The truth is that it’s the lowest hanging fruit and there is almost no impetus either on the ground or from media bosses to check facts. But what will these journalists do when the truth gets out after the war ends in Ukraine, when they become the focus of opprobrium?

The biggest secret which no journalist ever wants to tell even his own mother is that war reporting is absurdly easy and can actually be carried out by the most stupid numpty in the office who struggles to even operate the photocopier. Sure, the psychological trauma weighs heavily, often after the event and it takes a certain amount of courage and selfishness to put yourself in a conflict zone (selfish if you have a family back home) but in terms of the actual mechanisms of the job, war reporting really is not at all challenging. The day to day events in a conflict are so horrific that really all the reporter needs to do is get to where the action is and take the shots, roll the camera or get the quotes. The stories practically write themselves for the simple reason that many of the normal requisites of reporting don’t apply in conflict zones. The consumer has an unlimited appetite for the same story over and over again. Blood and gore really does stun viewers, particularly in broadcast news, into a sense of shock and morbid curiosity which then metamorphosises into an addiction, an adrenalin rush which the reporters on the front line themselves also fall victim to.

But if you have the courage or are driven by your own sense of self-importance and can put out of your mind your loved ones, the a-b-c of reporting couldn’t be simpler or more rudimentary. The stories literally present themselves packaged and ready to go, with no annoying questions by editors who want to slow down the process by painful fact checking and due diligence.

You never forget the first time a gun is pointed at you. For me it was in the summer of 1992 in Mogadishu, Somalia where the country was being torn apart by a civil war and its capital resembled a hell which not even Ridley Scott could capture in Black Hawk Down. It was a security guard in a compound who wanted me to leave. I resisted and argued with him in Swahili until I heard the definitive click of the hammer on a Colt 45 1911 being pulled back and the muzzle pointed at me. “D’toka sai yee” (get out now) was all he had to say as my heart thumped so hard I was convinced it was jump completely out of its rib cage.

Getting the builders in

You also never forget the first time you hear the distinctive faint whistle noise of a 7.62mm round as it passes your ears. And you defiantly never forget the awkwardness of not knowing what to do when people are actually firing at you which also happened to me in Mogadishu a couple of days later where I was naively confused by parts of the wall next to me exploding. I stupidly thought that the summer heat was making the cement crack or that perhaps workman were drilling it from the other side. What an idiot. Well, I was in my mid 20s.

Somalia was my first conflict. Others followed in East Africa including Rwanda and Southern Sudan in ’94 and then later the former Yugoslavia in ’97 and ’98, Lebanon ’06, Afghanistan ’08. In all those times, I lost count of the whistling bullet noises of the number of times militias pointed guns in my face and how the sight of dead bodies shocks and yet intrigues at the same time. In 1994 in Southern Sudan I was specifically sent to a region which was being bombed by the Khartoum regime from Anthonovs which were barely visible at 18,000 feet. I was sent there to be bombed on and film it which I dutifully did for what is now APTN news in London. The idea today that AP, which is barely a shadow of itself compared to those days, would send a freelance journalist on such a suicide mission is unthinkable.

In all that time though I was aware how the strength of the story more or less dictates your role to document, film, replicate the events for history. What I was to imagine would be the diligence of journalism wasn’t required. There wasn’t really any fact checking as, on a practical level, it was more or less impossible. When you arrived at a site of a massacre, you’re more or less hostage to the anguish and horror and the people who are there to fill in the gaps and put the story together. It’s absurdly easy, a child could do it. One of the things I learnt in all of those places was that the victims, even though they didn’t need to lie, did just that. Even when a massacre happened and it was pretty obvious who did it, there were still plenty of people who survived who sexed up the story when it was so sexed up already that it hardly needed it. The temptation is too much for those who are the victims, but also for the governments, regular armies and aid organisations when a journalist is there on the scene and he has shown that speed is of the essence to get the story processed and sent back. I wonder whether the Marioupol theatre bombing is one of these stories as the facts as they are presented leave more questions than answers and residents claiming that they had been told days beforehand by right wing groups sympathetic to Zelensky that they were going to bomb it themselves as an amoral ruse to draw NATO into the war. We saw exactly this ploy by Muslim groups in Sarajevo in the Yugoslav war who figured that they could bomb their own civilians and western media would point the fingers at the demonized Serbs in the hills – which became the basis of NATO airstrikes against Milosevic.

In the nineties, we relied very heavily on our editors in London to provide a layer of fact checking as we weren’t hooked up to the internet (certainly not in my Africa and Yugoslavia period).

A generation who knew right from wrong

You chose a side. Usually the one which is first of all the more practical to get to; and secondly the one which is going to give you the instantly vivid and horrific pictures. And mostly journalists, certainly not today, ever cross the line between where they are to the group which was the aggressor. I tried to do this in ’92 in Somalia in its capital which was divided by a north-south line and very nearly got shot by Aideed’s thugs who chased after me in the south. I literally ran for my life carrying bulky video equipment which would be in a museum today, it was so heavy. My friend Dan Eldon was not so lucky. Later on in 1993 he rushed to a scene of an attack by a U.S. helicopter and was beaten to death by angry women who made the connection between his pale skin and western imperialism which robbed them of their children.

We were part of a generation of journalist who knew that it was not right just inserting yourself into the mayhem of war with civilians being bombed each day, without reaching out to the other side to at least offer a comment, a response to the news we were producing. But on the ground it often wasn’t possible; only when returning to your home country where calls can be made.

In those days there was more honour amongst all those practicing, whether they be journalists, government officials, defence ministries or even khat-chewing militias. It has taken the Yugoslavian war for all of these groups to wake up to taking advantage of the tricky position journalists find themselves in when covering war. They have seen that the speed to get the gory pictures and file the story with the ghastly details of death caused by modern warfare eclipses the need for due diligence. The ‘embedding’ of journalists, which really started in 1991 with the Gulf War, more or less creates a hostage situation between the powerful army and its facilities and the journalists who are happy to sign up the Stockholm Syndrome type reporting – which, in a nutshell, is a sort of stenography of what generals say at press conferences and a tacit agreement to report on the staged scenes which the army takes you to cover. And it’s the same with militias. Journalists who went to Norther Syria to cover the Syrian war soon found themselves embedded with ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates who would protect them while taking them to scenes which they wanted covered. There is a certain amount of obligation from the journalist to not do their due diligence and reach out – via telephone and internet – to fact check what they’re being shown as tangible news material as such an act would be considered discourteous to the hosts. And so in this set up, fake news thrives as the incumbents who hold the journalists can barely resist the opportunity to spin stories. They have the journalists as a hostage and he/she is under pressure to write stories each day.

Staged chemical attacks in Syria

And so ‘embedding’ comes in many forms and it merely encourages the polarised set up which all wars now have, which we saw in Yugoslavia and other places. In Syria, we saw the same story where so many big title journalists even succumbed to writing reports based on finding sources on social media in places being bombed. The reporting became so jaded, the process so corrupted that it led, in many cases, false reporting on Assad using chemicals on his own people. In at least one case, there is overwhelming evidence now, for those who wish to examine in on line, to prove without any doubt that one such attack was staged entirely by Al Qaeda affiliates, with local Syrian actors being requested to stage a minor performance for the cameras – video footage shamefully used by the BBC to support a narrative which ticked a box for them and their journalists camped in Beirut.

Journalists these days in war zones don’t cross the line, even on a technical level with their smartphones such is the new ‘standard’ which all media giants are operating by – which has merely encouraged a new all time low of pseudo journalism from other journalists struggling to make their way up. It reminds me of a CNN producer who, so unable to cope with her assignment in Morocco, had decided on the beginning, middle and end of her report before she even got on the plane to carry out the ‘King clinging on to power’ story which was entirely wrong and planted in her head by her Emirati lover in Washington. The media giants who sent their big named journalists to Ukraine had already decided the story, the narrative that all must abide to which is that Zelensky is some sort of Ce Gevara figure and squeaky clean, that the war is not at all the west’s fault and so no responsibility shall be placed on its leaders since the early 90s and that all Ukrainians are angels and that we should all adopt one, like adorable Labradors. They’ve even invented the perfect explanation how they can carry out this extreme partisan news reporting, which is, conveniently that “Putin is mad”. Or perhaps intel agencies helped them out with this folly.

