Monday, March 28, 2016

Africa’s $700 Billion Problem Waiting to Happen | Foreign Policy


The Horn of Africa region is central to the world’s maritime trade. It’s also beginning to fall apart.


Africa’s $700 Billion Problem Waiting to Happen

Back in 2002, Meles Zenawi, then prime minister of Ethiopia, drafted a foreign policy and national security white paper for his country. Before finalizing it, he confided to me a “nightmare scenario” — not included in the published version — that could upend the balance of power in the Horn of Africa region.
The scenario went like this: Sudan is partitioned into a volatile south and an embittered north. The south becomes a sinkhole of instability, while the north is drawn into the Arab orbit. Meanwhile, Egypt awakens from its decades-long torpor on African issues and resumes its historical stance of attempting to undermine Ethiopia, with which it has a long-standing dispute over control of the Nile River. It does so by trying to bring Eritrea and Somalia into its sphere of influence, thereby isolating the government in Addis Ababa from its direct neighbors. Finally, Saudi Arabia begins directing its vast financial resources to support Ethiopia’s rivals and sponsor Wahhabi groups that challenge the traditionally dominant Sufis in the region, generating conflict and breeding militancy within the Muslim communities.
Fourteen years later, reality has exceeded Zenawi’s nightmare scenario; not only has every one of his fears come to pass, but Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi King Salman bin Saud are working hand-in-glove on regional security issues — notably in Yemen and Libya — which has raised the stakes of the long-running Egypt-Ethiopia rivalry. If the worsening tensions in the Horn of Africa erupt into military conflict, as seems increasingly possible, it wouldn’t just be a disaster for the region — it could also be a catastrophe for the global economy. Almost all of the maritime trade between Europe and Asia, about $700 billion each year, passes through the Bab al-Mandab, the narrow straits on the southern entrance to the Red Sea, en route to the Suez Canal. An endless procession of cargo ships and oil tankers passes within sight — and artillery range — of both the Yemeni and African shores of the straits.
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Zenawi’s nightmare scenario, in other words, may soon become the world’s — and no one has a white paper to prepare for it
Zenawi’s nightmare scenario, in other words, may soon become the world’s — and no one has a white paper to prepare for it.

A crisis in the Horn of Africa has been a long time in the making. The regional rivalries of today date back to 1869, when the Suez Canal was opened to shipping, instantly making the Red Sea one of the British Empire’s most important strategic arteries, since almost all of its trade with India passed that way. Then as now, the security of Egypt depended on control of the Nile headwaters, 80 percent of which originate in Ethiopia. Fearful that Ethiopia would dam the river and stop the flow, Egypt and its colonial masters attempted to keep Ethiopia weak and encircled. They did this in part by divvying up rights to the Nile’s waters without consulting Addis Ababa. For example, the British-drafted Nile Waters Agreements, signed in 1929 and 1959, excluded Ethiopia from any share of the waters. As a result, Egypt and Ethiopia became regional rivals, intensely suspicious of each other.
The Nile remains a high-profile source of tension between the two countries to this day; Sisi’s state visit last year to Ethiopia failed to achieve much, in large part because of Egypt’s unease over a huge Ethiopian hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile. But another important source of friction between the two countries has centered for some time on two of Ethiopia’s volatile neighbors — Eritrea and Somalia — which Cairo has long viewed as useful partners to secure its interests along the Red Sea littoral. Ethiopia has shown it will resist what it views as Egyptian encroachment near its borders. From 2001 to 2004, for instance, Ethiopia and Egypt backed rival factions in Somalia, which prolonged that country’s destructive civil war.


