09/26/08 – Ken Menkhaus – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org, Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's supposed to just be the first hour, but I've heard Dr. Paul express interest in this story himself before, so I'm going to go ahead and leave the stream on for everyone listening over at Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty website.
And I thank the Campaign for Liberty for working with me all this week to host all these economists to talk about the financial crisis.
It's been great, and I hope you guys have enjoyed it.
Our next guest on the show is Ken Menkaus.
He's an associate professor of political science at Davidson College, and he's written this study of the current regime change situation in Somalia.
You can find it at EnoughProject.org.
It's called Somalia, a country in peril, a policy nightmare.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you.
I'm very glad to have you here.
I'm looking forward to asking you about history in Somalia going back a ways, but if we could just start in 2004, where you say in your story that the U.S. bad guys lost, and you said that to the United States' credit, they at least tried to work out some kind of negotiation between the Islamic Court's union on one side, and I'm not certain who on the other side, and that that didn't work, and then how that led up to the situation where America sponsored the Ethiopian regime change operation there in December of 2006.
To back up just a little bit, Somalia's been without a functioning central government now for 18 years, and that's the broader context.
This is the longest-running instance of complete state collapse in the modern era.
What we had in 2004 was the establishment, through a peace negotiation, of a transitional federal government, but it was a government on paper only.
Then what happened is the United States government, concerned about the possibility that Somalia was being used as a safe haven for a small number of East Africa al-Qaeda operatives, began working through armed non-state actors, militia leaders, warlords, and others, to try to monitor and apprehend what was called the high-value targets.
The American-backed militia leaders got into a war with an ascendant group of Islamists who were trying to establish control over neighborhoods in the capital.
That war produced a major victory for the Islamists.
The U.S.
-backed militia leaders were ousted from the city, and for six months we had Islamist government in not only Somalia's capital, but in most of southern Somalia, and it was a very interesting period, because they actually ruled.
They were able to administer peace and law and order in most of the city and countryside, and as a result were pretty popular among Somalis, including a lot of Somalis who were not Islamists themselves.
The negotiations that you just referred to was an attempt by the United States to broker a deal between this transitional federal government that had been created, but had never been able to actually establish itself inside the country, and the Islamists, and those negotiations unfortunately went south.
Hardliners on both sides were unwilling to entertain the possibility of power sharing, and meanwhile some hardliners in the Islamists started making provocative moves toward neighboring Ethiopia, which is a very large U.S. ally, about half Christian, half Muslim, very nervous about the prospect of having a radical Islamist government on its borders, and so Ethiopia engaged in a military offensive in 2006, December 2006, and ousted the Islamists, and that's where we stand today.
We've got for the past two years an Ethiopian military occupation of the capital and surrounding areas, and the predictable insurgency that has arisen against that occupation, which has been devastating for Somalia.
Okay, now when you talked about the U.S.
-backed militias, what kind of constituency did they have inside Somalia?
Mainly clan-based constituency, and not very strong.
Most of these guys were pretty unpopular.
They were viewed as warlords in the areas that they controlled.
Not all of them.
Some had a little bit more of a bona fide constituency than others, but generally not terribly popular.
So I wonder if that's a good-faith negotiation, or simply an American attempt to force these people to accept a coalition with people who there's no reason why they should, other than because we're trying to make them.
Well in this case, once those militia and warlords were defeated, the negotiations we were trying to broker were between this transitional federal government and the Islamists, and the transitional federal government, they weren't that same group of warlords that we were just referring to.
They were a third group.
No, it's really complicated.
I mean, it's hard to keep track of all these things.
But the general point that you raise is valid, that we have, we meaning the international community broadly speaking, have often on over the past 17 years, sought to bring militia leaders to the table to try to broker a deal, and it has never been able to stick.
And that raises the question, are these guys able or willing to actually set up a government?
One of the observations that some have raised is that the power to destroy isn't the same as the power to govern.
These guys are essentially spoilers.
They can block governments from becoming operational, but they really have no interest in seeing one set up.
