FDD

Somali Warlords (RWC)

Mogadishu is quickly heading back to the clan-based anarchy that consumed it for the past 15 years – before the radical Islamists seized power.

Last week, The New York Times said bands of armed thugs were running through the market places, shooting at people, smashing things and stealing at will.

Mogadishu has one of the most heavily armed civilian populations in the world and the government is trying to find ways to disarm them. The prime minister has demanded that Somali warlords and their soldiers turn in military-style weapons and has threatened to search homes. 

One of the clans surrendered a pickup truck with an anti-aircraft gun and two dozen of the clan’s young fighters turned over their rifles and small arms.

The Islamists and clan elders had banded together to get rid of the war lords – and then lost public support when they went to war against the transitional government and the Ethiopian soldiers protecting it.

The US Central Command has responsibility for our military interests in Africa and I have tried to stay on top of events in Somalia, the Horn of Africa, and the Sudan for the last couple of years because the continent is so important to the Global War on Terror.

U.N. Pressuring Kenya to Release Terrorists (RWC)

The United Nations said that Kenya had given the boot to at least 600 refugees who had gotten into the country, were caught, and then asked for asylum.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told Agence France Presse that Kenya “has a humanitarian obligation” to let people whose lives are at risk to seek asylum in their country.

The Kenyans say they caught ten Islamic terrorists hiding in a crowd of refugees as they poured across the northern border from Somalia. 

The men were carrying suitcases packed with U.S. dollars, money to be used to finance Somalia’s Islamic movement, now crushed by troops supporting the transitional government.

The Somali Islamists have been harboring Al-Qaeda terrorists, according to U.S. Intelligence and they had put out a general call to the Islamic world for terrorist and warrior recruits. Hundreds had responded but they are now dead, hurt or dispersed.

Islamists on the Run (RWC)

The Islamists who control Somalia are on the run, having retreated in the face of war with primarily Christian Ethiopia.

Somalia’s prime minister in Mogadishu says it appears that the major fighting has ended. Two weeks ago the radical Islamists controlled most of southern Somalia and threatened to crush the transitional government. But Prime Minister Al Mohamed Gedi said his Islamic rivals were widely scattered and that a group of them had offered to surrender.

Islamic clerics had closed local schools and sent out hordes of teenage boys to fight with inferior weapons and no training.

Those boys, the ones not killed or wounded, have tossed away their weapons and rag-tag uniforms and burrowed back into the general population.

Ethiopian-led soldiers have been hunting down Islamic fighters, killing some and driving others south towards Kenya.

Kenya Keeping Somali Refugees Out (RWC)

Kenya has locked its Northern border up tight, blocking the flight of thousands of people trying to leave Somalia. 

The Kenyans are using helicopters and increased border guards and soldiers to keep the Somalis out.

Authorities in Nairobi say the closed border is to prevent Islamic terrorists from crossing over.

Maybe, but it is just as likely to keep thousands of impoverished refugees from flooding into Kenya.

Why Europeans and Arabs Are Rooting For The Islamists In Somalia (CM)

Caroline Glick writes:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference has called daily for an Ethiopian pullout from Somalia. So too, the Arab League demands that Ethiopia retreat. With their people on the ground retreating with the ICU [Islamic Courts Union, the Militant Islamist forces], as has been their consistent policy towards Israel, so in Somalia the Arabs and Muslims wish to win at the negotiating table what they cannot achieve on the battlefield.

In this pursuit, they enjoy support from a familiar quarter. Five days before Ethiopia invaded Somalia, the EU attempted to mediate the conflict in a manner that would prolong and legitimize the ICU's control of Somalia...

When word of the Ethiopian invasion got out, [EU mediator Louis] Michel -- like his associates in the EU Secretariat -- moved immediately to condemn Ethiopia. Sunday he said, "I condemn in the strongest terms the escalation of the conflict in Somalia into an all-out war and appeal for all Somali sides to cease immediately all hostilities. I express my deepest concern on the reported involvement of foreign forces in Somalia and urge all external players to refrain immediately from intervening militarily in Somali affairs and provoke further violence."

Last week, as he engaged in his shuttle diplomacy, Michel pointedly did not take a public stand regarding the ICU's declaration of jihad against Ethiopia or its announcement that it would target any UN-peacekeepers that entered the country.

Israelis routinely assume that Europe's pro-jihadist policy towards the Palestinians is a result of anti-Semitism or anger over Israel's military victory in 1967. But the EU's treatment of Ethiopia and the TFG [the secular Transitional Federal Government] indicates that Brussels' hostility towards the Jewish state is part of a much further-reaching policy. Europe's pro-jihad position toward the war in Somalia indicates that its support for jihad is over-arching rather than limited to specific battlegrounds...

