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The Strategy of Keeping States Failed
As b real continues to document in comments here, the U.S. behavior around Somalia is somewhat mysterious.
What is the U.S. trying to achieve there?
U.S. officials will answer that they want to create some loyal, decent government and a healthy state of Somalia. But the current U.S. supported war-lord ‘government’, held up by deeply hated Ethiopian
proxy forces, is certainly not the way to achieve that outcome.
So the official answer is likely wrong. Instead the U.S. may want Somalia to stay a failed state.
To reinvent Somalia as a stable, western oriented state without Islamic influence would cost an enormous amount of money, people and time. Maybe $100 billion, 300,000 troops and 10-15 years could create such a state.
Any other stable government in Somalia, created without outer help, will be Islamic orientated, as this is the most uniting part of the national character in Somalia. But any Islamic government in Somalia, the U.S. fears, would turn the country into a safe haven for ‘Al-Qaeda’.
As the U.S. does not want to invest the resources to achieve the desirable outcome, it decided to allow no outcome at all. Just keep the state failed and the problem is solved until the cows come home.
Via David Axe we find this general strategy described in a paper from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point:
By identifying, catalyzing and swallowing ungoverned spaces, jihadi strategists believe they will be able to consolidate their strength and pursue their broader political and internationalist agendas. Notice that what is important to these thinkers is not the existence of a security vacuum, but what comes next, establishing functioning state institutions under jihadi control. In fact, existing security vacuums have not proven to be a viable base for exporting attacks abroad. No major international attacks, for example, have been supported out of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somalia.
Thus, while a concern with security vacuums is warranted, the implication is not that we must consistently prevent security vacuums. That takes immense resources, as the largely unsuccessful effort to end the security vacuum in Iraq show. Indeed preventing all security vacuums would be a Herculean task involving American power in numerous failed and failing states around the world. However, denying terrorists the benefits of security vacuums is likely a more feasible strategy.
The paper assumes that the self-creation of a state out of a security vacuum would be a benefit for ‘jihadis’, and thus has to be denied. Doing anything else is too ‘costly’.
The massive troop deployment in Iraq has so far denied terrorists the use of that country as a staging ground for attacks in the West. Meanwhile, terrorists are denied the benefits of a potential Afghan security vacuum with 18,000 troops, while [Centcom Joint Task Force Horn of Africa] effectively denies jihadis the use of Somalia and the rest of that region with only 1,600 troops—in both cases, these deployments are far less resource-intensive than would be required to actually end the security vacuum. A more cost-effective strategy, we believe, may be to maintain the capability to act decisively when necessary in security vacuums, without embarking on an unsustainable mission to end security vacuums worldwide.
There was a stable state government in Somalia the U.S. didn’t like. Through bombing and the use of proxy forces that government and the state were effectively destroyed. Now the task is to keep it destroyed by whacking and bombing away any person or social structure that could change the situation.
Is a similar strategy of denial of real stability can be seen in the West Bank and Gaza. Is such also behind the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Afghanistan as Empty Space — excellent article in multiple parts, by M Herold.
Suggests strongly that the creation of large stateless regions — “failed states” as they are euphemistically known — is a prime goal of neocolonialism.
Four years after the U.S.-led attack on Afghanistan, the true meaning of the U.S occupation is revealing itself. Afghanistan represents merely a space that is to be kept empty. Western powers have no interest in either buying from or selling to the blighted nation. The impoverished Afghan civilian population is as irrelevant as is the nation’s economic development. But the space represented by Afghanistan in a volatile region of geo-political import, is to be kept vacant from all hostile forces. The country is situated at the center of a resurgent Islamic world, close to a rising China (and India) and the restive ex-Soviet Asian republics, and adjacent to oil-rich states.