Oh boy, there's so many topics to tackle here.
First of all, when you talk about the warlords, I read somewhere that this includes the son of the bad guy, Adid, from Black Hawk Down back in 1993.
His son, who is a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. Marines and is apparently an engineer, did go to Somalia to take the place of his father, who was killed in a street battle in 1996.
He is really a minor player in all of this.
At this point, he never had the muscle that his father had, and he's also switched sides three or four times.
He's been supportive of the Ethiopians, and then he has switched sides against them.
Typical of many of these militia leaders, they're really driven very much by the politics of expediency.
Whoever seems to be able to deliver them some resources at that time, they'll back.
What about the Bush administration?
Seems like they've switched sides too, right?
Or he just switched sides?
Oh yeah, there was a bloodbath within the U.S. government over these policies in Somalia.
When the militia leaders who were defeated by the Islamists lost, there was a lot of finger-pointing in the U.S. government about some departments and agencies not really having a very good idea of what was going on inside Somalia and backing the wrong horse.
There was a power struggle between them and the State Department, which came in to try to broker the peace deal.
There continues to be, and this is one of the themes I was trying to explore in my report, there continues to be internal divisions in the U.S. government over conflicting agendas.
We've got a humanitarian agenda where parts of the U.S. government are trying desperately to get food into the 2.5 million Somalis who are on the verge of starvation.
This is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and there's no access because of insecurity.
We've got another branch of the U.S. government that's trying to engage in state-building to shore up this increasingly desperate transitional federal government.
And then we continue to have counterterrorism agendas, which are working through armed non-state actors around rather than with the transitional federal government.
All three of those agendas are working at cross-purposes, and it is just well beyond a point where we need to de-conflict those different agendas and try to get the U.S. government working in a single direction in Somalia.
Boy, how about hands-off?
That's a start, if you ask me.
Well, we've tried that, too.
After Black Hawk Down, the United States left Somalia.
Somalia was really a third rail for American policymakers for a long, long time.
No one wanted to get near Somalia.
It had a bad reputation as a career-damaging country, and so there was a lengthy period of benign neglect, both on the part of the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the international community.
But there are people who say that was bad, too, because this was a country that was simmering and getting worse, and people should have been engaging on it.
I think the ideal situation is constructive, positive engagement.
I sometimes despair of the world's ability to pull that off in Somalia.
We have too often become part of the problem rather than part of the solution there.
All right.
Now, another thing I want to get to that you talked about was the Islamist, because I don't think that you necessarily meant it this way, but that's a pretty loaded term.
That means Osama bin Laden, we've got to kill him, I think, to a lot of people.
And so I want to know just how scary this Islamic Courts Union was.
But before we get to that, and maybe one answer can lead to the other, I want to see if you can address the idea that the anarchy in Somalia was actually the best time they'd had in generations.
I've read, I forgot who wrote something in The Atlantic like this, and Alan Bock at Antiwar.com covered this quite a bit, and they said that this is the best economy they ever had.
There were no tariffs at the port, and I guess the Mogadishu port, if that's the port town, I forget, that everybody was making money, the best cell phone and computer service anywhere in Africa, and things were actually going pretty well, that the Islamic Courts Union was sort of the culmination of that, that they finally decided rather than having a central state, they would go with the local ministers and oldest uncles in the neighborhood to resolve disputes.
They would have a very minimalist state, if you could call it a state at all, and let everybody make some money.
I mean, obviously, that's painting a very rosy picture, but is there not some truth to that?
There is some truth to that.
So my answer to you would be yes and no.
It is true that in this long period of state collapse, there have been sectors of the Somali economy that have thrived.
The trans-shipment commerce, because there's no customs, has meant that Somalia has turned into, or for a while, turned into the world's largest duty-free shop, and goods were smuggled across borders into Kenya and elsewhere, and made a lot of money.
Telecommunications industries and remittance industries blossomed in Somalia.
There was a lot of entrepreneurial energy there.
There were a number of places in the economy that did reasonably well.