Journalists became the combatants

What iconic journalists from the UK who hail from a once esteemed investigative news outfit like BBC Panorama won’t be investigating is the worryingly high level of Ukrainians who supported far right fanatical groups there for decades which were funded by the CIA and the State department. The odious John Sweeny will not go against the grain of the newsroom indoctrination and present Zelensky as corrupt, if not more corrupt, than the leader he ousted in his anti corruption campaign which installed him as president. Sweeney, who claims to be an investigative journalist and who shouldn’t be judged on his mental meltdown while filming a doc about scientologists in the U.S. will no doubt do his reporting on the gore which is in front of his eyes but not look to hard for reasons behind it. A German journalist sent to Dresden during the second world war to film the antihalation of the RAF bombers on women and children might take a similar line by not blaming Hitler for invading Poland in 1939.

We should not expect much from Mr Sweeney or the BBC Panorama team who I have actually worked for briefly and know only too well how their own personal careers come before anything which remotely whiffs of raw, vociferous journalism. In 2017, I found Britain’s most wanted gangster who fled the UK in the 1990s after an FBI sting to net him failed. The individual, who was hiding in Greece, was prepared to tell Panorama the names and addresses of the top twenty heroine importers in the UK. I failed to convince the producer, who only wanted her idea of him spilling the beans on UK customs agents’ corruption, to repair a previous poor report she had made have more gravitas. Britain’s biggest ever double agent (heroine importer and paid super grass by the UK government who was protected by Jack Straw) was let go due to personal ambitions, office politics and rank stupidity. So much for BBC Panorama being an investigation team digging deep and finding great stories which set the media agenda. Just politics. People’s own greed and self fulfilment. Corruption.

I have stopped watching TV news from the Ukraine as I can see the A-B-C of how the sloppiest war reporting is carried out without the slightest effort for any western journalists to at least look beyond the bodies and twisted limbs for nuance, which has become the collateral damage of all journalism these days. Recently a number of western journalists have been killed in Ukraine which saddens me of course. But if you begin to understand how journalists have crossed a line and become combatants when they either embed themselves with the governments, armies or even the victims they are writing about, then it’s easier to understand why they have become targets themselves. I once used to feel guilty about not helping people who were suffering. The photo by the South African photojournalist Kevin Carter of the vulture looming over the almost dead infant left on the ground in Southern Sudan by a mother fleeing an attack in 1994 haunts me to this day, as I was there in the same year. But when time has passed and in years to come the truth comes out and we see a more complexed nuanced story about the Ukraine war, the big gun journalists today in Ukraine will feel a shame which will eclipse mine tenfold for being partisan to a over-simplified presentation of a story which will show we have much more blood on our hands in the west than most humble people realise. Western journalists in the Ukraine don’t understand the iconic photograph of the vulture and the dying child in Sudan which Carter took and which gave him nightmares all his life which finally led him to taking his own life in 1993. They wouldn’t miss a heartbeat to stop and help as they have already decided what the story is and their tawdry role in reporting it.

By TJ COLES

This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?

The official reason provided by the Pentagon was that the Somali National Army needed air support in its operations to counter al-Shabaab. But the actual reason was that Somalia is geo-strategically important to US empire.

Successive US administrations have cycled through a myriad of excuses to either bomb the country or to arm its dictators: Cold War politics, “humanitarian intervention,” anti-piracy, and more recently counterterrorism.

As we shall see, in the mid-2000s, a fragile coalition of soft and hard Islamists – explicitly not allied to al-Qaeda at the time – brought some measure of peace to the areas of Somalia it controlled. With help from Britain and neighboring Ethiopia, the US smashed the coalition and pushed more right-wing elements like al-Shabaab over the edge into militancy.

And of course, the global superpower bombing one of the poorest countries on Earth in the name of national security is not terrorism.

Let’s take a look at the broader context and specific chronology.

A US imperial bulwark is born in Africa

The Pentagon has divided the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility (AORs). The Southern Command deems itself “responsible” for operations in Central and South America, regardless of what the people of the region think.

The Central Command (CENTCOM) covers much of the Middle East and Central Asia: the key intersections of energy fields and pipelines that enable the US to influence the global economy at the expense of competitors, notably Russia and China.

The Africa Command (AFRICOM) was founded in 2007 by the George W. Bush administration and is based in Stuttgart, Germany. President Barack Obama vastly expanded its operations.

AFRICOM’s current AOR covers 53 of the continent’s 54 states, with Egypt in the northeast already under the AOR of CENTCOM due to its strategic value (more below).

AFRICOM recently bragged about how it helped coordinate with Somali “partners,” meaning elements of the regime imposed on the country by the West, to organize the Biden-led bombing of al-Shabaab.

AFRICOM says: “The command’s initial assessment is that no civilians were injured or killed given the remote nature of where this engagement occurred.” But who knows?

US commanders operating in the African theater have tended to dismiss the notion that civilian deaths should be tallied at all. In 1995, for example, the US wound down its “assistance” to the UN mission in Somalia, but ended up in a shooting war in which several Somalis died.

The US commander, Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, said at the time, “I’m not counting bodies… I’m not interested.”

Somalia’s geopolitical importance to US empire

In the Africa-Middle East regions, three seas are of strategic importance to the big powers: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea (connected by Egypt’s Suez Canal), and the Gulf of Aden, which is shared by Somalia in Africa and Yemen in the Middle East.

Through these seas and routes travel the shipping containers of the world, carrying oil, gas, and consumer products. They are essential for the strategic deployment of troops and naval destroyers.

Somalia was occupied by Britain and Italy during the “Scramble for Africa,” the continent-wide resource-grab by Western colonial powers that began in the late-19. Ethiopia continues to occupy Somalia’s Ogaden region.

A 1950s’ British Colonial Office report described the Gulf of Aden as “an important base from which naval, military and air forces can protect British interests in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.” “British” interests, like “US” interests today, means elite interests.

A George W. Bush-era report by the US Army War College notes that, “Even before the Suez Canal came into being, the [Red] Sea had been of importance as an international waterway. It served as a bridge between the richest areas of Europe and the Far East.” The report emphasizes that the “geopolitical position of the Red Sea is of a special importance.”

AFRICOM was founded with a grand imperial ambition: to make the four of the five countries on Africa’s Red Sea coast – Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan – comply with US elite interests, and to keep the Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Suez Canal open for business and strategic deployment.

As noted before, CENTCOM covers Egypt. During the Arab Spring a decade ago, US strategists feared, like their British predecessors, that losing the Suez Canal to a democratic government in Egypt “would damage U.S. capabilities to mobilize forces to contain Iran and would weaken the overall U.S. defense strategy in the Middle East,” home of much of the world’s accessible oil.

International interference drives Somalia’s civil conflict

Somalia declared independence in 1960. Its British and Italian areas merged into a single nation led by President Aden Abdullah Osman and Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, who later became president. Most political parties merged with the Somali Youth League to create a de facto single-party state.

Backed by the West, Ethiopia blocked Somalia’s diplomatic efforts to reclaim the Ogaden region. As president, Abdirashid took millions of dollars in Soviet military assistance and was subsequently assassinated by one “Said Orfano,” a young police-trained man posing as a cop and erroneously referred to in contemporary sources as a “bodyguard.”

Major General Siad Barre took over in 1969 and ruled until his overthrow in 1991. An early-1970s CIA intelligence memo refers to Russian-Somali relations as “largely a liaison of convenience,” marred by “mutual” “distrust.”

After Barre’s failed war with Ethiopia over Ogaden and his explicit rejection of Soviet money and ideology, the US saw him as a client. In 1977, senior US policymakers highlighted Somalia’s “break with the Soviets.” From then until 1989, the US gave nearly $600 million in military aid to Barre’s regime to nudge it further from the Soviet sphere of influence.

The Barre regime used the newly augmented military – from 3,000 to 120,000 personnel – to crush the rival Somali National Movement, killing tens of thousands of civilians and driving a million people from their homes.

But the coalition that deposed Barre in 1991 fell apart and the rival factions fought a civil war that triggered famine and killed an additional 300,000 people within the first couple of years.

The United Nations intervened to deliver food to civilians. The US saw the move as an opportunity to test the new doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” in the form of Operation Restore Hope. President George H.W. Bush said that the objective was to “save thousands of innocents from death.”

But a master’s thesis by Major Vance J. Nannini of the US Army’s Fort Leavenworth provides a version of events much closer to the truth: “Throughout our involvement with Somalia, our overriding strategic objective was simply to acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and the Red Sea area.”

Restore Hope ended in a fiasco for the US, exemplified by the famous Black Hawk Down incident, and thousands of Somali deaths – “I’m not counting bodies,” as Commander Zinni said of a later mission.

A convenient target in the “war on terror”

In Djibouti in 1999, a Transitional National Government (TNG) was formed in exile and came to power in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in 2001.

