The Somalian Labyrinth

It did not take long after 9/11/2001 for certain American institutions with small minds containing bitter memories to see the chance to use the post 9/11 atmosphere to even some outstanding scores. The usual prime-time experts on places to which they had never been, with names they could not pronounce, insisted that Usama received much of his terror treasure from sympathetic Somalis, well known for their hoards of clandestine wealth, that his operatives (including those responsible for the 1998 embassy bombings) had taken advantage of Somalia's lawless society, long shoreline, and porous borders to smuggle guns and operatives, and that bin Laden himself was intent on making the place his next hideout. He could also use Somalia to run lucrative rackets, particularly in drugs and counterfeit money, to bolster his finances.

To deal with the first, the U.S. Treasury right after 9/11 had blocked on virtually a world-wide basis the transfer of funds from the Somali Diaspora to families back home--at a time when those remittances, annually around $250 million (some estimates ran to $500 million), were the only thing keeping the country afloat. (Apparently no one bothered to point out to the Treasury that if the problem was Somalia as a source of terror funds, it made little sense to block the flow of money to the country.) To handle the second, the U.S. Navy quickly sent a warship to keep an eye on Somalia's unguarded 1,000-plus kilometer coastline which is serviced by enough small smuggling vessels to make southern Florida blush with envy. To take care of the third, the military dusted off plans for direct intervention, while waiting the situation on the ground to become more propitious. After all, based on the emerging fiasco in Afghanistan and the inevitable drainage of forces that Iraq would entail, it had enough sense to let to wait until proxy forces could do as much of the work, face as much of the danger and share as much of the resulting opprobrium as possible. After all, it had bitter experience in such matters.

Information about bin Laden's intimate association with Somalia came from the kinds of objective and disinterested sources so often called upon in the Terror War. They included landlocked Ethiopia covetously eyeing a strip of the Somali coast; Somali warlords who, eager to emulate the Afghan Northern Alliance, wanted to use the U.S. military against local rivals; and the Pentagon, which had its own grudge. Among the misdeeds in Somalia they jointly and severally imputed to the dour Saudi were: his central role in the lucrative traffic in qat, the popular local "narcotic"; his financing and/or training of al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (Islamic Unity), a local terrorist movement that had repaid him by helping to bomb the U.S. embassies; and his role in killing eighteen U.S. soldiers who, in 1993, had been simply helping with relief aid in the famine-ravaged country. Proof of this last offense came during the invasion of Afghanistan, when U.S. troops found in an "al-Qaeda stronghold" a GPS system taken from a U.S. soldier killed in Somalia--where he undoubtedly had been using it to locate pockets of starving people in need of an Afghan-style food drop. Hours after the find was announced, the company that had supplied the unit pointed out, uncooperatively, that it had been manufactured four years after U.S. forces had precipitously pulled out of Somalia.


ENTRANCE STRATEGY?

It remains somewhat of a mystery why the U.S. military blundered into Somalia in the first place. Even the most doctrinaire Marxist would have trouble blaming old-fashioned economic imperialism. Nearly 75 percent of the population lived a pastoral existence; manufacturing was almost nonexistent; and agriculture had been savaged by drought and war. Perhaps the fact that bananas were the main export crop triggered in Washington a conditioned reflex. Although indications of offshore deposits had excited some big oil companies, the discoveries came during a world glut. Apart from camels (hardly to U.S. taste even before 9/11) and cattle (of which the U.S. scarcely needed more), about the only local product foreigners found of interest was the gum from some of Somalia's unique trees, which for more than four thousand years had yielded frankincense and myrrh. While a Christian "fundamentalist" might see that as ample reason to sound boots and saddles, at the time of the decision to intervene the U.S. was under the reign of George I, not his Born-Again son. In any case, the trees were in a part of the country that had already seceded by the time U.S. troops arrived in Muqdisho, the capital city.

Looking beyond the economic to the strategic, in the past one attraction had been the port facilities at Berbera, which the U.S.S.R. had briefly used. But with the end of the Cold War, the old Soviet fleet was rusting out in home ports; and other littoral states welcomed the U.S. Navy.

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