I have extensively interviewed Somali business people, though, over the years, and they consistently say this, that in the short term, there were opportunities to exploit because there was no taxes and no government restrictions.
But in the longer run, we're running into impediments, that we need a regulatory environment.
We do need security that's provided by a state.
We need someone to be able to police our shores so that we don't have this epidemic of piracy.
So they would like a state, but they would like a state that creates an enabling environment for business as opposed to one that's predatory.
And the problem has been, every time a state isn't set up in Somalia, it has been predatory toward everyone, the private sector, civil society, the works.
And so they're getting increasingly reluctant to support state-building efforts as a result.
Well, and now, were the Islamic Court unions, I know that they closed down the local movie theater and so forth, but were they predatory?
They were not part of this idea of a minimalist state.
They were actually very much attempting to set up a central state, a robust Islamic government.
They never had the opportunity to do it.
They were only in power for six months.
But there were clear indications that they were looking to maximize their control over both certain parts of the economy, but more importantly, social life in the country.
Well, now, the Washington Post says that there were three suspects wanted for questioning by the FBI for the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings in 1998, and that that's why we sponsored this regime change.
One, two, three individual suspects wanted for questioning.
Ken?
This brings up the whole question of proportionality.
There is no doubt that the number of what the U.S. government calls high-value targets, these are individuals from East Africa who are implicated in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998.
These are bad guys.
These are guys who have a lot of blood, mainly Kenyan and Tanzanian blood, on their hands.
There's no doubt that they're dangerous.
The problem has been that in our pursuit of those, that very small number, and people debate the exact number, maybe three, maybe five, maybe ten, it doesn't really matter, it's a small number, that we have been partially responsible for overturning an entire country, creating levels of displacement and death that are really all out of proportion.
Well, I'm not so certain who we are, but this government...
We in this case, meaning the United States.
Right.
I'm just going to be facetious there to make sure I make that distinction, but it is 100% this government's fault.
The Ethiopians wouldn't have done this if they hadn't been given the order by George Bush.
I will take issue with that.
The Ethiopians are a very strong government in the Horn of Africa.
They are quite dedicated to doing what they think is in their interest.
They do not take orders from the United States.
Well, they sure had help, didn't they, with 730 gunships coming in?
Absolutely.
They were going to go in with or without our support once we understood that they were committed to going in, the United States, through full backing behind Ethiopia.
But this is a relationship that's a lot rockier than it looks on the surface between Ethiopia and the United States when it comes to Somalia and when it comes to other issues.
It's important to understand that that was not simply the United States unleashing a client or subcontracting the war on terror out in Somalia, it was a lot more complicated.
Well, what if George Bush had said, listen, I want you to not do this?
Would they have still done it?
This is going to take some time.
Someday the historians will be able to give us a complete answer on this.
I'm sorry, I'm asking you to do a counterfactual history for us here, which is just make-believe.
But still, there's some context to be had here.
There are things we know and things we don't know about what happened in 2006.
We know that the Ethiopians were initially ready to act against the Islamists at a time when the United States was saying, no, no, we think we can work out a power-sharing agreement.
So there was actually a period where we were trying successfully to restrain the Ethiopians.
At some point, we gave up when the Islamist hardliners, the hardliners in this umbrella group seemed to be ascendant.
At that point, there was some green light given to Ethiopia to go ahead.
But again, this was not us telling Ethiopia to do anything.
It was us actually, for a time, restraining them.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, shades of gray are important.
The truth is in the details, including what you mentioned, a number that I hadn't heard before, 2.5 million on the brink of starvation.
I had heard that there were as many as 700,000 refugees from Mogadishu.
But I guess this 2.5 million, that sounds like almost the entire population of the country is now about to die.
It's the entire population of the country.
And it's a perfect storm in terms of a humanitarian crisis in Somalia.
It's a result of 700,000 people being displaced, a drought, lack of humanitarian space because people and aid agency personnel are being attacked by paramilitaries and extremists on all sides, hyperinflation, this spike in global food prices and fuel.
Everything has come together at the wrong moment.