[A] tripartite alliance of Iran, the Arab world and Europe upholds the cause of jihad not merely against Israel and the US, but globally...While the Arab dictatorships embrace jihad to safeguard their regimes, the Europeans support the jihadists in the hope that their support will deflect jihadist violence away from them.

More here.

Josh Trevino on Somalia, Ethiopia and Media Coverage (CM)

He’s particularly scathing re the media:

In the worldwide fight against Islamism, the number of combat fronts is small: Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Somalia on the first tier; and Algeria, the Philippines, and southern Thailand on the second. In that light, the Ethiopian attack upon the Somali Islamists is a profoundly significant story -- of a piece with the signal struggle of our era -- that our media professionals ought to be striving to understand and report upon. Instead, we get recycled narratives and canned agendas, substituting for the hard work of comprehension and communication that appear too far beyond the ken of our correspondent class. The pity is that those who suffer most from it are the objects of our policies that result.

Much more here.

Nigeria's Electoral Intrigue

In today's online edition of The National Interest, FDD Adjunct Fellow Dr. Peter Pham argues that "few countries are as vital to the strategic interests of the United States as Nigeria." However, the West African country’s internal political situation "barely registers on inside-the-Beltway policy discussions."

Crisis in Africa

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has launched "Crisis in Africa," a new campaign focused on terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

FDD Adjunct Fellow Dr. J. Peter Pham was one of the first to raise the alarm about the militant Islamist threat in Africa and call for a comprehensive national security and diplomatic strategy in response. Dr. Pham and FDD staff and fellows are using research, strategic communications, and consultation with U.S. and international officials to ensure that Africa is no longer the “forgotten front” in the Global War on Terror. 

A tribute to Jeane Kirkpatrick (AV)

I was awakened this morning by a call from a friend informing me that Jeane Kirkpatrick had died. Ambassador Kirkpatrick, until fairly recently, was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where I interned last year, and her office was only a few steps away from my bay on the 11^th floor. She later went on to help found the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Jeane would make a point of stopping for a chat every time she passed my bay at AEI, and we had many fascinating conversations about foreign policy, and I was constantly struck by her powerful mind, on which, mercifully, age was not taking its toll.

Being a somewhat bumptious sort, I would try to tease out her views on the issues facing us today—at the time, it was the floundering Iraq mission—and it was clear that her contributions deserved a more public airing. Fortunately, prior to her death, Jeane had finished writing a new book on foreign policy. Though I have not yet had the pleasure to read it (it will be published shortly), I am told by those whose judgment I trust that it is excellent.

I remember one particular conversation with Jeane during which, and this was the Tory in me speaking, I quizzed her about her role in the Falklands crisis, which had received unfavorable reviews in Margaret Thatcher's memoirs Downing Street Years. Jeane displayed her characteristic graciousness, explaining the basis for her skepticism at being too supportive of Britain's pursuit of its territorial claim, while conceding that hindsight showed her fears were too severe.

Jeane explained that she was worried that an embarrassment of the Argentinean government over the Falklands might lead to its replacement by a communist one. Jeane's thinking flowed from the powerful, and powerfully American traditions of the Monroe Doctrine, as well as her own thesis in Dictatorships and Double Standards, which foreign policy thinkers today, especially those specializing in the Middle East, are I think admonished to read. (A link to the original essay is here, and its book form here).

In vivid detail, Jeane explained that hindsight had vindicated Lady Thatcher's decision, not her own. Yet, in this concession, Jeane's graciousness and honor came through, and I came to see that any sensible policymaker in her place would have had the same fears as her, and would probably have come to the same decision: I, with all my sympathies for the Anglosphere and the old order, certainly would have.

Jeane then spoke to me about the profound ambiguity of foreign policy idealism that animated her Dictatorships and Double Standards thesis, subtly calling attention to a particular weakness in my own foreign policy thinking. I would say that if there is one essay that those who are called neoconservatives should read, it is Dictatorships and Double Standards.

Ultimately, difficult policy decisions cannot be entirely based on ex ante normative ideals, but prudential concerns, animated by history. Fortunately, this underscores the need for powerfully smart, and idealistic, statesmen, of which Jeane Kirkpatrick surely was one. Withal, Jeane's contribution to U.S. foreign policy was very significant, and her death is serious and in many ways sad, but she leaves behind many friends, a goodly number of acolytes, and a very, very significant legacy. May she rest in peace.

Pham's Top 10 (BM)

FDD Adjunct fellow Dr. J. Peter Pham has been a lone voice in warning about the Militant Islamist threat in Africa and arguing that the United States can no longer afford to ignore the region.  He has written an illuminating two-part series in World Defense Review in which he lays out his top 10 priorities for U.S. policy in Africa.  Part I is here.  Part II, published today, is here.