By Prof. Horace Campbell
What lessons were learnt by Kenya after the El Adde attack: Intellectual impoverishment?
The fact that the Kenyan government believes that it can control the flow of information about what happened in Somalia and the confused state of the operations stem directly from the intellectual and political position of the present Kenyan military and political leaders. Throughout the world, the US military and academic establishment had pronounced on Somalia as a failed state. This intellectual exercise had been the cover for the US military operations in Eastern Africa since 1992. If the intellectual starting point is incorrect, then the outcomes would be incorrect. Von Clausewitz famously stated that, “no one starts a war without being clear in their mind what the real objectives are, and what they intend to achieve. The first is the political purpose and the second is the operational objective.”
In the context of the war in Somalia, the Kenyan military and political barons confused their financial/political objectives with their operational objectives and with what was actually possible given the limitations of the form of organization of Kenyan society. Kenya is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual society. To wage a war that is premised on religious grounds, ‘that Kenya is seeking to oppose Al Shabaab setting up a caliphate in Somalia’, simply plays into the hands of religious zealots who represent themselves as patriots in Somalia. From the KDF book,
Operation Linda Nchi, one gets a clear grasp of the intellectual limitations of the counter terrorism discourse that emanates from the US military circles. Kenyan capitalists have internalized these forms of understanding of the political challenges in Somalia in order to promote their own economic interests. At the same time, the intelligentsia in Kenya and the so-called humanitarian community are ensnared in the anti-terrorist discourse so that there can be no sifting of the Somali population to separate the extremists who are in war for profit from the Somalis who want an end to external military aggression in their society.
This impoverishment of the so-called literature of the war on terror is not only home grown, but has a consistent school in the European Union and the USA that is only too willing and ready to use the terrorist moniker to identify Somali nationalism. Fairly extensive literature exists, written by both African scholars and counter-terror experts covering Somalia. In the specific case of the United States, the experiences of the USA after the battles in Mogadishu in 1993 up the deployment of the Special Forces in The Horn of Africa.
In the period of the war on terror, there are numerous studies on Somalia. Even more so from the US Africa Command Social Science research initiatives that started workshops and conferences on the Horn of Africa after 2008. However, the limitation of this intellectual investment has been to grasp the complexities of class, religious and regional relation in simple terms of Islamic extremists or in terms of clan loyalties. In this way, the Al Shabaab capitalist who is an ally of the sugar barons and oil traders in Dubai is presented as having the same interest in the future of Somalia as the ordinary peasant and itinerant trader. Yet, within this extensive literature is reproduced ad infinitum by graduate students and peace researchers across Africa and beyond. Specialized think tanks that are linked to the infrastructures of empire such as the International Crisis Group (ICG), the International Peace Academy, The Institute for Security Studies, ACCORD seek to compete with US think tanks to reproduce the uncritical reports that there is a war on terror in Africa.
Time to end the war on terror in East Africa
This author agrees with Ngugi Wa Thiongo when he wrote that the future of peace in Somalia lay in the full integration of Somalia and Kenya in a confederated East Africa. “In nearly all African states, there are people of the same language, culture, and history on either side of a border — what are called border communities. For instance, if Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia itself were to see the Somali people as a shared community, then uniting Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia would not be a union of cultural strangers. We could thus use the notion of a shared community as links in a chain for African unity from the Cape to Cairo, from Kenya to Liberia.”[8]
Part of the dialectic of initiating a new framework for a prosperous and peaceful Africa would be to build on the skills of the Kenyan educated to forge the economic unification of the currencies so the economic activities that are now carried out in the dark markets can be brought out in the open so that the economies of the Eastern African region become integrated with a common currency.
This author will go further and say that peace will come from realizing the goals of isolating those who are opposed to Pan African unity. This means that in the short run, there ought to be clarity as to those forces in Kenya and Uganda who are involved in war as a business. Progressive NGO’s need to have a clear roster of the sales of weapons by the Ugandan military to the extremists in Somalia.