These fractures in the Horn of Africa have been deepened by Saudi Arabia’s reassessment of its security strategy. Worried that the United States was withdrawing from its role as security guarantor for the wider region, it resolved to build up its armed forces and project its power into strategic hinterlands and sea lanes to the north and south. In practice, that has meant winning over less powerful countries along the African coast of the Red Sea — Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia — a region that Ethiopia has sought to place within its sphere of influence.
The Saudi presence along the African Red Sea coast has grown more sharply pronounced since its March 2015 military intervention in Yemen, which drew in Egypt as part of a coalition of Sunni Arab states battling Iran-backed Houthi rebels. The coalition obtained combat units from Sudan and Eritrea, and scrambled to secure the entire African shore of the Red Sea. Then in January of this year — under pressure from Saudi Arabia — Djibouti, Somalia, and Sudan all cut diplomatic ties with Iran. By far the most significant of these was Sudan, which has had long-standing political and military ties with Tehran. For years, Iranian warships called at Port Sudan, and Iranian clandestine supplies to the Palestinian militant group Hamas passed freely along Sudan’s Red Sea coast (occasionally intercepted by Israeli jet fighters). Now Sudan is part of the Saudi-led coalition pummeling the Iran-backed Houthis.
But the most important geopolitical outcome of the Saudi-led Yemen intervention has been the rehabilitation of Eritrea, which capitalized on the war to escape severe political and economic isolation. After it gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993, Eritrea fought wars with each of its three land neighbors — Djibouti, Sudan, and Ethiopia. It also fought a brief war with Yemen over the disputed Hanish Islands in the Red Sea in 1995, after which it declined to reestablish diplomatic relations with Sana’a and instead backed the Houthi rebels against the government.
After the Ethio-Eritrean border war of 1998-2000, Eritrea became a garrison state — with an army of 320,000, it has one the highest soldier-to-population ratios in the world — and Ethiopia led an international campaign to isolate it at the African Union, United Nations, and other international bodies. This was made easier by Eritrea’s increasingly rogue behavior, including backing al-Shabab militants in Somalia. The imposition of U.N. sanctions in 2009 brought the country to the brink of financial collapse.
But the war in Yemen gave Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki a get-out-of-jail-free card. He switched sides in the Yemen conflict and allied himself with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners. As a result, the Eritrean president is now publicly praised by the Yemeni government and welcomed in Arab capitals. His government is also reaping handsome if secret financial rewards in exchange for its diplomatic about-face.
But the fact that Eritrea has decisively escaped Ethiopia’s trap does not mean it has suddenly become a more viable dictatorship. On the contrary, the renewed geostrategic interest in the country and its 750-mile Red Sea coast make the question of who succeeds Afewerki, who has been in power for a quarter century, all the more contentious — especially since Ethiopia has long sought to hand pick a replacement for the Eritrean president. Already, Ethiopia mounts regular small military sorties on the countries’ common border to let Eritrea know who is the regional powerbroker. It would not take much for these tensions to explode into open war.
Saudi Arabia’s revamped security strategy has also meant a sudden influx of Arab funds into Somalia. The Saudis promised $50 million to Mogadishu in exchange for closing the Iranian embassy, for example, while other Arab countries and Turkey have spent lavishly to court the allegiance of Somali politicians. This is partly intra-Sunni competition — Turkish- and Qatar-backed candidates pitted against those funded by the Wahhabi alliance — but it also reflects Somalia’s increasing geopolitical importance. In the country’s national elections scheduled for September, Arab- and Wahhabi-affiliated candidates for parliament could very well sweep the board.
All of this has made Ethiopia very nervous — as it should. The tremors of the region’s shifting tectonic plates may not directly cause a major crisis. The more probable outcome is deeper divisions between Egypt and Ethiopia, which could cause a proliferation or deepening of proxy disputes elsewhere in the region, such as the two countries’ competing efforts to shape the future leadership of Eritrea and Somalia.
Still, it’s impossible to rule out the possibility of a dramatic security crisis stemming from the shifting regional balance of power. It could come in the form of renewed fighting over Eritrea’s still-disputed land borders, or spinoffs from the war in Yemen, such as the eruption of maritime terrorism. That would lead to a dramatic escalation of the militarization of the region. It would also threaten to entirely close the region’s sea lanes — the ones that are so central to global commerce.
Unfortunately, the international community is sorely unprepared for such an outcome. A well-established, multi-country naval coalition patrols the sea lanes off Somalia’s coast to combat piracy, but no international political mechanism currently exists to diffuse a regional crisis. In the relevant bureaucracies that might be called upon in an emergency — from the United Nations to the U.S. State Department — Africa and the Middle East are handled by separate divisions that tend not to coordinate. The EU’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Alex Rondos, has taken the lead in developing an integrated strategy for both shores of the Red Sea, but the EU’s foreign policy instruments are ill-suited to hard security challenges such as this that span two continents.
For its part, the African Union has developed a sophisticated set of conflict management practices for its region. It has taken a hard line against coups and pioneered the principle of non-indifference in the internal affairs of member states — foreshadowing the doctrine of “responsibility to protect.” Its summits serve as gatherings where peer pressure is used for the informal management of conflicts, with more success than is usually recognized. The Gulf Cooperation Council, the regional alliance of Gulf monarchies that would inevitably be involved in a major regional dispute of this kind, should learn from these African best practices. That would require a dramatic change in the mind-set of Arab royal families, which assume that their relationship with Africans is one of patron and client. Too often, the Africans reinforce that mind-set by acting as supplicants. For example, when the African Union sent a delegation to the Gulf countries in November, the agenda wasn’t strategic dialogue or partnership — it was fundraising.
But to prevent Zenawi’s “nightmare scenario” from coming to fruition, the Africans and the Arabs need to recognize the Red Sea as a shared strategic space that demands their coordination. A sensible place to start would be by convening a Red Sea forum composed of the GCC and the AU — plus other interested parties such as the United Nations, European Union, and Asian trading partners — to open lines of communication, discuss strategic objectives for peace and security and agree on mechanisms for minimizing risk. The fast-emerging Red Sea security challenge is well suited to that most prosaic of diplomatic initiatives — a talking shop.
The problem is, all these actors tend to start talking only after a crisis has already exploded. Here’s a timely warning.
Image credit: SIMON MAINA/AFP/Getty Images