At the same time, a broad umbrella of Sufis and Salafists – the “left” and “right” of Islam – known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was gaining political and territorial ground.

The TNG collapsed in 2004 and was replaced with a Transitional Federal Government founded in Kenya and backed by the Ethiopian proxy Abdullahi Yusuf, a man harbored by Britain and even given a liver transplant in the UK. (The liver allegedly came from an Irish Republican Army member. “Now I am a real killer,” joked Abdullahi.)

Abdullahi was found liable for damages in a UK court over the killing of a British citizen in Somalia in 2002 by his bodyguards.

Under the post-9/11 rubric of fighting a “war on terror,” the CIA added to the chaos throughout the period by covertly funding non-Islamist “warlords,” including those the US previously fought in the 1990s. The aim was to kill and capture ICU members and other Islamists.

In addition, the Pentagon’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) engaged in covert operations. Estimates of the number of JSOC personnel on the ground in Somalia range from three to 100.

US Special Forces set up a network of operations and surveillance in the country, supposedly to counter al-Qaeda.

In 2003, for instance, US agents kidnapped an innocent man, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, from a Mogadishu hospital. Claiming that he was an “al-Qaeda” operative, the US had Suleiman tortured at a number of “rendition” sites before releasing him. (The operatives who grabbed him were tipped off by the “warlord” Mohammed Dheere, who was paid by the CIA.)

But one of the Arabic meanings of “al-Qaeda” is “the database,” referring to the computer file with information on the tens of thousands of mujahideen and their acolytes trained, armed, organized, and funded by the US and Britain throughout the 1980s to fight the Soviets (Operation Cyclone).

There are more direct links between the US and al-Shabaab. In his younger days, ICU secretary and later al-Shabaab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane joined the only major terrorist group in Somalia in the 1990s, Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI, “Islamic Union”). The AIAI fighters trained with “al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US and Britain were training “al-Qaeda.” (See citation no. 7.)

Killing Somalia’s hope

By the mid-2000s, with the rise of the ICU, the hope of stability came to Somalia – but it was not to last. In 2003, the US Combined Joint Tasks Force Horn of Africa initiated training of Ethiopia’s military in tactics, logistics, and maintenance. The US backing later came in handy fighting the ICU.

The ICU was rapidly and widely painted as an extremist organization. However, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report notes that it was “well received by the people in the areas the Courts controlled,” particularly as it provided social services.

Western propaganda spun the ICU’s shutting down of cinemas as proof of its Islamo-fascism. But the CRS report says that such measures were undertaken at the request of parents because children were skipping school, “not because of the Courts’ alleged jihadist and extremist ideology… There is no evidence to support the allegation that women were prohibited from working.”

As Western vessels continue to deplete starving Somalia’s fish stocks to sell to comparatively privileged consumers, propaganda denounces Somali “piracy” against Euro-American ships. However, a report by the Royal Institute for International Affairs (the British think tank also known as Chatham House), says: “The only period during which piracy virtually vanished around Somalia was during the six months of rule by the Islamic Courts Union in the second half of 2006.”

A World Bank report from 2006 notes that the ICU “brought a measure of law and order to the large areas of South-Central Somalia” it controlled. The US State Department, meanwhile, was hosting an international conference in a bid to remove the ICU and bolster the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

With US and British training, including logistical support, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late-2006 to install Abdullahi as President of the TFG.

The US and Britain worked hard to set up a new regime in a war so brutal that over 1 million people fled their homes. In addition, tens of thousands crossed the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in hazardous small boats sailed by traffickers. Hundreds of thousands ended up in dire refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where women and girls were raped.

A US- and UK-backed regime terrorizes Somalia’s people

The Transitional Federal Government terrorized the Somali population. One of the few British journalists to report on this at the time, the Kenya-born Aidan Hartley, wrote: “several Somali leaders who have been linked to allegations of war crimes against countless civilians are living double lives in Britain.”

General Mohamed Darwish, head of the TFG’s National Security Agency, was “given British citizenship, state benefits and a subsidised home.”

The taxpayer-funded privatization unit the Department for International Development (DFID, now part of the Foreign Office) paid TFG politicians’ salaries, as well as buying police radios and vehicles.

Human Rights Watch says that the Commissioner of the Somali Police Force, Brig. Gen. Abdi Hasan Awale Qaybdib, was “a former warlord who has been implicated in serious human rights abuses that predate his tenure as commissioner.”

A House of Commons Library report confirms that the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the World Food Program (WFP) were used as unwitting conduits: “DFID has pledged over £20 million in new commitments for Somalia, including £12 million to the WFP. No money goes directly to the TFG. It is channelled through the UNDP.”

By 2011, this included training 3,000 police in Somaliland and hiring mercenaries formerly of the UK Special Boat Service, who were promised up to £1,500 a day.

The consequences for Somali civilians were devastating. In addition to the refugees noted above, the instability caused by the war triggered another famine by jeopardizing aid and driving people from areas near food distribution centers.

The US has survived shocks like 9/11 because it is a robust nation. Fragile countries like Somalia cannot withstand major political disruptions.

Transforming Somalia into an extremist haven

President George W. Bush bombed “al-Qaeda” targets in Somalia in January 2007. Al-Shabaab, then led by the hard-line Godane, survived the collapse of the ICU in the same year.

The UN Security Council then authorized the African Union (AU) to occupy Somalia with “peacekeepers,” with AMISON being the US support mission.

The British-backed TFG President Abdullahi resigned in 2008 and was replaced by the former ICU leader, the more moderate Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Sharif met with Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009, who pledged US support to the TFG in its fight against its former armed wing, al-Shabaab.

A West Point study notes that, using sharia, al-Shabaab had by 2009 “succeeded in bringing about a period of relative stability in much of the territory it controlled,” just like the ICU before it. Shabaab was also comparatively moderate: the “leadership pursued a pragmatic approach toward clan politics and drew its leadership and rank-and-file from a relatively diverse array of clans and sub-clans, unlike many of Somalia’s other armed factions.”

But the group made tactical errors, such as the Ramadan Offensives (2009-1010) against the TFG and AMISON forces in Mogadishu. With Shabaab weakened, Godane merged the group with “al-Qaeda” in 2011.

British-backed terrorists poured into Somalia to join Godane. By the time it allied with al-Qaeda, a quarter of Shabaab’s fighters hailed from the UK. Many had been radicalized by Abu Qatada, a man once described as Bin Laden’s “right-hand man in Europe” and a protected asset of Britain’s internal MI5 Security Service.

Via an entity called al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants), MI5 informant Omar Bakri Mohammed and an alleged double-agent for Britain’s external security force (MI6), Haroon Rashid Aswat, also radicalized young Muslims to fight in Somalia.

The Nigeria-born Michael Adebolajo, who was charged in the UK with murder, had previously attempted to recruit for Shabaab in Kenya. He maintains that MI5 attempted to recruit him.

A time-tested recipe for destabilization and disaster

Since merging with “al-Qaeda,” al-Shabaab has extended its reach, reportedly sending suicide bombers into neighboring countries, including Kenya.

One could say that the Biden administration has learned no lessons after decades of interference in Somalia. But this would be inaccurate. Successive US administrations understand perfectly that stirring the pot of extremism and relying on propaganda to report the result, not the process, gives them endless excuses to occupy other countries.

The Pentagon is committed to global domination, Somalia is a strategic chokepoint, and the Department of Defense needs reasons to maintain its presence in the country.

The US created al-Shabaab in several ways. First, it escalated Islamist vs. non-Islamist tensions by backing secular “warlords” as a proxy against the ICU in the mid-2000s. This alienated the moderate factions of the ICU and empowered the right-wing Islamists.

Second, and most importantly, Washington backed Ethiopia’s invasion in late 2006, triggering a catastrophe for the civilian population, many of whom welcomed hard-line Muslims because they imposed a degree of law and order.

Third, by painting the nomadic and Sufi Islamist nation of Somalia as a hub of right-wing Salafi extremism, Western policymakers and media propagandists created a self-fulfilling prophesy in which Muslim fundamentalists eventually joined the terror groups they were already accused of being part of.

Fourth, for a country supposedly concerned with international terrorism, the US has done nothing to rein in one its closest allies, the UK, whose successive governments have sheltered a number of Islamic extremists that recruited for Somalia.

Even if we look at Somalia’s crisis through a liberal lens that ignores titanic imperial crimes, such as triggering famines, and focus on the lesser but still serious crimes of suicide bombings, it is hard not to conclude that Somalia’s pot of extremism was stirred by Western interference.

thegrayzone.com

By Nick TURSE

“This is a different kind of war, which we will wage aggressively and methodically to disrupt and destroy terrorist activity,” President George W. Bush announced a little more than two weeks after the 9/11 attacks.  “Some victories will be won outside of public view, in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated. Other victories will be clear to all.”