In the summation of the investigative report on Kenya’s criminal activities in Somalia, the authors noted that,
“when the value of the smuggled sugar is around $1 million per day, the incentives to keep North Eastern insecure and ungoverned become clear. Further incentives then build upon the foundational ones as those well positioned to profit from the trade at a time of war (for example, the KDF), have little interest in leaving Kismayo and building peace. They also have strong incentives to push public policy in a more militarized direction to increase their control and their opportunities for profit from other spheres such as procurement and international financing for counter-terrorism. Politicians who have become accustomed to a system of patronage and corruption in order to gain power have no incentive to play straight and they consistently corrode the central state in their efforts to promote a system that benefits them.”
One year after the military defeat, courageous journalists in Kenya have asked if the Kenyan government will ever honor the memory of those who were killed. These journalists are calling for the correct information on the events of January 15, 2016. The campaign to expose this defeat cannot be confined to Kenya, but must be part of a larger discussion of how to end the war on Terror in Africa.
Faced with the military setbacks for the AMISOM forces in Somalia, the US administration announced that it would increase its Special Operations forces that were deployed to Somalia. According to report in the New York Times in October, “The Obama administration has intensified a clandestine war in Somalia over the past year, using Special Operations troops, airstrikes, private contractors and African allies in an escalating campaign against Islamist militants in the anarchic Horn of Africa nation.”[9]
Between 200 and 300 US Special Forces under the control of AFRICOM are currently operating in Somalia seeking to stiffen the nerve of the AMISOM soldiers. Though the US Africa Command seeks to keep the Special Operations as covert as possible, the very deployment of these forces ensures that the propaganda apparatus of the militants can be ramped up to point to the fact that they are actually fighting imperial forces who are coming to dehumanize Somalis. This had been the rhetoric of General Aideed in 1993 and these ideas resonate with a section of the population. Long term planners of the military management of the international system understand that the deployment of US military personnel will intensify the war and for these planners the intensified warfare will justify military expenditures for the war on terror internationally.
The misguided idea that conflates assertive religious identification with Islam as terrorism must be brought out in the open. Islamic fundamentalism is just as misguided as Christian fundamentalism and the promise of the Trump administration to round up Muslims in the USA should be a moment for progressives to show solidarity with oppressed citizens who are followers of the Islamic faith.
Secondly, serious scholars must end the use of the formulation ‘failed state’ to refer to Somalia. States cannot fail. States are reflections of class and social relations in society. A government can collapse and the answer to such a collapse must be to mobilize popular and democratic forces to hold governments accountable. The war on terror and the concept of failed state are at the core of the intellectual bankruptcy of western liberalism.
There cannot be a war on terror, because terror is a tactic. The tactics of the insurgents in Somalia are to coerce the population into thinking that they are fighting forces of occupation. The activities of the Ethiopian army in Somalia give credence to this propaganda from the extremists. Kenyan rulers have been in alliance with rulers in Uganda, Burundi and Ethiopia who have no moral authority to be deployed to fight terrorism in Somalia. This immorality of these forces is exploited by the planners of the extremists who use religious dogma to mobilize misguided youths in Somalia.
Thus far the opposition politicians in Kenya who have been competing for political power have not put forward a vision of how to bring peace and reconstruction to Somalia and Kenya. Politicians who have become accustomed to a system of patronage and corruption on both sides of the political divide do not have the moral authority to propose real alternatives that challenges those who are in the business of war locally and linked to the US counter terror apparatus .
Reconstruction in Somalia and Kenya
The Kenyan government spends more than one billion dollars per year in its operations of fighting terror in Somalia and Kenya. In this same context, teachers, university lecturers, doctors, nurses and the rank and file are calling for a better standard of living. Investments in the reconstruction of Kenya and Somalia will in the long run pay for more dividends for Africa than the never ending war on terror.
Five years ago, there were elements in the USA that called for an end to the war on terror. These elements stated that if the criminals who plant bombs in communities are treated as criminals, then the challenge would be to mount police operations to ferret these criminals out of their communities. Such an approach to the militant extremists in Somalia would expose them in a way that ensures that they could not easily hide behind religious zealotry. Significantly, this kind of police operation would be able to garner international cooperation to expose and arrest the billionaires in Saudi Arabia who are the bankers of the extremists.
