability on American drone strikes.
And that should be worrying to anyone who thinks about what the US is doing abroad and cares that civilians are not being killed recklessly in, you know, American air wars.
Right.
Well, and it's airwars.org.
They're the only ones who are trying to count, I think, at this point and keep count of strikes in Somalia there.
But, you know, I know that they have a hard time.
They wouldn't claim to be complete in their records by a long shot, I don't think.
Yeah.
And I mean, they don't, again, it's difficult when you don't have anyone on the ground to be able to ARB people who are going to hospitals who, you know, civilians who are injured or civilians who are killed in the course of strikes.
So you can keep track of, you know, local reporting on strikes that are happening, local reporting on if civilians are injured, but verifying that becomes very difficult.
And that also then means that it's very easy for, you know, AFRICOM to deny any civilian casualties because they know how difficult it is to verify them.
Yeah.
Well, so, well, I'm sorry to kind of jump around a little bit, but I was thinking about what we were talking about before, about how American intervention had really helped to bring about the al-Shabaab crisis in the first place back when they were overreacting in the early 2000s there and kind of caused this.
And then the argument about, you know, the military intervention against them and all that kind of thing.
But I wonder if we really follow the argument to its conclusion and the Americans and the AU forces and whatever just stopped intervening there.
Might not al-Shabaab just dry up?
I mean, how much of the problem with them is that they really have foreign enemy occupiers to fight?
How likely do you think it would be that maybe they would just go ahead and drop their rifles and get jobs if the foreign intervention would cease?
Since after all, they don't really have, it doesn't sound like they're anywhere near having the power to take the capital city over again or anything like that, right?
I mean, that's a good question.
And it's hard to answer because it's hypothetical.
But I would say that by the time that al-Shabaab, you know, came into existence, by that point, I wonder whether, you know, if there wasn't any African intervention, if there wasn't any American or foreign intervention, I actually probably think that they might still hold the capital or at least have held it for much longer than they did.
Because again, in a sense, the damage had been done by the time that members of a very moderate Islamic group decided to become a very militant Islamic group that wanted to create a very strict version of an Islamic state in Somalia.
And again, if you talk to some folks at the Atlantic Council, I'll tell you that there should have been at that point, instead of this kind of proxy American intervention, there should have been direct American intervention in order to wipe that group out and then move on.
But, you know, at that point, it was still, you know, what, 15 years after Black Hawk Down.
And so there's still, I think, a sentiment that there should never be a direct American intervention in Somalia.
Now, I do think that, again, we've seen airstrikes in particular have been able to keep the group at bay to an extent.
There are less, again, there's visibly less BBIDs in Mogadishu that, you know, kill a lot of civilians.
In October of last year, there was a BBID that killed over 500 Somalis.
It was the biggest terrorist attack in the world since 9-11.
So they are still very capable.
But again, it's kind of this critical, the U.S. is now playing this kind of critical role in at least being able to keep the group at bay.
Because I think, again, since Al-Sharab was created, we were kind of far past the point of, you know, should we just completely pull out?
You know, now maybe, again, it's hard to say hypothetical, but now maybe there needs to be more ways of, again, holding Somali politicians accountable, making sure that they are actually, they actually have the political will to rebuild their country.
A lot of Somali politicians are dual citizens in the States and other European countries.
Are there ways of making sure, you know, are there ways of holding them accountable, recognizing that they still hold an American passport?
That's something I think should be explored further.
But at this point, I think, you know, the U.S. is so kind of embroiled now in the counterterrorism fight in Somalia that it's hard to imagine what would happen if they completely pulled out.
I would say certainly that Al-Sharab would still control probably larger swaths of territory in the region.
But again, that's not to say that what the U.S. is doing now is, you know, ushering in the end of the group, because it isn't.
It's keeping them at bay.
And until you have, you know, much stronger governing institutions, that will be the case.
Because, you know, Al-Sharab is a group that drives a lot of its strategic power from its ability to provide basic goods and services to people in territories it controls.
You know, they collect taxes.
They, if you are driving down a road controlled by Al-Sharab and you pay, you know, tax to use the road, you'll get a receipt so that no one down the road can, you know, extort you for more money.
They're able to provide, you know, to a degree, you know, health care.
And they're, again, a basic public good that the Somali federal government, that regional government, are still not able to provide.
So, in some cases, I know people in Mogadishu who, you know, Mogadishu is not under Al-Sharab's control, but they sometimes decide to go to Al-Sharab run courts because they will get a swift and decisive decision on, you know, whatever their legal dispute is, whereas the Somali government court can't do that and they can't enforce them.
So, until you start looking at those kind of political solutions, we're never going to see an end to Al-Sharab in Somalia.
Well, when did this interview turn to start talking about Afghanistan?
I thought we were talking about Somalia.
Oh, no, you are talking about Somalia.
It's the exact same situation.
I get it.
Yeah, there are many, many parallels.
But, again, in Somalia, you're trying to, you know, state-build with a fraction of the government, a fraction of the funding that the U.S. used in Afghanistan, which is kind of telling of what you can expect of the result.
Yeah, well, and as bad as it already is, it sounds like that may be a blessing in disguise.
You know, if they doubled it, they might make everything that much worse.
All right, well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show.
It's really been very interesting, Christina.
Yeah, thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it.
All right, you guys, that's Christina Goldbaum.
She wrote this piece for The Atlantic, and it's also at Defense One, The War on Terror Still Grows in Somalia.
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.