And people's coping mechanisms have been eroded to the point where we're now looking at a massive humanitarian crisis.
I mean, Somalia, as anywhere in the world, households have ways of coping with these hardships and they'll cut back to one meal a day.
They'll start eating famine food, you know, they'll sell off their personal assets.
And what we can learn on the ground now is that they're out of those coping mechanisms.
And so we're all fearing the worst in the coming six months.
Wow, so all this time we've been covering this thing, this was the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, apart from Iraq.
Oh, it's, yeah, I know, the aid agency has been saying this for months now, that this is worse than Darfur.
Wow, that's really incredible.
So, and you explain also in your study here, again, it's called Somalia, Country in Peril, a Policy Nightmare by Ken Menkaus, you talk about how the economy basically doesn't even exist, there's no trade really at all now?
Yeah, this economy that we talked about earlier, that had blossomed in the late 1990s, has been almost entirely shut down by the fighting and insecurity, by extortionate demands on the part of paramilitaries, there's over 400 checkpoints on Somalia's roads, and these militia are charging up to $500 per vehicle to get things passed, so that's going to kill commerce.
Yeah, nobody's going to have any money to pay them anything, these guys are real geniuses.
I mean, if you're going to be a troll on the bridge, you've got to charge a reasonable rate or people are going to not come by anymore, I don't know.
And also we have this, well, indefinite, I guess there's no time horizon, they call it now, for withdrawal of the Ethiopian army and the regime they're trying to install there, and so as long as there's an occupation, this insurgency is just getting stronger and stronger, right?
Well, this is my argument, and I think most people agree with this interpretation, is that the principal driver of the insurgency right now is the continued presence of Ethiopian forces, which is very, very unpopular in Somalia.
These are historic rivals, and so it's been a humiliation to be occupied by Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian government has been giving signals that it wants to withdraw.
I think that the available evidence that we've got suggests that this has been a political and financial drain on Ethiopia of some magnitude, and they would really like to get out if they can, but they want an honorable way out.
They don't want to just withdraw and have the jihadists say, you know, we defeated Ethiopians, and so they're looking to link their withdrawal to a peace accord that was recently signed in the neighboring country of Djibouti, and we'll see if that goes.
If the Ethiopians withdraw, the insurgency will still exist.
The armed violence will continue, it'll take on different forms.
There'll be a lot of communal violence, I think, Somali on Somali violence next.
Well, occasionally we hear reports that American submarines are firing cruise missiles at so-called al-Qaeda targets, or perhaps actual al-Qaeda targets inside Somalia.
Instead, they, of course, usually just kill women and children in their homes, and that kind of thing.
To what degree is this policy, or the policy of the Ethiopian government now being done in the cooperation of the United States, or with the cooperation of the United States, or on their orders?
Less than you think.
They do cooperate, as I understand it, they cooperate on matters of intelligence.
But the thing to keep in mind is that the United States and Ethiopia are actually fighting two different wars in the Horn of Africa.
Ethiopia is principally trying to prevent Somalia from becoming a base for Somali and other regional insurgencies that would attack Ethiopia, of which there are a number.
They are less concerned about al-Qaeda.
The United States is exclusively concerned with al-Qaeda.
They could care, well, I don't know if they could care less.
They don't care much about these regional insurgency groups like the Ogaden National Liberation Front and the Arobo Liberation Front.
And so the US, those missile attacks that you referred to, that have happened on three or four occasions in the past two years, have been designed to hit very specific individuals, either foreigners or top Somali jihadists in the group called the Shabab, which the United States recently designated a terrorist group.
Well, so that really sounds like good news from my point of view, and I'm sorry for editorializing all over your interview here, but the US doesn't care about these local regional groups.
That's really great.
They're actually trying to make distinctions and differences between bad brown people they want to murder in the world, huh?
I wouldn't put it exactly like that, but they're after a small number of individuals they hold responsible for the bombing of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
Wow.
Well, geez, if that was all that they were doing, I guess I would support it too bad as all of the rest of these consequences.
As you said- That's the problem, is the disproportionality.
