The Infrastructure of Militarism in Somaliac
April 21, 2021
Save African states are more involved in the war on terror than we may
think, writes Samar Al-Bulushi.
March 2012: Four suspected members of Al Shabaab walk on the grounds of
Mogadishu Stadium in the capital of Somalia. They were captured during a
joint operation by AMISOM and Somali security services and found in
possession of a rocket-propelled grenade, two sub-machine guns and 84 rounds
of ammunition. (UN Photo)
By Samar Al-Bulushi
Africa is a Country
In late January, reports circulated on social media about a suspected U.S.
drone strike in southern Somalia, in the Al-Shabaab controlled Ma'moodow
town in Bakool province. Debate quickly ensued on Twitter about whether the
newly installed Biden administration was responsible for this strike, which
was reported to have occurred at 10 p.m. local time on Jan 29.
Southern Somalia has been the target of an unprecedented escalation of U.S.
drone strikes in the last several years, with approximately 900 to 1,000
people killed between 2016 and 2019. According to the nonprofit group
Airwars, which monitors and assesses civilian harm from airpower-dominated
international military actions, "it was under the Obama administration that
a significant U.S. drone and airstrike campaign began," coupled with the
deployment of Special Operations forces inside the country. Soon after
Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed a directive designating parts of
Somalia "areas of active hostilities."
While the U.S. never formally declared war in Somalia, Trump effectively
instituted war-zone targeting rules by expanding the discretionary authority
of the military to conduct airstrikes and raids. Thus the debate over the
Jan. 29 strike largely hinged on the question of whether President Joe Biden
was upholding Trump's "flexible" approach to drone warfare, which sanctioned
more airstrikes in Somalia in the first seven months of 2020 than were
carried out during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama,
combined.
In the days following the Jan. 29 strike, the U.S. Military's Africa
Command (AFRICOM) denied responsibility, claiming that the last U.S.
military action in Somalia occurred on Jan. 19, the last full day of the
Trump presidency. Responding to an inquiry from Airwars, AFRICOM's public
affairs team announced:
"We are aware of the reporting. U.S. Africa Command was not involved in the
Jan. 29 action referenced below. U.S. Africa Command last strike was
conducted on Jan. 19. Our policy of acknowledging all airstrikes by either
press release or response to query has not changed."
In early March, The New York Times reported that the Biden administration
had in fact imposed temporary limits on the Trump-era directives, thereby
constraining drone strikes outside of "conventional battlefield zones."
In practice, this means that the U.S. military and the CIA now require White
House permission to pursue terror suspects in places like Somalia and Yemen
where the U.S. is not "officially" at war. This does not necessarily reflect
a permanent change in policy, but rather a stopgap measure while the Biden
administration develops "its own policy and procedures for counterterrorism
kill-or-capture operations outside war zones."
Aug. 9, 2011: A woman outside closed businesses in an area of central
Mogadishu that had been an Al Shabaab stronghold until just a few days
earlier. (UN Photo)
If we take AFRICOM at its word about Jan. 29, this provokes the question of
who was behind that particular strike. Following AFRICOM's denial of
responsibility, analysts at Airwars concluded that the strike was likely
carried out by forces from the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somali
(AMISOM) or by Ethiopian troops, as it occurred soon after Al-Shabaab
fighters had ambushed a contingent of Ethiopian troops in the area. If
indeed the military of an African state is responsible for the bombing, what
does this mean for our analysis of the security assemblages that sustain the
U.S. 's war-making apparatus in Africa?
Thanks to the work of scholars, activists, and investigative journalists, we
have a growing understanding of what AFRICOM operations look like in
practice. Maps of logistics hubs, forward operating sites, cooperative
security locations, and contingency locations - from Mali and Niger to Kenya
and Djibouti - capture the infrastructures that facilitate militarism and
war on a global scale. Yet what the events of Jan. 29 suggest is that
AFRICOM is situated within, and often reliant upon, less scrutinized
war-making infrastructures that, like those of the United States, claim to
operate in the name of security.
