Thursday, May 19, 2016
On the last Monday in May, as many Americans commemorate those men and women who sacrificed their lives for our freedom, some are still fighting in dangerous places, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. President Barack Obama has escalated U.S. involvement in Somalia, and the Pentagon last month launched airstrikes in the war-torn country, killing 150 fighters of the al-Shabab militant group. According to Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis, the fighters posed an “imminent threat” to the U.S. and the African union troops in Somalia.
The U.S. engagement in Somalia provides communications, drone attacks, special-operations raids, CIA operations, logistics and training, and financing for the Somali army composed up of rival local clan militias and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).
Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have succeeded keeping the U.S. out of the news as far as the Somalia war and its casualties are concerned. Instead, the Obama administration is disguising the Somali intervention as a United Nations/African Union mission, when in fact the United States is expending vast resources, including boots on the ground, on the Somalia quagmire, with little or no return for taxpayers’ money, just to prop up the besieged Somali government.
That government, the first Somali government the U.S. has recognized since 1991, has failed to build government institutions, such as security, basic services and a functioning judicial system. And the man Obama is backing as the leader of the country, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, has no support from ordinary Somalis; his authority is not beyond Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, where a climate of violence, including car and suicide bombings, has prevailed.
Congress can end AMISOM the right way by defunding it, unless Obama defines the U.S. long-term political objective in Somalia, and outlines an AMISOM exit strategy. Congress has the power and constitutional authority to end Obama’s Somalia quagmire, and its costs on U.S., Somali, and African troops.
Instead of dictating the political outcomes of Somalia’s Byzantine political dynamics of the Somali clan system, U.S. officials should put their energy into devising an exit strategy for AMISOM before mission creep takes over, and let the Somalis decide their own future.