The only populated centers of any real concern are a few islands of grotesque capitalist imaginary reality — foremost Kabul — needed to project the image of an existing central government, an image further promoted by Karzai’s frequent international junkets. In such islands of affluence amidst a sea of poverty, a sufficient density of foreign ex-pats, a bloated NGO-community, carpetbaggers and hangers-on of all stripes, money disbursers, neo-colonial administrators, opportunists, bribed local power brokers, facilitators, beauticians (of the city planner or aesthetician types), members of the development establishment, do-gooders, enforcers, etc., warrants the presence of Western businesses. These include foreign bank branches, luxury hotels (Serena Kabul, Hyatt Regency of Kabul), shopping malls (the Roshan Plaza, the Kabul City Centre mall), import houses (Toyota selling its popular Land Cruiser), image makers (J. Walter Thompson), and the ubiquitous Coca-Cola1.
The “other,” the real economy — is a vast informal one in which the Afghan masses creatively eke out a daily existence.2 They are utterly irrelevant to the neo-colonist interested in running an empty space at the least cost. The self-financing opium economy reduces such cost and thrives upon invisibility. The invisible multitudes represent a nuisance — much like Kabul’s traffic — upon maintaining the empty space. Only the minimal amount of resources — whether of the carrot or stick type — will be devoted to preserving their invisibility. Many of those who returned after the overthrow of the Taliban are now seeking to emigrate abroad, further emptying the space.3
I suspect that this new, penny-pinching colonialism has a lot to do with industrial tech and fossil power. To exploit the resources of a colonised space, the colonial occupier no longer needs to project force in the form of a permanent occupying population. As with MTR in Appalachia, only a small work force using the tools of gigantic industrial capitalism can extract all the resources; it’s not necessary to build a “little England” in the occupied area to steal the wealth over a long period of time. The current model of colonialism is smash-n-grab raid.
So no “stable government” is required in the occupied area because no “people who matter” are in that area. And if that area is to be looted on the cheap, without a strong orderly structure of colonial workers, police, shopkeepers, courts, etc. — then any stability there is can only serve the colonised, because it would be their own government and population being organised and stable, and that would be a basis for resistance. And we can’t have that.
Like an opportunistic virus, colonialism always wants a maximally weakened host at the moment of conquest. Classic colonialism first weakens the host — by warfare, bribery, culture shock — and then inserts its own new hierarchies, structures, governments in place of the indigenous ones — and even co-opts the indigenes into comprador and collaborator roles in the new structure (think of the hundreds of thousands of civil servants the British sent to India to “manage” the occupied space, enforce laws, build roads, etc, and the so-called “Babu class” of native-born clerks and bureaucrats enlisted by the British to help run the country). Old-time colonialism invests a tremendous amount of operating cost in running the territory it has conquered. But present-day neocolonialism, it seems, merely weakens the host and then siphons off the resources with a long technological straw, refusing to invest more than the bare minimum in overhead or operating cost. Structure and organisation can only interfere with this predation, so it wants the weakened host to stay weak, paralysed, fragmented: an empty space…
Posted by: DeAnander | May 2 2008 19:07 utc | 3
if you’ll recall wes clark’s story about being shown a pentagon list of countries slated for rollback or regime change following iraq, somalia was one of the six(?) listed, so it’s been in their sights for a while now.
at the moment, it looks like the current u.s. objective is to achieve more enemies and stoke up anti-american sentiment in the HOA, which then gives them plenty of reason for expanding operations & establishing more bases in the region. in a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of way, as the propaganda value of the al shabaab quoted response to wednesday’s bombing demonstrates.
or, substituting a few words in that ctc link that b provided,
..groups like [Gate]’s in [Somalia] operate with very loosely defined political goals which appear to extend little beyond driving out the [ICU] and preventing a political settlement.
i have lots of problems w/ that ctc paper. for starters, a working definition for jihad is never provided, nor is one for “terrorist” or “terrorism” though the terms are used frequently. in another study as part of the harmony project, in a footnote the authors stated that “we use ‘terrorism’ with reference to Islamic ‘extremism'”. i’m assuming the same loaded meaning applies here.
