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It’s currently the longest foreign conflict in which US troops are still engaged. Today it is still almost a complete mystery to the average America, just as it always has been.
The investigative outlet The Intercept, recently obtained a classified study commissioned by the Pentagon that showed “a failure to define the parameters of the conflict or its aims, and an overemphasis on military measures without a clear definition of the optimal military strategy,” writes journalist Nick Turse,
The study was authored by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a private think tank that works solely for the US government, and included anonymous interviews with key US government officials from across various departments and agencies.
The conclusion is frightfully similar to the conclusions drawn from the Washington Post’s investigative expose the Afghanistan Papers which was based on a collection of internal interviews and memos documenting problems with the US war effort in Afghanistan.
What both collections show is that fundamental questions of aims and objectives went not only unanswered but in many cases unasked. Despite this lack of clear aims and means, both operations plowed forward to their murderous conclusions.
Rather ‘conclusion,’ because unlike Afghanistan where the Taliban took America’s 20-year occupation and nation-building campaign out behind the metaphorical barn, the chain of repeated invasions and occupations of Somalia by the US and their Ethiopian proxies is still ongoing.
In October 2022, WaL reported on a drone strike that supposedly killed a co-founder and potential commander-in-chief of al-Shabaab, the jihadist group in Somalia, but that US African Command (AFRICOM) assessed the armed group as “adaptive and resilient” despite the assassination.
The statement highlights what Turse and The Intercept have now made clear with the Freedom of Information Act request that obtained the classified study: that there’s no overarching plan for restoring peace and security to the Horn of African country, nor are there any clear, understandable pathways to achieving it.
Lacking, in conflict, not keeping track
The IDA study is entitled Achieving Unity of Effort: A Case Study of US Government Operations in the Horn of Africa. Turse doesn’t need 20,000 words to get to the point, and quickly quotes the senior officials on the civilian side of the American intervention in Somalia saying that the whole project was lacking “an organizing principle,” and that the IDA authors “could not find documentation for a ‘whole of government’ US strategy that would compel the coordination of all [government] efforts in the region of the Horn”.
Furthermore, agencies were often “in conflict over ends, ways, and means,” and the dual strategies of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency were “competing rather than complementary”.
On the military side, 2007, the year the IDA study was completed, saw the inauguration of AFRICOM, an entity that US civilian government officials interviewed felt put too much emphasis on the military side of operations in the Horn of Africa.
The IDA study writes that the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) which was set up to prosecute War on Terror operations prior to AFRICOM’s establishment, was “generally not setting specific, achievable, and measurable goals for activities”. This is despite the fact that, as Turse cites, 280 airstrikes and commando raids were authorized in Somalia since 2007, Special Operations forces were deployed to the region, and a host of local proxy forces were created by the CIA.
Furthermore, the IDA study found that CJTF-HOA was not keeping track if their operations were “having their intended effects or whether modifications are needed to best align with AFRICOM’s mission”.
Since 2023, Joe Biden’s Administration has revitalized these hopeless, uncoordinated efforts in Somalia, with 2023 witnessing a doubling of declared and alleged US airstrikes from drones or aircraft, according to the monitoring group Airwars. Civilian deaths from these strikes quadrupled.
Violence within the country is much higher than in previous years, with Turse reporting that over 7,000 people have been killed in Somalia as a result of Islamist violence. After 22 years of US operations in Somalia, the conditions could not be further from any reasonable standard of progress, and the needle is not likely to move towards an improvement anytime soon, with Biden’s limited mental faculties focused on conflicts elsewhere, and Trump, who greatly expanded this uncoordinated pathwork of military and civilian activities, is the only other person on offer in November. WaL
PICTURED ABOVE: Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud with Antony Blinken. PC: State Dept, handout.