You said it was the highest estimate was there were 10 of these guys.
That's still less than a dozen, and all of this for that is, boy.
Well, that's why many of us are very, very upset with US policy.
We think that it has resulted in massively disproportionate pain on the Somali people in pursuit of a small number of high value targets, and the worst part is if you want to take a narrow view focused just on US national securities, it's actually made us less secure rather than more secure because the net result is that Somalis are radically angry at the United States.
There's a level of virulent anti-Americanism in the country that was never there before.
That was never there before.
No, I mean, Somalis, you know, we're sometimes irritated with different, you know, everyone's irritated with everyone else at times, but there was never this level, at least in my experience in 20 years in the country, there's never been this level of anti-Americanism across the board.
Now, the good news is, Somali colleagues of mine say, what we're angry about is your policies and the impact it's had in Somalia.
If you change those policies, the anger would go away, the radicalism would go away.
This is not Al-Qaeda style radicalism where we're trying to, you know, we see this as an existential conflict with the West.
There's nothing like that going on in Somalia, but make no mistake, the longer this goes on, the more Somalis are going to be inclined to gravitate toward groups that do espouse that kind of Al-Qaeda view, and that would not be good for the United States and it would certainly not be good for Somalia.
That is such an important point, and it's one that I think probably most regular people would agree if they heard it at least one time.
It's not the kind of argument we hear on the news, and it's the kind of argument that I don't believe very many people with power even really understand.
In fact, in the summer of 2006, Osama bin Laden put out a podcast where he said, everyone get ready, the Americans are going back to Somalia, and hopefully soon they'll come also to Sudan, and we will continue to fight our holy jihad there.
And our policy makers are doing exactly what he wants, and I'm glad to hear you emphasize that no, really, if we cooled it, then they would probably, you know, things would be alright, we wouldn't have generation-long grudges, but we're pushing it, we're doing exactly what our enemies would like us to do.
I agree, and it's easy to say this policy is a disaster, and to be honest, most people that I speak to in embassies, both in the US government and outside, are privately acknowledging that this is not at all the outcome that anyone wanted to see.
The bigger, more difficult question is, so what do we do?
And how do we change the course of these policies?
And that is not so simple right now, that's going to take a lot of work.
Well, you know, the default answer is going to be put in UN troops with baby blue helmets.
That's not going to happen.
No?
I mean, if it's out there as a proposal, it's just not going to happen.
The UN is very reluctant to be inserted again in Somalia after the first bad experience, and there are very few countries that seem interested in injecting their forces into what is getting to be a worse and worse situation.
There are already African Union peacekeepers there now, and they have been besieged over the past 48 hours by the insurgents.
I mean, this whole thing is changing very quickly.
There may be no transitional federal government or African Union force in Somalia in a few months if it keeps up at this rate.
In that you mean the so-called insurgents will win?
They'll win, yeah.
And drive the Ethiopian army out?
No, the Ethiopian army will probably withdraw strategically toward its borders, create a buffer zone.
It's a strong army.
They're not going to be driven out.
If they see that there's no hope, at this point they're playing whack-a-mole.
The insurgents control almost the entire country.
And I think that they've come to realize that this is a hopeless mission for them.
And of course, as long as the fighting continues, the soldiers get first, or the people doing the fighting, if you can call them soldiers, they get first priority on what little food resources there are while everybody else is starving.
Not only that, but in some cases they're part of the looting of civilians.
Okay, now it's unforgivable for me to ask you this with about four minutes left in the show, but the last time I interviewed a gentleman from, his name was Abdul Qadir Abdirahman from Somali Cause just a few weeks back, and the comment section on the archive entry at Antiwar.com was alive for weeks with Somalis fighting among each other, or Somali-Americans I think mostly, fighting among each other.
And the fight is all about the people from Somaliland versus the rest, and I wonder if you can help give us the very briefest history and sort of explanation of the differences and what that portends for the future of the conflict there.
Right, we've got this corner of Somalia called Somaliland in the northwest part of the country, which declared a unilateral secession from the rest of the country in May of 1991.