This year will mark the 20th anniversary of the war on terror, including America’s undeclared conflict in Afghanistan.  After that war’s original moniker, Operation Infinite Justice, was nixed for offending Muslim sensibilities, the Pentagon rebranded it Operation Enduring Freedom.  Despite neither a clear victory, nor the slightest evidence that enduring freedom had ever been imposed on that country, “U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan ended,” according to the Defense Department, in 2014.  In reality, that combat simply continued under a new name, Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, and grinds on to this very day.

Like the 2003 invasion of Iraq, known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom and Freedom’s Sentinel failed to live up to their names. Nor did any of the monikers slapped on America’s post-9/11 wars ever catch the public imagination; the battlefields spread from Afghanistan and Iraq to Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, Syria, Niger, Burkina Faso, and beyond — at a price tag north of $6.4 trillion and a human toll that includes at least 335,000 civilians killed and at least 37 million displaced from their homes.  Meanwhile, those long promised clear victories never materialized even as the number of terrorist groups around the world proliferated.

Last month, America’s top general offered an assessment of the Afghan War that was as apt as it was bleak. “We believe that after two decades of consistent effort, we’ve achieved a modicum of success,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley.  “I would also argue over the last five to seven years at a minimum, we have been in a condition of strategic stalemate.”

Milley’s soundbites provided appellations far more apt than those the Pentagon dreamt up over the years.  Had the Defense Department opened the post-9/11 wars with names like Operation Modicum of Success or Operation Strategic Stalemate, Americans would at least have had a realistic idea of what to expect in the ensuing decades as three presidents waged undeclared wars without achieving victories anywhere across the Greater Middle East or Africa.

Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at Army-Navy football game at U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, Dec. 12, 2020. (DOD, Carlos M. Vazquez II)

What the future will bring in terms of this country’s many armed conflicts is murkier than ever as the Trump administration pursues an array of 11th-hour efforts interpreted as last-minute attempts to make good on pledges to end this country’s “endless wars” or simply as sour-grapes shots at upending, undermining, and sabotaging the “deep state” (the CIA in particular), while handcuffing or kneecapping the incoming Biden administration’s future foreign policy.

As it happens, however, President Donald Trump’s flailing final gambits, while by no means ending America’s wars, provide the Biden administration with a unique opportunity to put those conflicts in the history books, should the president-elect choose to take advantage of the inadvertent gift his predecessor provided.

Third President Not to End War on Terror

For four years, the Trump administration has waged a multifront war, not only in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere around the globe, but with the Pentagon as well.  Donald Trump entered the White House vowing to stop America’s ceaseless foreign interventions and repeatedly teased ending those “endless wars.”  He didn’t.  Instead, he and his administration continued to wage America’s many conflicts, surged troops into Afghanistan and Syria, and threatened nuclear strikes against enemies and allies alike.

When the president finally began making halting gestures toward curtailing the country’s endless conflicts and attempted to draw down troops in various war zones, the Pentagon and State Department slow walked, slow rolled, and stymied their commander-in-chief, deceiving him, for example, when it came to something as basic as the actual number of U.S. troops in Syria.

Even after striking a 2020 deal with the Taliban to settle the Afghan War and ordering significant troop withdrawals from that country and others as he became a lame-duck president, he failed to halt a single armed intervention that he had inherited.

Far from ending endless wars, Trump escalated the most endless of them: the conflicts in Afghanistan and Somalia where America has been intermittently involved since the 1970s and 1990s, respectively.  Air strikes in Somalia have, for instance, skyrocketed under the Trump administration.

From 2007 to 2017, the U.S. military conducted 42 declared air attacks in that country.  Under Trump, 37 strikes were conducted in 2017, 48 in 2018, and 63 in 2019.  Last year, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) acknowledged 53 air strikes in Somalia, more than during the 16 years of the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Aerial view of coast south of Mogadishu, Somalia. (AMISOM, Flickr, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

The reasons for that increase remain shrouded in secrecy. In March 2017, however, Trump reportedly designated parts of Somalia as “areas of active hostilities,” while removing Obama-era rules requiring that there be near certainty that airstrikes will not injure or kill noncombatants.

Although the White House refuses to explicitly confirm or deny that this ever happened, retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who headed Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept that the “burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically.” That change, he noted, led AFRICOM to conduct strikes that previously would not have been carried out.

The uptick in airstrikes has been disastrous for civilians.  While Africa Command recently acknowledged five deaths of noncombatants in Somalia from all such airstrikes, an investigation by Amnesty International found that, in just nine of them, 21 civilians were killed and 11 others injured.

According to the U.K.-based monitoring group Airwars, evidence suggests that as many as 13 Somali civilians have been killed by U.S. strikes in 2020 alone, and Trump’s recent decision to withdraw U.S. forces from there will not end those air attacks, much less America’s war, according to the Pentagon.  “While a change in force posture, this action is not a change in U.S. policy,” reads a Defense Department statement that followed Trump’s withdrawal order.  “The U.S. will retain the capability to conduct targeted counterterrorism operations in Somalia and collect early warnings and indicators regarding threats to the homeland.”

U.S. Army sniper prepares to provide security for an airlift in Somalia, June 16, 2020. (U.S. Air Force, Shawn White)

The war in Afghanistan has followed a similar trajectory under Trump.  Far from deescalating the conflict as it negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban and pursued troop drawdowns, the administration ramped up the war on multiple fronts, initially deploying more troops and increasing its use of U.S. air power.  As in Somalia, civilians suffered mightily, according to a recent report by Neta Crawford of Brown University’s Costs of War project.

During its first year in office, the Trump administration relaxed the rules of engagement and escalated the air war in an effort to gain leverage at the bargaining table.  “From 2017 through 2019, civilian deaths due to U.S. and allied forces’ air strikes in Afghanistan dramatically increased,” wrote Crawford.  “In 2019, airstrikes killed 700 civilians — more civilians than in any other year since the beginning of the war in 2001 and 2002.”

After the U.S. and the Taliban reached a tentative peace agreement last February, U.S. air strikes declined, but never completely ceased.  As recently as last month, the U.S. reportedly conducted one in Afghanistan that resulted in civilian casualties.

As those civilian deaths from air power were spiking, an elite CIA-trained Afghan paramilitary unit known as 01, in partnership with U.S. Special Operations forces, was involved in what Andrew Quilty, writing at The Intercept, termed “a campaign of terror against civilians,” including a “string of massacres, executions, mutilation, forced disappearances, attacks on medical facilities, and air strikes targeting structures known to house civilians.”

In all, the unit killed at least 51 civilians in Afghanistan’s Wardak province between December 2018 and December 2019.  As Akhtar Mohammad Tahiri, the head of Wardak’s provincial council, told Quilty, the Americans “step on all the rules of war, human rights, all the things they said they’d bring to Afghanistan.”  They are, he said, “conducting themselves as terrorists. They show terror and violence and think they’ll bring control this way.”

President Biden’s Choice

“We are not a people of perpetual war — it is the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought,” Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller wrote as part of a two-page memo to Defense Department employees last November, adding, “All wars must end.”  His predecessor, Mark Esper, was reportedly fired, at least in part, for resisting President Trump’s efforts to remove troops from Afghanistan.  Yet neither Miller nor Trump turned out to be committed to actually ending America’s wars.

After losing his bid for reelection in November, the president did issue a series of orders drawing down some troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Virtually all military personnel are to be withdrawn from Somalia.  There, however, according to the Pentagon, some or all of those forces will simply be “repositioned from Somalia into neighboring countries in order to allow cross-border operations,” not to speak of continuing “targeted counterterrorism operations” in that country.  This suggests that the long-running U.S. air war will continue uninterrupted.

The same goes for the other war zones where American troops are slated to remain and no cessation of air strikes has been announced.  “You’re still going to have the ability to do the missions that we’ve been doing,” a senior Pentagon official said last month regarding Afghanistan.  Miller echoed this during a recent trip to that country when he said: “I especially want to see and hear the plan for our continued air support role.”

Ironically enough, Miller’s all-wars-must-end November memo actually championed a forever-war mindset by insisting on the necessity of “finishing the war that al-Qaida brought to our shores in 2001.”