Geopolitical Projects
A careful examination of the geographies of the U.S. so-called war on terror
in East Africa points not to one unified structure in the form of AFRICOM,
but to multiple, interconnected geopolitical projects.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore in 2012. (Heinrich-Boll-Stiftung, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Inspired by the abolitionist thought of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who cautions
activists against focusing exclusively on any one site of violent exception
like a prison, I am interested in the relational geographies that sustain
the imperial war-making infrastructure in Africa today.
Just as the modern prison is "a central but by no means singularly defining
institution of carceral geography," AFRICOM is a fundamental but by no means
singularly defining instrument of war-making in Africa today.
Since the U.S. military's embarrassing exit from Somalia in 1993, the U.S.
has shifted from a boots-on-the ground approach to imperial warfare, instead
relying on African militaries, private contractors, clandestine ground
operations, and drone strikes.
To singularly focus on AFRICOM's drone warfare is therefore to miss the
wider matrix of militarized violence that is at work. As Madiha Tahir, who
studies digital and drone warfare at Columbia University, reminds us, attack
drones are only the most visible element of what she refers to as
"distributed empire" - differentially distributed opaque networks of
technologies and actors that augment the reach of the war on terror to
govern more bodies and spaces.
This dispersal of power requires careful consideration of the racialized
labor that sustains war-making in Somalia, and of the geographical
implications of this labor. The vast array of actors involved in the war
against Al-Shabaab has generated political and economic entanglements that
extend well beyond the territory of Somalia itself.
Ethiopia was the first African military to intervene in Somalia in December
2006, sending thousands of troops across the border, but it did not do so
alone. Ethiopia's effort was backed by U.S. aerial reconnaissance and
satellite surveillance, signaling the entanglement of at least two
geopolitical projects.
While the U.S. was focused on threats from actors with alleged ties to
Al-Qaeda, Ethiopia had its own concerns about irredentism and the potential
for its then-rival Eritrea to fund Somali militants that would infiltrate
and destabilize Ethiopia. As Ethiopian troops drove Somali militant leaders
into exile, more violent factions emerged in their place. In short, the 2006
invasion planted the seeds for the growth of what is now known as
Al-Shabaab.
African Union Mission in Somalia
Nov. 18, 2011: A Burundian soldier with the AMISOM in a frontline position
in territory recently captured from insurgents in northern fringes of
Mogadishu. (UN Photo)
The United Nations soon authorized an African Union peacekeeping operation
(AMISOM) to "stabilize" Somalia. What began as a small deployment of 1,650
peacekeepers in 2007 gradually transformed into a number that exceeded
22,000 by 2014.
The African Union has emerged as a key subcontractor of migrant military
labor in Somalia: troops from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda
deployed to fight Al-Shabaab are paid significantly higher salaries than
they receive back home, and their governments obtain generous military aid
packages from the U.S., U.K., and increasingly, the European Union, in the
name of "security."
But because these are African troops rather than American ones, we hear
little of lives lost, or of salaries not paid. The rhetoric of
"peacekeeping" makes AMISOM seem something other than what it is in
practice-a state-sanctioned, transnational apparatus of violent labor that
exploits group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. (This is
also how Gilmore defines racism.)
Aug. 20, 2011: Jean Ping (left), chairperson of the African Union
Commission, visits wounded Transitional Federal Government, or TFG, soldiers
in Mogadishu. (UN Photo)
Meanwhile, Somali analyst Abukar Arman uses the term "predatory capitalism"
to describe the hidden economic deals that accompany the so-called
stabilization effort, such as "capacity-building" programs for the Somali
security apparatus that serve as a cover for oil and gas companies to obtain
exploration and drilling rights. Kenya is an important example of a
"partner" state that has now become imbricated in this economy of war.
Following the Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) invasion of Somalia in October
2011, the African Union's readiness to incorporate Kenyan troops into AMISOM
was a strategic victory for Kenya, as it provided a veneer of legitimacy for
maintaining what has amounted to a decade-long military occupation of
southern Somalia. Through carefully constructed discourses of threat that
build on colonial-era mappings of alterity in relation to Somalis, the
Kenyan political elite have worked to divert attention away from internal
troubles and from the economic interests that have shaped its involvement in
Somalia.