The UN has on numerous occasions published information on the charcoal trade of Al Shabaab and other researchers have pointed to the infrastructure of foundations and business enterprises that finance extremist in Africa. The United Nations itself needs to turn a new page from the ways in which the world body has served the military interests of the neo-conservatives in Washington. As Abdi Samatar noted years ago, the Monitoring Group for Somalia and Eritrea (MG) and the United Nations Special Representative (SR) are at the center of the reproduction of the disaster in the country. “These two agencies have separate mandates, but collectively they have been engaged in activities that undermine Somali efforts to rebuild the country.”[10
Conclusion
Our focus on the military defeat of the Kenyan Army in Somalia has been guided by the way in which militarism has impeded peace and reconstruction in Eastern Africa. The peoples of Somalia have has suffered disproportionately from the efforts of the US establishment to use Somalia as political football to assert the geo- political interest of the USA in the Indian Ocean.
From the time of Operation Restore Hope in 1992 to the present, over a period of 25 years, the United States followed a policy of destabilizing Somalia. This was vividly demonstrated when the US Ambassador to Kenya, Smith Hempstone, was working with the progressive human rights activists in Kenya in 1992 but was overruled by those who had a long term vision of the need to ensure that Kenya played a key role in the military operations of the US in the Indian Ocean. In subsequent years, this policy was ramped up after September 2001.
The US government has worked with the regime in Ethiopia and thus sought to present the changes of the region as the Christian state of Ethiopia fighting Islamic terror in Eastern Africa. This logic inspired the CIA to finance warlords in Somalia to fight the Islamic Courts Union in 2006. This financing of the APRCT had the effect of conflating Somalia nationalism with terrorism.
Ugandan militarists who have never turned away from a conflict to earn money moved into Somalia when the Ethiopians were overstretched and joined the anti-terror campaign. This intensification of warfare also brought Uganda close to the scene of the illicit trade of sugar and charcoal at Kismayo. Kenyan barons intervened to ensure that the trade remained in the hands of Kenyans. Together, the Kenyans, Barundi and Ugandans demeaned the concept of peace in Eastern Africa. Kenyan politicians who have no respect for African lives have sought to cover up the defeat on the Kenyan forces at El Adde.
Yet, this episode provides a real opportunity for the progressive forces in the African Union to call for a full reexamination of the war in Somalia so that another way forward can be conceptualized. Such a way forward calls for the demilitarization of Somalia and the introduction of thousands of reconstruction workers from Somalia and Eastern Africa who would rebuild the society. Already elements within UNESCO and within the peace movement have recognized that this unending war must end.
War has profound effects on any society, and the impact of El adde is still unfolding in Eastern Africa. The ravages of warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Syria point to the failure of the so called war on terror. The African Union is in a position to ensure that the kind of devastation that has been wrought in Syria is not visited on the peoples of East Africa.
Source:
Kenya’s military defeat at El Adde: Time to end war on terror in Somalia | Pambazuka News
* Prof. Horace G. Campbell is the Kwame Nkrumah Chair at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana at Legon.
End notes
[1] The Reports of John Githongo offered one window into the extent of the appropriation under the Presidency of Daniel Arap Moi,
Githongo report.pdf - WikiLeaks
[2] Mark Mazetti,” Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge,” New York Times , June 8, 2006
Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge
[3] For an analysis of the nationalist content of the Islamist Courts Union see Abdi Samatar, Ethiopian Invasion of Somalia, US Warlordism & AU Shame, Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 34, No. 111, 2007
[4] For Justice, ‘Black and White : Kenya’s Criminal Racket in Somalia, “ Nairobi, November 2015
[5] “How KDF fought 10 hour battle to save ill-fated camp, “
https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2000188803/how-kdf-fought-10-hou...
[6] Kenya Covers up Military Massacre, CNN, May 11, 2016,
Kenya covers up military massacre - CNN.com
[7] “Somali leader: '200 Kenyan troops' dead in January raid, “AL Jazeera, February 26, 2016
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/killed-al-shabab-mortar-attack-som...
[8] Ngugi Wa Thiongo, “African Identities: Pan Africanism in the era of Globalization and capitalist fundamentalism,” Macalester International, Volume 14, Spring 2004, page 36
[9] In Somalia, U.S. Escalates a Shadow War, New York Times, October 16, 2016,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/world/africa/obama-somalia-secret-war...
[10] Abdi Ismail Samatar, “An Odious Affair: The UN in Somalia” published in Al Jazeera