In classic the-U.S.-has-finally-turned-the-corner fashion, Miller asserted that America is “on the verge of defeating al-Qaida and its associates” and “must avoid our past strategic error of failing to see the fight through to the finish.”  To anyone who might have thought he was signaling that the war on terror was coming to a close, Miller offered a message that couldn’t have been more succinct: “This war isn’t over.”

Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller visiting Bahrain, Nov 25, 2020. (U.S. Navy, Jordan Crouch)

At the same time, Miller and several other post-election Trump political appointees, including his chief of staff, Kash Patel, and Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick, have sought to make significant last-minute policy changes at the Pentagon, rankling members of the national security establishment.

Last month, for example, Trump administration officials delivered to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a proposal to decouple the leadership of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.  Miller also sent a letter to CIA Director Gina Haspel informing her that a longstanding arrangement in which the Pentagon offered support to the Agency is in jeopardy.

News reports indicated that the Department of Defense is reviewing its support for the CIA. The reason, former and current administration and military officials told Defense One, was to determine whether Special Operations forces should be diverted from the Agency’s counterterrorism operations to missions “related to competition with Russia and China.” The New York Times suggested, however, that the true purpose could be to “make it difficult” for the CIA to conduct operations in Afghanistan.

The troop drawdowns and 11th-hour policy changes have been cast by pundits and national security establishment boosters as the spiteful final acts of a lame-duck president. Whatever they may be, they also represent a genuine opportunity for a president-elect who has voiced support for a shift in national security policy.

“Biden will end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which have cost us untold blood and treasure” reads the plan for “Leading the Democratic World” at JoeBiden.com.  There, too, in the fine print, however, lurk a set of Milleresque fight-to-the-finish loopholes, as the italicized words in this sentence suggest: “Biden will bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan and narrowly focus our mission on al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

Under an agreement the Trump administration struck with Taliban negotiators last year, the United States promised to remove all remaining troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021, if that group upholds its commitments.  Were the Biden team to take advantage of both the Trump administration’s withdrawal pact and its last-ditch effort to handcuff the CIA, a significant part of the American war there would simply expire later this spring.

While this would undoubtedly elicit anguished howls from supporters of that failed war, President Biden could defer to Congress’s constitutionally assigned war powers, leaving it to the legislative branch to either declare war in that country after all these years or simply allow the conflict to end.

He could also use the bully pulpit of the presidency to call for sunsetting the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, a 60-word resolution passed by Congress three days after the Sept. 11 attacks, which has been used to justify 20 years of war against groups like the Islamic State that didn’t even exist on 9/11.

He could do the same with the 2002 Iraq Authorization for Use of Military Force, which authorized the war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, but was nonetheless cited last year in the Trump administration’s justification for the drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Suleimani.

Almost two decades after President George W. Bush launched “a different kind of war”; more than a decade after President Barack Obama entered the White House promising to avoid “stupid wars” (while promising to win the “right war” in Afghanistan); six months after President Trump committed to “ending the era of endless wars,” President-elect Biden enters the White House with an opportunity to begin to make good on his own pledge to “end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.”

As President Bush put it in 2001: “Some victories will be won outside of public view, in tragedies avoided and threats eliminated.” America’s 21st-century wars have, instead, been tragedies for millions and have led to a proliferation of threats that damaged the United States in fundamental ways.  Biden has recognized this, noting that “staying entrenched in unwinnable conflicts only drains our capacity to lead on other issues that require our attention, and it prevents us from rebuilding the other instruments of American power.”

Failed forever wars are, however, also a Joe Biden legacy.  As a senator, he voted for that 2001 AUMF, the 2002 AUMF, and then seconded a president who expanded America’s overseas interventions — and nothing in his personal history suggests that he will take the bold actions necessary to follow through on putting an end to America’s overseas conflicts.  “It’s long past time we end the forever wars,” he announced in 2019.  As it happens, on entering the Oval Office he will be faced with a monumental choice: to be either the first U.S. president of this century not to double down on doomed overseas conflicts or the fourth to find failure in wars that can never be won.

TomDispatch.com via consortiumnews.com

You may not know exactly where Somalia is. Or really much about its history. But this unique African country on the North Eastern tip of the African continent – which was both a former Italian and British colony – is going to be in the newspapers you read and on your social media timelines a lot in 2021 – if the petulant outgoing president Trump gets his way and pulls out 700 or so U.S. troops.

While it’s still unclear whether Trump will really go ahead with the total troop withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which will almost certainly lead to the Taliban gaining the upper hand during the so-called Doha peace talks, in Somalia it is almost certain he will go ahead with the ruse, because its impact – he probably believes – will be less and will draw less wrath from the press. Somalia is bite-sized, he will figure.

But he couldn’t be more wrong.

Somalia, a troubled country which fell into the abyss in 1991 and has been controlled by terrorist groups since, is more important than most western journalists realise. And although the small contingent of U.S. troops there is tiny, in terms of military capabilities, it is hugely symbolic in keeping the international community there and preventing the country slide into a civil war.

The worry from many Somali apparatchiks is that if the U.S. pulls out, then the rest of the international contingent – including the EU and several important European governments – will also do the same, leaving the country vulnerable to Al Shabab taking total control over a fragile patchwork of troubled federal states. Of course, there will be resistance to this from a great many clan leaders who will feel they have no choice now other than to remove the knife from the sheaf to defend their lands and their political enclaves.

Initially it was Bill Clinton, who, almost as soon as taking office in January 1993 was presented with the problem of armed clans taking all of the food aid arriving in the port of Mogadishu, causing a famine in the interior. The democrat president from Arkansas signed off for U.S. troops to go in, which led to the Black Hawk Down catastrophe, which Clinton never really recovered from on the international circuit, even contributing to the genocide in Rwanda, following the Tutsi coup which was also an ill-conceived CIA plan which blew up in everyone’s face.

Will Joe Biden and his new secretary of state Antony Blinken suffer a similar ill fate when they take office in January?

For years, Somalia has been on the brink of a brink of a total civil and military meltdown. The only stalwart measure of wisdom from the west, which has prevented total calamity leading to an inevitable civil war, was keeping U.S. troops there as a reminder that America has the ability to strike quickly if it needs to. To remove those soldiers, as Trump is likely to do, for most educated Somalis is for the country to take a suicide pill.

Al Shabab’s roots are in a Salafi extremist movement which was born from the post-Siad Barre period but later boosted both by foreign jihadists post 9/11 under the affiliation to Al Qaeda – and then an invasion by Ethiopia in 2006 which swelled its ranks even further. It had, at one point, taken control of the capital but was pushed back by a UN-backed African Union peace-keeping mission. The very real worry is that this mission AMISOM simply won’t be able to cope with anarchy on all sides as its resources are limited. It simply won’t be able to operate in a civil war situation even with the present numbers of U.S. troops and other contingents there. Certainly if U.S. troops pull out, this will be the hair trigger that starts a civil war on all fronts.

Yet unlike before, the situation is made even more complicated by Somalia’s relationships in recent years with regional powers who some might argue would thrive in the chaos of civil war and revel in the opportunity to pursue their agendas. Qatar has always had an opaque, if not two-faced relationship with the Somali government and is often accused of fuelling terrorism within Somalia, pitching one clan against another. It is also often accused outright of wrecking the relative peace that the country’s president Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo had built, when Doha raised the stakes in the so-called special relationship and installed their own TV propagandist from Al Jazeera into the position of security chief.

What happens to Faramaajo when the country slides into civil war? Does he become the puppet which Qatar props up, exactly in the same way the Saudis kept Yemen’s president in office, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in exile? Will Somalia be the new Yemen war which Joe Biden will be a spectator of while the world’s media catches up onto the farce of Trump’s claims to be a peace broker? As DC based analysts scramble over the idea that it could have been Trump himself to have resolved the four-year dispute between Qatar and its GCC neighbours, the final nail in that particular coffin could be Somalia, given that the UAE is also an active player in this country and has its own ambitions of hegemony there. If Faramaajo is to become Qatar’s own Hadi, no doubt exiled to Doha, then does that make the internal battle between the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, replicated more or less in Somalia? Does the UAE find its own group of rebels – Al Shabab itself? – which it backs, so as to topple “Mr Cheese”? Will the war spill over into peaceful Somaliland, a breakaway state which has its own scores to settle in Somalia?

It’s a cruel irony though that the power vacuum that Obama himself created when he reduced America’s role in the entire region to ‘soft power’ opened up a chasm for Qatar, UAE and Turkey to fill in failed states like Somalia – and now one which is about to bite Joe Biden on the arse before he even enters the Oval Office. The democrats are cursed by Somalia, it seems, but just as Bill Clinton had to make his toughest foreign policy decision almost immediately entering the Oval Office, so too will Joe Biden.