And they have their historical arguments for why this is a dissolution of union, and they have every legal right to do this.
There are other Somalis who are vehemently opposed to that secession.
They argue that this has to be something that all Somalis have a say in, and frankly, feelings are very, very strong on these two sides.
I've tried very hard to stay out of it and stay agnostic on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, and I have every intention to continue to do so.
I will say this.
The worse things get in the rest of Somalia, the more discussion emerges in the international community about, well, then shouldn't we just recognize Somaliland?
Because it has been relatively successful in promoting stability and peace, democracy.
It's a very, I mean, it's a vibrant democracy.
It's not perfect.
There's all kinds of shenanigans go on there like everywhere else, but it's doing better than almost any other part of the Horn of Africa, and yet it's unrecognized.
So the Ethiopians aren't even messing with them at all?
Well, they're an ally of the Ethiopians, but Ethiopia is supporting them, as are the United States and other countries, quietly, but not recognizing them diplomatically.
Well, that still has got to breed a lot of resentment on the ground there.
It's like bringing the Indians into Afghanistan and surrounding Pakistan with them, kind of thing.
I mean, it's basically Somaliland has done this on their own.
I mean, I should be careful, you know, if your listeners should understand that this is not a puppet government that's been propped up by anyone.
They really have done what they've accomplished on their own and are quite proud of that, and rightly so.
I guess my position on all this is whatever happens with Somaliland and the rest of Somalia, our number one priority must be to protect and expand security and basic livelihoods for Somali people, wherever they live.
If recognizing Somaliland compromises that, if it destabilizes Somaliland, then we need to think twice before going down that road.
I do think that conversation is coming up again in the next year or two, I suspect it will be.
And, you know, the most important thing is answering the question, will this actually make Somalia safer or less safe?
Because it's one of the few safe havens left, you know, a lot of southern Somalis have fled to Somaliland and have been hosted there over the past year.
And that's not a small thing to have that safe haven for the Somali people.
Yeah, that should breed the opposite of resentment, let's hope, at least one little silver lining.
Well, most people are, you know, most Somalis actually are pretty pragmatic about all this.
The business community, for instance, they've all got partnerships between Somaliland and Somalia.
They work together.
Civil society works together.
It's just that at a political level, this is a very, very sensitive issue.
More sensitive, I think, than most outsiders appreciate.
Right.
Okay.
Now, I'm sorry, can I keep you just another couple of minutes?
Sure.
I don't think I'm running over anybody else's show next.
The humanitarian crisis, the people starving to death, obviously, as you said, number one priority is there's got to be security of some kind.
We have to have an end to the fighting.
And then when you have, as you describe it, and I'm taking your word for it, more than a million people on the brink of starving to death, somebody's got to do something.
And yet, we have that local information problem and we have, presumably, in the future, if we can ever get security there, we will have liberal do-gooders from all over the world coming with their aid in ways that actually disrupt the local economy and make it harder for people to get back on their feet there by flooding their market with things that they don't quite need and those kinds of things.
I know that's been a problem in the past in that country.
It has.
It's a general problem with famine relief that you run the risk of distorting local economies.
But that's the bad news.
The good news is that the humanitarian aid community is getting better at this.
They have learned how to operate in ways that minimize disruption to local economies.
The biggest problem right now is not that.
The biggest problem is just access.
The level of insecurity is so great that virtually nobody can operate inside the country now on humanitarian aid.
And that, as this population of 2.5 million Somalis gradually run through their coping mechanisms and slide from malnutrition towards severe malnutrition, at which point we really have a loud humanitarian crisis on our hands, we just can't get in.
And so, you know, from my view, first things first, let the aid flow in.
If it disrupts markets in the short term, that's just something we're going to have to deal with, because the alternative is worse.
All right, well, I really appreciate your time.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, and I hope that we can do this again and stay up to date on this story, which almost no one covers.
My pleasure.
I'm glad to talk with you.
I'm determined to continue to cover it.
Thank you very much again.
Okay.