Onward to Mogadishu

Islamists abandon Mogadishu in the face of Ethiopia's apparently unstoppable conventional assault, leaving the capital back under conditions of clan-based anarchy. It will be interesting to see if the Ethiopians and/or the transitional government try to actually assert control over the capital. This has the rough shape of the result I would have anticipated (conventional success followed by hard-to-solve problems) but I must admit I wouldn't have believed the Ethiopian military had the logistical capacity to advance this quickly.

12/27/06 11:54PM del.icio.us this incoming links

Comments

Come on. Controlling Mogadishu has always been a piece of cake for outside forces. I'm sure it will be a shining beacon of democracy in no time.

Posted by: Col Bat Guano on December 28, 2006 12:33 AM

Y'know, I tend to agree with you that the WH's policy here is lacking in both the moral and realpolitik realms.

But I'm not sure why you don't even feel the need to even glancingly address the administration's strategic thinking here. The idea seems to be to create a regional military power ally in Ethiopia, which we'll be able to outsource any future horn of Africa problems out to.

-----

And I'd say this line of criticism could apply to much of your foreign policy analysis. If you're not going to bother to walk a few miles in the shoes of folks you disagree with, you're not any more insightful than Marty Peretz at the end of the day - even if I may end up agreeing with more of your reflexive positions than I would with Peretz.

Posted by: Petey on December 28, 2006 12:54 AM

"I must admit I wouldn't have believed the Ethiopian military had the logistical capacity to advance this quickly".

Surely you do not believe the Ethiopian military is making this push without the backing (logistical support plus equipment)of the US?

And in the face of such overwhelming and superior force, the ICU have evidently (and wisely?) opted to get out of the way and return to fight another day.

That, and more, is the reason why the invasion and installation of a government in Mogadishu are doomed to prove couterproductive and unsustainable. That government will be clearly identifiable as a puppet of Ethiopia and the US and, hence, rejected by a great many Somalians. And the ICU have vowed, and will now position thmeselves, to mount an unending guerrilla struggle against any such government, which will make it virtually impossible to achieve order and stability.

Posted by: Jim Dandy on December 28, 2006 01:12 AM

Matt - You missed the biggest line in the article.

"Some people openly celebrated in the streets by hoisting up pictures of the transitional government’s leaders and gleefully chewing khat, a mildly narcotic plant the Islamists had outlawed."

Any group that tries to ban khat has no chance of ruling any part of the Horn. When it come down to brass tacks, in a country where just about every male of fighting age, say, 14-44, is addicted to khat, they'll fight to the death against anyone that tries to ban it. Nothing is more powerful than drug addition, as all "The Wire" fans know well.

Posted by: Khat, Khat, Khat! on December 28, 2006 01:23 AM

Wonder if the Islamists are going to get some more outside help now?

The Cold War was so much fun...we must do it again!

Posted by: alphie on December 28, 2006 01:58 AM

Obviously, Mogadishu will continue to be dangerous turf for a good long while to come. And I can't pretend that my brief crash-course on East African geopolitics qualifies me as an expert. But I wouldn't be so quick to rule out the possibility that this campaign will ultimately prove to be a moderate success.

The absence of American troops reduces the worldwide media exposure and therefore reduces the Jihadist recruitment potential. If Ethiopia resists the temptation to actively meddle in the new regime, it seems to me that the transitional government will probably stand or fall based entirely on its ability to curry favor with and divide power among the tribal elders. The relative standards for peace, stability, and good government in East Africa are generally quite low, and Somalia has been uniquely bad even by those standards. Unlike, say, the Iraq War, the potential upside might justify the risks and a small US investment.

Then again, I could be completely and utterly wrong. If my idle internet musings are wildly off-the-mark, nobody gets hurt. Unfortunately, based on their prior record, I greatly fear that no actual Bush political appointee knows any more about the horn of Africa than I do. And the odds that some Heritage Foundation brat is currently devising our nation's Ethiopia policy while jamming Legend and taking bong hits with Marty Peretz are decidedly nonzero. So it's probably safest to reflexively condemn the whole intervention.

Posted by: LaFollette Progressive on December 28, 2006 02:29 AM

What LaFollette Progressive said.

Posted by: Petey on December 28, 2006 02:47 AM

why is something "clan-based" necessarily "anarchy" and how is that worse than the islamist rule by terror? Presumably "clan-based" means the local community/tribal-based structures that have been there for quite some time. Go a head and beleive that doing away with these, like the Islamists tried, is a good thing if you want.

really like the paranoid posse you've gathered.

Posted by: neil on December 28, 2006 03:36 AM

One worries that the wingnuts will derive inspiration from all this for one last shot in Iraq.