Churchill is believed to have once said that “diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.” If that is true, then can we assume that Washington’s man in East Africa has lost his edge? Or perhaps just his mind.

There is a fable of a senior foreign office official from London in colonial times visiting a ‘District Officer’ in East Africa. They both venture out into the dessert in a Land Rover and the official asks his khaki clad DO three questions.

“What is the name of the tribe in this area?”
“What language do they speak?”
And “where is drinking water here?”

To all three questions the younger man shrugged his shoulders and looked bewildered. The senior official stopped the vehicle and threw him out on the spot, shouting as he drove off “by the time you get back, I imagine you will know the answers”.

Washington might consider sending such an official to East Africa to take a ride with their recalcitrant if not bewildered U.S. ambassador there, who is starting to get noticed in DC for going rogue on U.S.-Somalia policy.

Donald Yamamoto has been portrayed in a recent article by The National Interest as a veritable fool, meddling in the geopolitics of the Horn Of Africa and in so doing, creating a real problem for the Trump administration.

Being called a “colonial governor” with his delusional views about both his own role in policy forming and his hands-on approach to actually state building, Yamamoto threatens to tear to shreds Mike Pompeo’s plans in the region to stabilize Somalia.

Yamamoto’s recent moves to rope in the Ethiopian Prime minister to pull off what would have been a crowning moment at the end of an unremarkable diplomatic career – unifying Somalia with its former neighbour Somaliland – has backfired quite badly and put this region once again under the spotlight of the Washington circus and the media pack which feeds on its entrails.

And that’s possibly a very dangerous thing and could explain why the Pentagon and the State Department are currently carrying out the most illogical, banal and entirely spurious campaign of air strikes in Somalia – which more often than not kill herdsmen, villagers and farmers and almost nearly always miss Al Shabab extremists. Are the American pilots who operate the drones just not very good shots? What are we missing?

The last time America was in international news for all the wrong reasons in Somalia was in 1993 when TIME magazine had on its cover a Pulitzer winning photo of the body of a U.S. serviceman being dragged by rope through the streets of Mogadishu following the fiasco of Black Hawk Down.

It was that one single incident which forged U.S. foreign policy for years to come by Bill Clinton, dogged by his own trysts and the media attention they drew, and Somalia and Rwanda. In the former, the U.S. blithely ploughed in with eyes shut; in the latter, it stood on the touchline and watched a genocide unfold.

But you need to go back two years earlier when arguably one of the most brutal regimes, under the leadership of Siad Barre, collapsed and immediately provided the opportunity for the former British colony of Somaliland to break away from the south (Somalia – a former Italian colony).

The convoy of high-end four-wheel-drives carrying Barre’s family which raced across the Somali dessert to make it to the Kenyan border had barely made it to Nairobi before Somaliland wasted no time in snatching back to its former independence, which is gained from the British in 1960.

The alliance with the South as one communist republic was always a difficult one, particularly when the full extent of Barre’s brutality became known in the 1980s.

Today, Somaliland is the winner and takes full pride in that decision to break away as it’s much calmer, more stable than Somalia, which is a country strangled by Al Shabab, an Al Qaeda inspired extremist organisation which took root after the 9-11 attacks in New York – which has made it one of the most poorest and corrupt countries on the planet.

The reasons and rational for uniting again are unclear, although there is some truth to shared idea on both sides that a bigger united Somalia would be less vulnerable to regional foes.

But there is a more positive feeling on the Somali side than Somaliland for this to happen, if both the U.S. bombing campaign in Somalia – supposedly against Al Shabab terrorists – can be halted and the group itself can be reined in.

The U.S. ambassador is thought to be naive by many politicos in Mogadishu though. The idea that unification will bring stability is folly and such rank stupidity reminds older journalists from Black Hawk Down days of U.S. generals and their master plan of offering a reward of 25,000 USD for information leading to the capture of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who Wikipedia describes simply as a ‘warlord’.

Stability in Somalia has to be real and not just some spurious act of political gestures. Governance is a pretentious word banded about by scholars and western educated consultants in Mogadishu as their distance from reality is only trumped by the U.S. ambassador’s.

Unfortunately, going rogue doesn’t just throw a spanner in the works of the Pentagon, the State Department or even the Oval Office (assuming this last epicentre of ignorance can even find Mogadishu on a map of East Africa), but it also has consequences on the ground on the countries that the U.S. is supposedly trying to help.

The U.S. ambassador isn’t simply naive in his over simplified, cartoon snapshot take on what is an incredibly nuanced, if not complicated situation in both Somalia and Somaliland, but his own decisions there in Mogadishu have come with a hefty price.

A billion dollars of cash was unwisely spent on greasing palms and building relations, but according to the National Interest, has actually pushed key figures away from the proximity of Washington and what it has to offer, straight into the hands of the Chinese. Pushing for Mogadishu to have the central power of Somalia’s airspace also has led to illegal arms shipments coming, whereas before they were hindered. The same control for the skies has irked Somaliland and created new tensions with the North. But it’s the decision to insist that all U.S. and international aid money is centralised in one location – Mogadishu – which is his gravest error of judgment, which justifies the National Interest’s barb of “naive”.

Since that move, terrorism has actually increased as Al Shabab’s tentacles permeate deep into government departments, the police, military and some say even as high as Presidential offices. What on earth was this old African hand thinking when he put all the aid money in one basket? Such madness though is easily forgotten in a country which breaks all records at being a failed state even to this day. The U.S. drone strikes now may well be a counter reaction from the Trump administration or the Pentagon who don’t wish to see unity in Somalia but prefer to see division and chaos. Indeed, local hacks even go as far as to say that his mentality also prevails with the UAE which much it seems prefers the ‘divide and rule’ model to the ‘peace and unity’ one. Even if we indulge ourselves that the chaos of Somaliland can be resolved by the recumbent values of the West or misguided buffoons whom it employs as its ambassadors, the bigger question about unity is where do the Gulf States who invest in Somalia stand if such an exercise can be pulled off?

And are the airstrikes by the U.S. there to propel the ambassador’s preposterous blueprint, or to defy it? There’s a lot of confusion, lies and misinformation to digest.

Just this year alone, some 41 airstrikes have been carried out with horrific fatalities amongst ordinary people – locals say as much as 300, although the official figure from U.S. military sources claim just a small handful.

Indeed, the sheer level of America’s meddling and colossal bungling in Somalia led to Hollywood films like Black Hawk Down. Yet now a U.S. ambassador’s foibles and insecurities appear to be writing a new Hollywood script.

Expect a visit from a General in the Pentagon who takes Yamamoto out in to the desert in a four wheel drive any day soon. And those three questions. Someone needs to be told to go to hell.

The author first reported on Somalia’s civil war from Mogadishu in the summer of 1992

After long periods of fighting for their independence from colonial empires, some newly-independent African states took on the mantra of neo-colonialism in denying aspiring ethnic groups their own statehood.

Perhaps the most egregious example of an aspirant nation denied its rightful status because of dictates from the African Union and outside powers in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin is the Republic of Somaliland in the «Horn of Africa». Shortly after achieving independence from Britain in 1960 as the State of Somaliland, the nation formed what would prove to be a dysfunctional union with the Republic of Somalia, what was formerly the colony of Italian Somaliland.

One of Somaliland’s founding statesmen, Mohammed Ibrahim Egal, was not so keen on rushing into a union with Somalia. Egal wanted to wait for six months to firmly establish Somaliland’s government institutions, before rushing into a union with a nation where the predominant business language was Italian, not English, as was the case in Somaliland.

In 1969, the military junta of Mohammed Siad Barre, who hailed from the former Italian Somaliland and governed from the Somali capital of Mogadishu, began a brutal crackdown on the Isaaq people, the majority ethnic group of Somaliland.

In 1990, after Barre’s ouster, the former British Somaliland withdrew from the Somali Republic and declared itself independence once again. Although the State of Somaliland was recognized by some 35 nations during its brief independence from June 26 to July 1, 1960, no state recognized the nation’s restoration of independence in 1960. Not even Somaliland’s former colonial power, the United Kingdom, recognized Somaliland’s independence, even though many of the restored nation’s leaders had close ties to Britain. Upon independence in 1960, Somaliland’s military was composed of the Somaliland Scouts, whose officers were all trained in Britain and were graduates of Britain’s military colleges.