“security vacuum”, as rapt points out, is another one of those euphemisms that attempt to disarm people — obviously security in this usage implies u.s. control.
and “ungoverned spaces” is similar — areas not ruled by those serving u.s. interests under an accountable/controlled western-style model.
the rpt linked above reads, in part, like a checklist for cointelpro efforts to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” targets perceived as threats.
but there’s so much nonsense in it. for instance, consider this so-called “parallel” in comparison, which leads into the first blockquote b cited in the original post: [the emphases are added]
Policymakers are correctly concerned about the existence of ungoverned spaces as being potential safe-havens for terrorist groups. The Harmony documents demonstrate that al-Qa’ida has been thinking about the necessity to exploit such spaces since their organizational founding.
The Somali document referenced above identifies a five-point strategy to unite Somali forces and create an Islamic national front. The author argues for:
1. expulsion of the foreign international presence;
2. rebuilding of state institutions;
3. establishment of domestic security;
4. comprehensive national reconciliation; and
5. economic reform and combating famine.
This approach parallels the June 2005 Zawahiri letter addressed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. In this letter, Zawahiri argues that jihad in Iraq should proceed incrementally, according to the following phases:
– expel the Americans from Iraq;
– establish an Islamic authority or emirate, then develop it and support it; and
– extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.
He also notes that jihad in Iraq may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.
Both of these documents focus on the need to create viable operational space by first expelling occupiers and then by establishing and nurturing their own system.
isn’t that called nationalism & concerned w/ establishing one’s own sovereignty? i don’t really see how the two agendas connect, but then i’m not overly paranoid, imperialist or racist so i couldn’t write something like
Thus, while a concern with security vacuums is warranted, the implication is not that we must consistently prevent security vacuums.
and then turn around and state that “Effective strategies will aggressively seek opportunities to create power vacuums within jihadi areas of responsibility.”
i thought all vacuum’s suck. how is a power vacuum conducive to the repression of your enemy?
in the rpt there’s several attempts to take credit for, at best, dubious claims. like the one b included in a quote above
The massive troop deployment in Iraq has so far denied terrorists the use of that country as a staging ground for attacks in the West.
unless, perhaps, by the west, one means israel? otherwise, i don’t even understand what that stmt means? are they still trying to peddle the line that iraq was involved in the 11 september 2001 attacks?
or this claim,
The United States and its allies have found great success fighting al-Qa’ida as an organization. We have significantly degraded its formal command structure, debilitated its capabilities to readily move money and closed most of its training facilities.
has AQ ever truly had a “formal command structure”? the exaggerations of a few years back that equated AQ w/ a transnational company were largely propaganda manufactured by the u.s. – as were the stories of bankrolling AQ, which were pretty much thoroughly debunked (see the 911 rpt, ibrahim warde’s the price of fear: the truth behind the financial war on terror, and r.t. naylor’s satanic purses: money, myth, and misinformation in the war on terror). and training facilities? well, i guess you actually could use the term “closed” and still be literally correct…
something else in the rpt that’s been bothering me for a long time, embedded in this paragraph
The strategic proponents of al-Qa’ida are what Vladimir Lenin, among a wide variety of other revolutionaries, described as the “vanguard.” These “professional revolutionaries” possessed both the intellectual capacity and the fighting spirit to blaze the trail toward revolution. As most students of jihadi terrorism know, Abdallah Azzam employed this same notion of the vanguard in his early conceptualization of the al-Qa’ida organization. The application of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary doctrine is critical to understanding jihadi strategy. Jihadi strategists have formulated a general roadmap for breaking what they see as America’s physical and virtual chokehold on the periphery—both in the literal international political sense, but also in a cognitive sense. Their solution draws not only on Lenin but also on Mao’s “Rural Strategy” or “Encirclement” path to revolution. Mao argued that the vanguard party needed to engage the masses, who in China were predominantly “poor and blank” peasants.
azzam & the idea of AQ as a vanguard creates cognitive dissonance for me.
from an acct of AQ by philippe migaux [italics in the original]
..it was ‘Abdallah ‘Azzam who had named the organization. In 1988, at the first signs of a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, ‘Azzam decided that he would not disband the army of Arab volunteers he had created four years earlier but would use it to undertake a much vaster mission – the reconquest of the Muslim world.