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

U.S. Strategy to Dominate Horn of Africa: Attacks in Somalia Expose “Failure” of Decade-long War | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization




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Bombings and ground campaign have not brought stability to the country
On March 7 the Pentagon announced that it had killed 150 members ofthe Al-Shabaab guerrilla movement in a bombing operation in Somalia.
These military actions are part and parcel of a broader United States foreign policy strategy to dominate the Horn of Africa. The administration of President Barack Obama has continued the military and political intervention in Somalia aimed at remaking the political landscape of the East African state which shares borders with some of Washington’s closest collaborators in the region including Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya.
The administration’s rationale for a renewed air campaign in Somalia was to downgrade and destroy training bases for Al-Shabaab. The Islamist movement has not only continued its war against the western-backed regime in Mogadishu but has crossed over into neighboring Kenya and Uganda in apparent retaliation for their military deployments in the country as members of the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) established in 2007.
A Department of Defense press release claimed the targeted area “is a training facility of al-Shabaab which is a terrorist group affiliated with al-Qaeda. The strike was conducted using manned and unmanned aircraft and the fighters who were scheduled to depart the camp posed an imminent threat to U.S. and AMISOM forces.” (March 7)
An escalation in the Pentagon’s air campaign in Somalia coincides with the years-long proxy war inside the country which has resulted in the deployment of 22,000 troops (AMISOM) from eight different African states who are trained, armed and given logistical support by Washington, the United Nations and the European Union (EU). In addition, the Somalia National Army (SNA) is supplied by western governments and their allies in an effort to transition the character of the war to defeat the Al-Shabaab organization, which maintains control over large areas of the country.
This bombing operation was followed on March 9 by reports that at least 15 Al-Shabaab fighters had also been killed in another raid led ostensibly by the imperialist-backed and trained Somalia National Army (SNA) troops working in conjunction with U.S. Special Forces. News of the second attack emanated from al-Shabaab itself and a Somalian federal government official.
Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, a spokesperson for Al-Shabaab, stressed that foreign soldiers had attacked their base located approximately 30 miles (50 km) from the capital Mogadishu in the Lower Shabelle region.
Abu-Musab said of the attackers that “They were masked and spoke foreign languages which our fighters could not understand. We do not know who they were but we foiled them.” (Reuters, March 9)
According to Abu Musab, Al-Shabaab only lost one fighter contradicting reports from other media and governmental sources. The Islamist organization said that the military commandos landed along the River Shabelle.
They then dropped off the commando unit which travelled to the Al-Shabaab base located in the town of Awdhegle. The suspected Special Forces unit were armed with M16 rifles and rocket launchers utilized in the attack.
U.S. government officials later announced to the press that their military troops were involved in the attacks alongside western-backed Somalian military forces, noting the operation had resulted in deaths among the Al-Shabaab combatants.
Administration Seeks Rapid Advances in Long War
The latest phase in the war of containment, domination and control of the resource-rich Horn of Africa state is approaching ten years when Washington attempted its renewed efforts to impose a political dispensation on the country beginning in 2006.
After the failure of the 1992-1994 occupation of Somalia by thousands of U.S. Marines, U.N. troops along with allied forces from Canada and other states, when the people of this beleaguered state rose up in an uprising, successive administrations sought avenues to interfere in the internal affairs of the country. Somalia had not been able to set up an internationally-recognized government since the collapse the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre in early 1991, a U.S. ally in Africa.