In 1961, the Somaliland officers, concerned that Somaliland was already receiving a raw deal from the union government in Mogadishu, staged an unsuccessful coup. These graduates of Eton and Sandhurst saw their countrymen receiving menial positions in the so-called «union» government in Mogadishu. Following the attempted coup, which sought a restoration of Somaliland’s independence, the Somaliland officers were imprisoned and not set free until 1964, when they were called on the help lead a war against neighboring Ethiopia for control of the Ogaden region. The Ogaden was recognized by the Mogadishu government as «Western Somalia».

In 1967, Egal, the founder of independent Somaliland, became prime minister of the country. The Italian Somaliland-born President, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, appointed Egal to the post to assuage feelings in Somaliland that their better-trained and educated political leaders were being short-changed for high leadership positions in Mogadishu. The honeymoon between Somalilanders and Somalis did not last long. In 1969, Shermarke was assassinated by one of his bodyguards, suspected of being a loyalist of Barre. What followed was a military coup staged by Barre. Soon, Barre began a war of genocide against the Isaaqs and other smaller groups in Somaliland.

The Somalilanders formed an armed opposition group, the Somali National Movement (SNM), to battle Barre’s forces. In 1988, Barre’s war became more brutal when he bombed the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa, the port city of Berbera, and other towns in the region. The Barre campaign against the Isaaqs became known as the «Hargeisa holocaust». The United Nations concluded that Barre’s perpetration of genocide was «conceived, planned and perpetrated by the Somali Government against the Isaaq people».

In 1990, the SNM freed Somaliland from the Somali occupiers and the Barre junta collapsed the following year. The SNM restored Somaliland’s independence in 1991 and it claimed «successor state» status for the short-lived State of Somaliland. In 1994, Egal, the elder statesman of Somaliland, became Somaliland’s president.

Unlike 1990, however, Somaliland, with a population of 3.5 million, was not recognized by any other nation. To this day, the nation has pleaded before the African Union, the European Union, and the United Nations for recognition. The world has turned its head on the country, which remains a force of stability in an area plagued by civil war, maritime piracy, and terrorism.

What is particularly galling to the Somalilanders is that the African Union has made exceptions to its colonial border policy by recognizing the independence of Eritrea, carved out of Ethiopia, and South Sudan, separated from Sudan. There is a suspicion that the African Union and its puppet masters in Washington, London, and at the UN were more than willing to grant recognition to Eritrea in 1993 and South Sudan in 2011 because of the majority Christian populations of both nations. Somaliland is overwhelmingly Islam.

South Sudan is a particularly egregious example of recognition being extended to what would become a «failed state» wracked by civil war. South Sudan was the pet project of people like Barack Obama’s UN ambassador and National Security Adviser Susan Rice. In the leadup to South Sudan’s independence in 2011, there was not even an agreed name for the country. Before South Sudan» was settled upon, other names considered included the Nile Republic, Nilotia, Cush, and New Sudan. There has never been any question about the name of Somaliland.

South Sudan was created as the result of powerful forces in Washington. Independence for southern Sudan was a goal of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her acolyte Susan Rice. The splitting of Sudan was also in the interests of Israel, which had yearned for a client state in southern Sudan that apply pressure on the supply of the Nile's headwaters to Egypt and northern Sudan. For Rice, a vitriolic hatred for Khartoum and its majority Arab population, helped the cause of the southern Sudanese. Rice's views on southern Sudan and Khartoum were partly influenced by two Bill Clinton administration counter-terrorism officials, Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin. Simon and Benjamin were also cozy with the Israel Lobby in Washington.

The African Union has also made exceptions to the dissolving of national unions of its member states. The Senegambia federation of Senegal and Gambia was dissolved in 1989 without resistance from the African Union. The Mali Federation between Senegal and the-then Sudanese Republic (French Sudan, later Mali) came to an end in 1960, after a two-moth existence. The Federation of Arab Republics, consisting of Egypt, Libya, and the non-African country of Syria, was dissolved in 1977. The United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria ended in 1961. If Eritrea and South Sudan could exit from their «parent» nations and Senegal, Gambia, Libya, and Egypt were permitted to end their political unions, why is Somaliland dealt a different hand?

Some status quo enthusiasts for colonial borders in Africa point out that if Somaliland were granted recognition, it would start a wave of other regions demanding independence. This is a specious argument as seen with international support for Eritrea and South Sudan, both the products of long guerrilla wars for independence. If Somaliland were granted recognition, it would signal to other aspirant nations on the continent that they, too, might have worthy arguments for statehood. That is how Somaliland saw independence for Eritrea and South Sudan. Prior statehood or recognition of autonomy does, in fact, provide a legal basis for the independence of Zanzibar from Tanzania, Barotseland from Zambia, and the Caprivi Strip from Namibia. These aspirant nations saw their future nationhood doomed as the result of a colonial treaty, the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890. Similar colonial treaties across Africa have stymied the sovereignty of countless other peoples. The African Union, which prides itself on rising from the ashes of colonialism, should not embrace it when it is carried out by its member states.

No matter that, the issue has been regularly raised, especially in view of the success achieved by Syrian and Russian forces in the province of Aleppo. Now the US government has to face responsibility for the acts of indiscriminate bombing committed by its own military and the CIA.

America has regularly used armed drones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere for a decade and a half. The Obama administration will soon tell the world how many casualties of US air and drone strikes there have been over recent 6 years (the expansion of drone attacks was authorized by the US President in December 2009).

Lisa Monaco, US presidential adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, has promised to reveal the number of terrorism suspects and civilians that the drone strikes have killed since 2009.

The assessment of combatant and noncombatant casualties «will account for all counterterrorism actions outside the area of active hostilities, across the board», she said in a speech in Washington, D.C.

The official declined to list exactly which countries and areas will be included, but did say the report will be issued annually and updated regularly.

It would be the first time for the Obama administration to release information regarding the most controversial lethal missions carried out by the United States in an attempt to gain public support for drone strikes and other military operations abroad.

The report will include the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operations carried out in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere starting from 2009. However, information on drone strikes from the active war locales of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria will not be included. The pledge of Monaco came in the wake of the announcement that the US military had conducted an operation in Somalia to eliminate suspected combatants using drones and manned aircraft.

The casualty report marks the latest attempt by Obama to shore up credibility for the drone program, which has attracted fierce criticism from civil rights advocates but plays a key role in Obama's strategy of targeting extremists without encumbering the US in massive on-the-ground military operations. In 2013, Obama tightened rules for drone attacks, requiring that a target to pose a continuing and imminent threat and that the American military is near-certain that no civilians will be hit. US lawmakers and human rights groups have long pressed for more transparency about civilians killed by US drones, but those calls have traditionally faced opposition from the intelligence community. US officials say, few civilians have died from drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere over the last decade, though unofficial tallies by human rights groups run into the hundreds. In 2014, lawmakers from both parties demanded an annual report as part of the main intelligence bill, but later dropped the demand amid assurances that the Obama administration was seeking ways to disclosure more about the covert activities.

The furtive nature of the program has continued to fuel concerns about unintended consequences and lack of thorough oversight. Civilian deaths from drone strikes have fueled anti-American sentiment to hinder US security cooperation with foreign governments. It also fomented anger among local populations in the countries like Pakistan to create problems for keeping supply routes open to Afghanistan.

Rights groups welcomed Monaco's announcement but said the administration should go further.

Human Rights First noted that the pledge of Monaco came just hours following the announcement of the Pentagon that it killed over 150 suspected terrorists in Somalia. «For data on the number of casualties to be meaningful, the administration must provide more than numbers», the group said.

It added that the government should define how it determines individuals as either a combatant or a civilian, the terrorist group in which the killed combatants belong to and the location of the drone strikes.

«This is an important step, but it should be part of a broader reconsideration of the secrecy surrounding the drone campaign», said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. «The authority to use lethal force should be subject to more stringent oversight by the public, by Congress, and, at least in some contexts, by the courts».

The ACLU said that in response to a freedom-of-information suit filed by the union, the government had said it would release a redacted version of the Presidential Policy Guidance, also known as «the Playbook», a secret document that sets out the law and rules the government must follow when it carries out targeted killings.

A lawyer for the human rights group Reprieve told the Guardian the move by the Obama administration doesn't go far enough.

«In every region where we have pursued an aggressive, secret drone policy, militancy has gotten stronger», said Cori Crider. «It's not enough to tally up the drones' body count – we need a thorough reassessment of the program itself».

California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called for legislation making the new report mandatory. «I do believe, however, there is still value in considering a statutory requirement to make this executive action permanent, ensuring that our commitment to transparency extends beyond the term of the current administration», stated Schiff, who previously introduced legislation to require such a report.

In October 2015, leaked military documents revealed that the controversial drone strikes launched by the United States in Afghanistan have killed a huge number of people that were not the intended target of the attacks.