Posted by: bob h on December 28, 2006 07:55 AM

bob h
If they do derive that inspiration, that's one more proof that they are impenetrably delusional. This Ethiopian invasion of Somalia looks an awful lot like the US invasion of Iraq in miniature. The Islamists made the mistake of taking on a well-equipped armored force with infantry and armed pick-up trucks, and found they couldn't mount an effective conventional resistance. Despite Matt's title for his link to the NYTimes article, the report does not say that the Islamists have "abandoned" Mogadishu. It says they have vanished from the streets, the same people now walking around without their weapons or any identifying clothing. So you've got the transitional government and its supporters (including a foreign army), the tribal sheiks and their forces, and the Islamists poised to take the car/truck/suicide bomb route. All the elements of the same sort of intractable chaos we now see in Baghdad are in place, particularly if the Islamists get outside help (as has already been reported).

Posted by: SqueakyRat on December 28, 2006 08:31 AM

bob h, are you suggesting that some 'nut is going to think maybe we ought to get the Ethiopian army involved in Iraq?

The khat thing makes me think this one might end up being a lot more like Afghanistan than like Iraq. The popularity of the Taliban among non-adherents was based solely on their being better than the anarchy that preceded them.

Even a 'success' as incomplete as that in Afghanistan could end up proving very useful for US policy. By taking one of "their" pieces off the board, we make our withdrawal from Iraq look less like a concession to a resurgent pan-Islamic movement, and more like an admission that the purely local conditions in Iraq require local, rather than superpower, solutions. We just have to be smart enough to use the opportunity to draw down in Iraq while during the window of time that this spin is even remotely plausible.

Posted by: CharleyCarp on December 28, 2006 08:35 AM

The absence of American troops reduces the worldwide media exposure and therefore reduces the Jihadist recruitment potential.

Another thing that may reduce the Jihadist recruitment potential is the fact that the country which carried out the invasion is itself around 40% Muslim.

Posted by: Peter on December 28, 2006 09:34 AM

I'm not sure why you don't even feel the need to even glancingly address the administration's strategic thinking here.

It's an administration run by laughably discredited fools who haven't bothered to publicly articulate a rationale for their policy. If they offer one, I'll say what I think about it.

Posted by: Matthew Yglesias on December 28, 2006 09:50 AM

Here's something that was pointed out to me last night by a liberal civil service officer working for the Bush Administration (as most of administration, in the form of the civil service, is liberal): if the US knew about or wanted the Ethiopian invasion, why would they have scheduled it for their Christmas vacation? Lots of people didn't get to go home because of this.

Posted by: Anon on December 28, 2006 09:53 AM

"It's an administration run by laughably discredited fools"

Fair enough.

"who haven't bothered to publicly articulate a rationale for their policy."

Meh. Welcome to foreign policy.

There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons why any administration is not going to be publically straightforward in describing foreign policy rationales in certain situations. But those rationales are often teased out by reporters who are doing more than just calling the public information office looking for an embarrassing lede.

Laughably discredited fools or not, they're still in control of the only meaningful armed forces on the planet, and dealing with their actual strategies is still of interest.

Posted by: Petey on December 28, 2006 10:43 AM

There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons why any administration is not going to be publically straightforward in describing foreign policy rationales in certain situations. But those rationales are often teased out by reporters who are doing more than just calling the public information office looking for an embarrassing lede.

I was a bit sloppy here. The problem wasn't that Bush hadn't spelled things out in detail personally. The problem was that really nobody had and I didn't want to spend my time guessing as to what was up. I see now that Josh Trevino's put up several posts that, together, constitute a plausible account of what the thinking is here. I'll respond to that.

Posted by: Matthew Yglesias on December 28, 2006 11:19 AM

"why is something "clan-based" necessarily "anarchy" and how is that worse than the islamist rule by terror? Presumably "clan-based" means the local community/tribal-based structures that have been there for quite some time. Go a head and beleive that doing away with these, like the Islamists tried, is a good thing if you want."

If you're a fan of clan-based governing structures, this is hardly a problem unique to Somalia. Nearly the entire history of colonial and post-colonial Africa has been driven by the legacy of Europeans who grafted Western-style nation-states on top of pre-existing clan structures. And most of these nations have failed to various extents as a result of the difficulty inherent in meshing their (typically poorly developed) national infrastructure with the continent's traditional cultural institutions, tribal and ethnic affiliations, and exploitative economic practices.

It's when national identity breaks down completely, though, that you end up with tragedies like Rwanda. Or Sudan. Or Somalia, which has effectively had no central government and a permanent state of civil war since the early 1990s.

There are several schools of thought about how to address these problems. But I don't think it's a terribly good idea to encourage these nations to devolve power from the national governments, however corrupt and dysfunctional they may be, to a clan-based power structure with no central government. (For lack of a better word, anarchy.) Nothing is more likely to ensure a permanent state of underdevelopment for Africa than fostering the preservation of tribalism.

Posted by: LaFollette Progressive on December 28, 2006 11:25 AM

The Ethiopians did upset the Italian Army back in 1896. I guess there are greater accomplishments in the military realm than beating Italy, but it's not nothing.

Posted by: JP on December 28, 2006 12:34 PM

At least khat isn't readily converted to stable and easy-to-smuggle byproducts. (Cathinone's Schedule I in the US.)

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