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Somalia: Counter-terrorism on the cheap?
June 12th, 2006 at 10:28 Björn Hallberg
Well, something is definitely on the cheap. Though it has still cost American tax payers millions of dollars and aided in escalating the civil war, killing tens of thousands due to violence and the breakdown of civilian infrastructure. That doesn’t seem very cheap.
It has emerged that the Bush administration bankrolled the warlords, who are secular, to gain access to al-Qaida suspects and block the rise of the Islamic militia. CIA operatives based in Nairobi funnelled $100,000 to $150,000 (£80,000) a month to their proxies, according to John Prendergast, an International Crisis Group expert on Somalia who has interviewed warlords. “This was counter-terrorism on the cheap. This is a backwater place that nobody really wants to get involved in, so [they] thought, let’s just do this and maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Apparently, it didn’t occur to the US that the support for war lords (Afghanistan redux) would not only violate the Security Council Arms Embargo but also by definition increase hostilities and thus the civilian toll. Another fine example of how the US only selectively adheres to agreed UN policy and views the rest of the world as expendable. Instead of extending a real and honest olive branch to the only viable governing group as a way to end hostilities, even for a month or a week, the US chooses to fuel violence and bleed Somalia dry in another adaptation of its infamous “Vietnamization” policy. A policy that by definition presupposes that one lacks any sort of humanitarian concern and rather be rid of a nation out of sheer racism and contempt.
Somewhere down the line, this is bound to bring the US military machine to another intervention in Somalia, no matter the cost or public opinion. Not that the public has much opinion to offer on Somalia. As much as the US is reluctant to appear to target Islamic nations, Somalia is out of the way and has very few allies. The US could very well play the democratization card again and get away with it as Somalia still looks like a mess that could need cleaning up by the diligent, selfless and virtuous policeman of the world, or so they could claim. Plus, Islamic nations, in part due to their propped up and domestically unpopular puppet governments, have been woefully inadequate at backing each other up.
US History in Somalia
Entry 568 filed under: Africa. This entry was posted 2 years, 5 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.