The report claimed that for drone strikes launched from January 2012 to February 2013, there were 35 «jackpots», a term used to indicate the neutralization of a target, and over 200 people declared as EKIA, or enemy killed in action.

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True, there is little precedent for the classified US UAV program. International law doesn’t speak directly to how it might operate. Still, the US war-model rationale is on shaky legal ground. International law permits the use of lethal force in very restricted circumstances. US drone strike policy appears to allow extrajudicial executions in violation of the right to life, virtually anywhere in the world.

Going to brass tacks, the following facts are undeniable.

Obviously, the drone warfare violates Article 51 of the UN Charter that defines the rules of self-defense because the United States is not attacked. Self-defense against prospective threats are limited to ones which are «imminent» to make US operations in the Middle East run afoul of international norms. The signature tactics used are inherently in violation of the principle of distinction because it fails to identify civilian or militant. Drone attacks don’t conform to the principle of proportionality concerning unintentional civilian casualties in war. The use of UAVs violates Article 2 of the Geneva Convention (IV) Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War by disregarding the human rights of the innocent civilians killed in the strikes. Furthermore, the US drone tactics conflict with International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which prohibits «arbitrary» killing even during an armed conflict. The executions of innocent human beings without trials constitute war crimes. The USA is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or many other international legal forums where legal action might be started. It is, however, part of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where cases can be initiated by one state against another. Conducting drone strikes in a country against its will could be construed as an act of war.

On the home front the legality of drone activities is also questioned. A Congress joint resolution, called Authorization for Use of Military Force, adopted right after the Sept. 11, 2001, says the President is authorized to use force against the planners of the attacks and those who harbor them. The above mentioned resolution authorized attacks on those who carried out the 9/11 attacks and those who harbored them. But the act did not cover mere «supporters» of such groups and associated forces. Under this ruling «signature strikes» and «secondary strikes» would be illegal under US law. UAV attacks in non-war theatres are not covered by international legislation, consequently, not only the killing of innocent civilians, but also of terror suspects without trial is illegal.

The incumbent administration has violated the sovereignty of other states more times than any other. A Nobel Peace laureate, President Obama has dramatically expanded the intensiveness of intrusions into the territory of non-belligerent states. It makes spring to mind other hostile acts committed during Mr Obama’s tenure like the Stuxnet computer virus, the first cyber-attack against another nation (Iran) the US was not at war with.

A flurry of challenges is calling into question the legal and ethical aspect of UAV policy. The US executive branch actually claims it has a right to arbitrarily kill anybody it wants relying on classified data discussed in a secret process by the people out of public sight. Known for its penchant for lecturing others about democracy and the necessity to comply with the international law, the US government has been shying away from public discussion of the most important foreign policy issue that constitutes a flagrant violation of international and domestic law.

The United States helped oversee the occupation of parts of Mogadishu in 2006 by troops from the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM). Most of the invading troops came from Ethiopia and Kenya. The foreign occupation of Mogadishu was aimed at dislodging the jihadist-oriented Islamist Islamic Courts Union (ICU) from power. Kerry’s three hour meeting with the rump Somali government took place under the protective military umbrella of AMISIOM, which maintains its military headquarters at Mogadishu airport.

Kerry’s hastily-arranged surprise visit to Mogadishu airport was made during his well-publicized trip to Kenya. Kerry’s emphasis on Somalia rebuilding its military while African Union peacekeepers patrol Somalia’s major population centers is in keeping with the Obama administration’s steady militarization of America’s foreign policy in Africa. To emphasize America’s military-oriented Africa policy, Kerry followed up his short visit to Mogadishu airport with a stop at the U.S. military and intelligence base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, a major operations center for U.S. drone attacks in the region.

In actuality, the spirit of John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, a civilian program without any ties to the U.S. military or intelligence community designed to help steer newly-emergent nations, mostly in Africa, to self-sufficiency and development, is now officially dead. The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) now holds ultimate sway over America’s Africa policy and assistance programs. The State Department's aid program for countries like Somalia is now firmly under Pentagon control.

Kerry is not only blindsided by a militaristic foreign policy toward Africa, and particularly, Somalia’s woes, but is constrained by the State Department’s enthusiasm for the Somalia status quo. Somaliland, the former British Somaliland that declared itself independent from Somalia in 1991, should have beaten South Sudan to achieve international recognition as an independent state. However, the United States continues to insist that Somaliland reunite with the dysfunctional government in Mogadishu. And the Pentagon maintains an inordinate amount of influence over U.S. policy toward Somaliland, a state that has held democratic elections in a sea of turmoil since it declared independence in 1991 after the fall of the bloody U.S.-supported Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. AFRICOM advisers are busy providing training and weapons to African Union "peacekeeping" forces in southern Somalia whose mandate is to reunite Somalia into a unitary state. The independence of Somaliland and the autonomy of Puntland, another self-governing Somali region in northern Somalia, are seen by AFRICOM and the State Department as short-lived until a strong government can be re-established in Mogadishu.

In many respects, the government of Somaliland faces the same uphill battle for recognition as the Al-Hirak movement faces in South Yemen, across the Gulf of Aden. In both cases, Somaliland and South Yemen, there is a popular desire for the restoration of the independence that was once enjoyed by both former British colonies. In the case of Somaliland, the post-colonial independence granted by Britain to «British Somaliland» in 1960, although only lasting five days prior to the country uniting with Italian Somaliland to form the Somali Republic, gives the Republic of Somaliland proclaimed in 1991 a firm legal basis under international law. However, the United States has decided that neither Somaliland nor the former People’s Republic of South Yemen, declared after Britain’s withdrawal in 1967 but terminated when the country unified with North Yemen in 1990, will ever see their independence restored. And the presence of U.S. drone bases at Camp Lemonnier and Arba Minch airport in Ethiopia are meant to reinforce to all the players on the Horn of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula that the United States policy in the region is backed up with the threat of stealth deadly force provided by the drones.

Somalia’s puppet president, Hassan Sheik Mohamud, is a 2001 graduate of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding’s faith-based conflict resolution center of Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Harrisonburg is also the location of James Madison University and both campuses have maintained their share of connections to the U.S. intelligence community. 

Ever since the downfall of Sad Barre, the failed Somali state has experienced the rule of leaders dubiously-appointed under Western supervision and having longstanding ties with the West. Mohamud’s predecessor, Mohamed Osman Jawari, the current Speaker of the Somali parliament, lived in Norway before moving to Somalia. His predecessor, Hassan Sheikh Sayid Abdulle, the current Somali ambassador in Rome, was a Somali army officer who graduated from the National Defense University in Washington, DC. From 2009 to 2012, the President of Somalia was Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the former commander-in-chief of the jihadist Islamic Courts Union who switched over to the American side. Ahmed, to the satisfaction of his American overseers based at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, appointed Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, the former First Secretary of the Somali embassy in Washington, as Prime Minister. Somalia’s prime minister from 2007 to 2009 was Nur Hassan Hussein Adde, the INTERPOL liaison officer and chief of the Somali National Police under the Siad Barre regime. Ever since the 1960s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency trained members of the Somali police force as its agents-of-influence while the Soviet KGB held sway over most of the Somali military’s officer corps.

Essentially, John Kerry paid a visit to a regime in Mogadishu that exercises no power over Somalia and which has been propped up by one American agent-of-influence after another. 

Somaliland, on the other hand, has shown itself to be resilient in the face of international non-recognition. The nation of 3.5 million people, where moderate Sufism plays a large part in religious life, is a relative oasis in a political and religious desert of turmoil. The country has two airlines that provide service between the capital Hargeisa and Djibouti, Dubai, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia. Somaliland has its own currency, the Somali shilling, and an impressive banking and telecommunications sector. In other words, Somaliland is the type of nation that Kerry wants to see run out of Mogadishu for all of Somalia, including Somaliland. That goal, however, is a fool’s errand and a pipe dream. It is far better to recognize Somaliland’s independence and hope that the failed nation of Somalia and all of its semi-autonomous constituent statelets such as Puntland, Jubaland, and others will use Somaliland as a role model for their own futures.

In many ways, the plight of Somaliland is similar to that of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. All three nations were born out of ruthless civil wars engineered by the West and all three have been shunned by the international community. None of these aspirant nations have seen the type of support from Washington that enabled Kosovo and South Sudan to receive international recognition. Kerry and his advisers would rather continue to support failed states like Somalia, Kosovo, and South Sudan in the interests of the State Department’s ignominious loyalty to its own status quo enthusiasts than in recognizing stark reality.