During 2006, an Islamic Courts Union (UIC) movement began to solidarize with local organizations establishing a political system that operated independently of the foreign policy imperatives of the administration of former President George W. Bush. Washington encouraged its contacts inside Somalia to force out the Islamic Courts which proved to be a disaster.
Sentiments towards the U.S. government became even more hostile leading to the invasion of Somalia by neighboring Ethiopia, which is a staunch partner of Washington in its so-called “war on terrorism.” Yet, the intervention of the Ethiopian military then under the leadership of the late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, was by no means sufficient to drive out the Islamic Courts movement from Mogadishu and other areas in the central and south of the country where they had taken control.
Over the next three years, the Islamic Courts split over whether to enter a transitional government in Mogadishu that was backed by the imperialist states. By 2009, the Al-Shabaab group, meaning “the youth”, emerged as the main opposition to the U.S. and British supported regime in the capital.
The escalating deployment of forces from Uganda, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and other African states strengthened the AMISOM operation driving out Al-Shabaab from most of Mogadishu and some other areas of the country in the central and southern regions.
Nevertheless, Al-Shabaab remained strong while attracting fighters from other countries and reportedly pledging allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
At present the EU, one of the major funding and logistical supporters of AMISOM, said that it would reduce its assistance by 20 percent. This announcement has prompted sharp rebukes from those states which have served as ground units propping up the federal government in Mogadishu.
According to an article published by Jane’s Defense Weekly, “The move was criticized during a summit of leaders from AMISOM’s contributing countries in Djibouti on 28 February. Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta said in his speech that the international community must provide adequate support for the mission in the run-up to elections later this year.” (March 3)
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said “This is the time to strengthen AMISOM through a surge in troops and resources, not weaken it.”
The same Jane’s Defense Weekly report noted that a “joint declaration released at the end of the summit said the leaders noted ‘with serious concern the decision by the EU to reduce financial support to AMISOM troop allowance by 20%, especially during this critical phase of AMISOM operations’ and called on the UN to cover the resulting shortfall.”
The Obama administration’s recent bombing of the country does signal a greater reliance on air power and the drawing-down of military assistance to AMISOM and the SNA. Exposing further the dominant imperialist role in the war against Al-Shabaab in Somalia, AMISOM has announced that it will rely more on air power in light of the reduction of funding from the EU.
Kenya’s Nation newspaper stated on February 21 that AMISOM “may have to concentrate more on air strikes than ground attacks in its war against Al-Shabaab militants to minimize expenses after one of its main donors reduced funding.”
Nonetheless, overall these developments provide no real plan for a reduction in the escalating Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department involvement in Somalia and the Horn of Africa. The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) which has thousands of troops in Djibouti and other continental states has been bolstered under the Obama administration.
The absence of any substantive discussions surrounding foreign policy in Africa during the presidential campaign leaves policy-making to the intelligence agencies and the defense department much to the detriment of people in Africa as well as in the U.S. Unless this situation changes dramatically, there will be no real shift in Washington’s foreign policy in the region.