From collusion with Al-Shabaab in the illicit cross-border trade in sugar
and charcoal, to pursuing a strategic foothold in offshore oil fields, Kenya
is sufficiently ensnared in the business of war that, as Horace Campbell
observes, "it is not in the interest of those involved in this business to
have peace."
What began as purportedly targeted interventions spawned increasingly
broader projects that expanded across multiple geographies. In the early
stages of AMISOM troop deployment, for example, one-third of Mogadishu's
population abandoned the city due to the violence caused by confrontations
between the mission and Al-Shabaab forces, with many seeking refuge in
Kenya. While the mission's initial rules of engagement permitted the use of
force only when necessary, it gradually assumed an offensive role, engaging
in counterinsurgency and counterterror operations.
Rather than weaken Al-Shabaab, the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia observed
that offensive military operations exacerbated insecurity. According to the
UN, the dislodgment of Al-Shabaab from major urban centers "has prompted its
further spread into the broader Horn of Africa region" and resulted in
repeated displacements of people from their homes.
Meanwhile, targeted operations against individuals with suspected ties to
Al-Shabaab are unfolding not only in Somalia itself, but equally in
neighboring countries like Kenya, where U.S.-trained Kenyan police employ
military tactics of tracking and targeting potential suspects, contributing
to what one Kenyan rights group referred to as an "epidemic" of
extrajudicial killings and disappearances.
Aug. 18, 2011: Civilians in northern Mogadishu, near the old cigarette and
match factory where Burundian soldiers with AMISOM established a new
position after a retreat by Al Shabaab. (UN Photo)
Finally, the fact that some of AMISOM's troop-contributing states have
conducted their own aerial assaults against Al-Shabaab in Somalia demands
further attention. A December 2017 United Nations report, for example,
alleged that unauthorized Kenyan airstrikes had contributed to at least 40
civilian deaths in a 22-month period between 2015 and 2017.
In May 2020, senior military officials in the Somali National Army accused
the Kenyan military of indiscriminately bombing pastoralists in the Gedo
region, where the KDF reportedly conducted over 50 airstrikes in a two week
period. And in January 2021, one week prior to the Jan. 29 strike that
Airwars ascribed to Ethiopia, Uganda employed its own fleet of helicopter
gunships to launch a simultaneous ground and air assault in southern
Somalia, contributing to the deaths-according to the Ugandan military-of 189
people, allegedly all Al-Shabaab fighters.
While each of the governments in question are formally allies of the U.S.,
their actions are not reducible to U.S. directives. War-making in Somalia
relies on contingent and fluid alliances that evolve over time, as each set
of actors evaluates and reevaluates their interests.
The ability of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda to maintain their own war-making
projects requires the active or tacit collaboration of various actors at the
national level, including politicians who sanction the purchase of military
hardware, political and business elite who glorify militarized masculinities
and femininities, media houses that censor the brutalities of war, logistics
companies that facilitate the movement of supplies, and the troops
themselves, whose morale and faith in their mission must be sustained.
As the Biden administration seeks to restore the image of the United States
abroad, it is possible that AFRICOM will gradually assume a backseat role in
counter-terror operations in Somalia. Officially, at least, U.S. troops have
been withdrawn and repositioned in Kenya and Djibouti, while African troops
remain on the ground in Somalia. Relying more heavily on its partners in the
region would enable the U.S. to offset the public scrutiny and liability
that comes with its own direct involvement.
But if the focus is exclusively on the U.S., then one can succumb to its
tactics of invisibility and invincibility, and one fails to reckon with the
reality that the East African warscape is a terrain shaped by interconnected
modes of power. The necessary struggle to abolish AFRICOM requires a
recognition of the entanglement in and reliance upon other war-making
assemblages.
Samar Al-Bulushi is a contributing editor of Africa Is a Country and on the
faculty of University of California, Irvine.
This article is from Africa is a Country and is republished under a creative
commons license.