To that end, he needed a standing vanguard of fighters to serve as leaders of the umma. He coined the term al-qaeda al-sulbah (the solid base) for this, which was also the headline of an editorial he wrote in issue number 41 of al-Jihad, published in April 1988. The article stated: “Every principle needs a vanguard to carry it forward that is willing, while integrating into society, to undertake difficult tasks and make tremendous sacrifices. No ideology, celestial or earthly, can do without such a vanguard, which gives its all to ensure victory. It is the standard-bearer on an endless and difficult path until it reaches its destination, as it is the will of God that it do so. It is al-qaeda al-sulbah that constitutes this vanguard for the hoped-for society.”
now, afaik, “vanguard” and “base” have entirely different meanings, especially for revolutionary theory. it just seems really weird to me that AQ, “the base”, was supposedly coined as the vanguard for a larger mvmt. am i missing something here, or is there really a glaring disconnect that can be attributed to a poor translation, a misunderstanding of the terms, or something else?
Posted by: b real | May 3 2008 7:16 utc | 9
in my above comment, i inadvertently left out part of a quote in one of the examples of contradictions i highlighted from the ctc paper. it should have read
Thus, while a concern with security vacuums is warranted, the implication is not that we must consistently prevent security vacuums. ..denying terrorists the benefits of security vacuums is like a more feasible strategy.
my reading of this is that nationalist fronts should not be allowed to take advantage of those spaces where u.s. influence does not dominate, which is why i then was perplexed by the later stmt that
Effective strategies will aggressively seek opportunities to create power vacuums within jihadi areas of responsibility.
alot of the paper just strikes me as someone theorizing & speculating on things they really do not have a solid grasp of, especially in relation to the larger cultural & religious context. that’s understandable, b/c it’s obvious that military strategists & analysts operate w/i a very narrow mandate established upon very rigid & dependent premises.
for instance, in a section which looks for “insight into the jihadi understanding of American foreign policy priorities”, the authors cite an extraction from one letter in their database & then attempt to draw some conclusions about “jihadi understanding” from it
The Somali experience confirmed the spurious nature of American power and that is has not recovered from the Vietnam complex. It fears getting bogged down in a real war that would reveal its psychological collapse at the level of personnel and leadership. Since Vietnam, America has been seeking easy battles that are completely guaranteed. It entered into a shameful series of adventures on the island of Grenada, then Panama, then bombing Libya, and then the Gulf War farce, which was the greatest military, political, and ideological swindle in history.
This statement reveals several important insights. First, at least throughout the 1980s and 1990s, al-Qa’ida believed the United States to be an aggressive and belligerent power, perpetually seeking opportunities to exercise its military domination.
hel-lo! as did the rest of the world. it doesn’t take the proverbial visitor from mars to make that obvious observation. a quick look at the list of u.s. military bases seeded across the planet will suffice.
the authors then go on to write
Jihadists writings generally portray the United States as a paper tiger, one that possessed overwhelming military power, but constrained in its ability to employ this strength by a domestic population and leaders who lacked the resolve to sustain military campaigns without public support.
i guess those silly jihadists failed to comprehend bush the elder’s 1991 exhalted pronouncement that “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” similar to the way iraqi “insurgents” missed bush the lesser’s ‘mission accomplished’ photo op, perhaps.
this POV of the u.s., or assessment really, independent of whatever group reaches it, could only be controversial to a party lacking in objectivity.
Posted by: b real | May 3 2008 17:42 utc | 12
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