Brains Like a Shoe

With no side capable of keeping the peace if it wins the war, the U.S. government, as well as the rest of the international community, should not focus its efforts on backing any one group. It should also forget about grand political projects to create a central government authority, which are likely to be futile.

Instead, she writes:

At some later point, when the anti-U.S. sentiment has subsided, it will indeed be desirable for Washington to try to address the deeper causes of anarchy in Somalia. But it will have to be extremely mindful not to revive past prescriptions, including the idea of finding and supporting national political figures in Somalia…

Somali actors are generally responsive to economic incentives. Most combatants are freelancers who have been forced to join militias out of economic need; in fact, they are often stigmatized as bandits for making such a move. In order to give them options other than employment with militias, the United States should promote targeted local development initiatives, such as a decentralized microcredit scheme that would engage both the Somali diaspora worldwide and existing local authorities. So long as these projects steer clear of governance reform, they might encourage the public to pressure local Islamists into distancing themselves from radical anti-Western actors.

This concept of how warlords make decisions in Somalia is not new. Ken Menkhaus (my former advisor at Davidson College) has written extensively on the subject. For years, he has argued that, “State-building and peace-building are…two separate and in some respects mutually antagonistic enterprises. This is because the revival of a state structure is viewed in Somali quarters as a zero-sum game.”

With that in mind, his key contribution to the understanding of why Somali leaders resist a political settlement to establish a state derives from the theory of ‘bounded rationality’ – a willingness to seek sub-optimal but acceptable outcomes rather than face the risks a revived state would entail.” In Somalia’s case, he submits:

“Powerful constituencies… profit from, and seek to promote, certain levels of conflict and certain types of lawlessness…[Thus,] relatively small numbers of these spoilers form the equivalent of a ‘veto coalition’ over initiatives to control criminality and prevent armed clashes.”

But doesn’t the presence of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban-like al-Shabaab militia change the scenario? Menkhaus does not think so.  Instead, in a recent piece in Foreign Policy, he argues that, “The fall of Mogadishu would not appreciably worsen the threat that al-Shabab and al-Qaeda already pose.”  The defeat of the TFG by al-Shabaab would not be the Obama administration’s fault but due completely to the TFG’s inability to build a workable coalition. It is for this reason that, like Bruton, he advises the White House to act with absolute caution and even to ignore snipes by Republicans that Obama is “losing” Somalia:

Today, the Obama foreign-policy team must resist the temptation to treat Somalia as a political problem if equally dire consequences are to be avoided. Anything less will yield paper solutions and empty gestures designed to preempt Republican attacks. Somalia has had many such “solutions” before. After two decades of war, what it needs now is long-term management of a messy crisis that, for the moment at least, presents options that range only from bad to worse.

Bruton’s “constructive disengagement” plan, therefore, is quite similar to Menkhaus’ cautious engagement strategy. Furthermore, in the face of dire warnings about al-Qaeda, local jihadis and pirates, they both put forward pragmatic recommendations for dealing with problems in Somalia that if not handled carefully could actually become worse and even more intractable.

I reached the same conclusions in an extensive background paper on Somalia that I wrote last spring. Tomorrow, I will post a portion of the paper that argues how Somalia’s history of dismemberment has led it to this moment where perhaps only half-solutions are possible.