As Washington's geostrategy has evolved
since September 11, 2001, the Horn of Africa has
taken on vital strategic importance.
In
the thinking of US defense planners, the Horn
occupies the western end of an "arc of
instability" that runs through the Middle East,
the Southern Caucasus and into Central Asia to
Afghanistan's eastern border.
The vast
area encompassed by the arc contains the world's
largest supply of energy reserves, is composed
mostly of states with authoritarian and
quasi-authoritarian governments that are subject
to instability, and has a predominantly Muslim population,
a
disaffected portion of which provides recruits for
and support of violent Islamic revolutionary
movements.
Washington's overriding
interests in the arc of instability are to contain
and suppress Islamic revolutionary movements in
order to secure strategic resources and prevent
further attacks on US soil, and to cultivate
stable and friendly governments in the area that
will serve broader US aims in its competition with
the power centers of China, Russia and India.
After Washington's initial response to
September 11 of invading Afghanistan and
overthrowing the Taliban regime, it set out on a
course effectively of unilateral action, outlined
in its 2002 National Security Strategy, which
announced that the US was committed to maintaining
global military supremacy and was ready to fight
preemptive wars against states that threatened its
vital interests by harboring "terrorists" or
developing weapons of mass destruction.
The generally multilateral approach of
previous US administrations was abandoned in favor
of organizing "coalitions of the willing" under
Washington's leadership.
The test of
Washington's strategy came in its invasion and
occupation of Iraq, which had the ambitious and
comprehensive aims of demonstrating the
effectiveness of US military might to hostile
powers and creating a model of regime change to
serve as an example of market democratization to
be emulated by regimes and publics within the arc
of instability.
The failure of
Washington's self-imposed test caused defense
planners to rethink their strategy. Facing a
Sunni-led insurgency in Iraq, Washington no longer
had the military resources necessary to make its
unilateralist strategy credible. A shift in policy
was necessary to protect US interests, and it was
made through 2005 without the publicity attending
the National Security Strategy. Nonetheless, the
new strategy has been declared openly and
frequently since it was put into place in March.
The 'long war' At the core of
Washington's new geostrategy is the explicit
acknowledgment that its enemy is not "terrorism"
in general, but "Islamic extremism". In order to
fight that enemy with any effectiveness, Major
General Douglas Lute, director of operations for
the US Central Command (CENTCOM), which has
military responsibility for the entire arc, said
in August that the US had embarked on a "long war"
that - all else being equal - would become the
dominant US military engagement once - as
Washington hopes - Afghanistan and Iraq were
stabilized.
Stability in Iraq, in
particular, will, according to Washington's
expectations, drive the Islamic revolutionaries,
who are now concentrated there as parts of the
insurgency, to seek safe havens and new
battlegrounds elsewhere in the arc of instability.
The region to which they are most likely to head,
in CENTCOM's view, is the Horn of Africa, where
large areas are not effectively controlled by
central governments or, such as in Somalia, where
there is no functioning central government.
As a variety of Pentagon briefings and
statements describe it under various rubrics, the
long war is not a conventional military conflict,
but a multi-faceted campaign including
military-military cooperation with states in the
arc, military-administered humanitarian aid and
public diplomacy. The aims of the campaign are to
encourage governments within the arc to cooperate
in suppressing Islamic revolutionary groups and,
more importantly, to diminish the recruitment base
for those groups by winning over local public
opinion.
Washington's blueprint for the
long war marks an abandonment of its former
unilateral approach in favor of a region-based
multilateralism in which Washington partners with
governments in the regions comprising the arc and
attempts to get them to cooperate with one another
in the common effort against Islamic revolution.
The new strategy represents a step back from the
ambitions of unilateralism. It further represents
an acceptance that Washington is dependent on
regional powers to satisfy its aims and must
negotiate with them while expecting only partial
success.
The new multilateralism must
adjust to the fact that regional partners have
their own agendas that may differ from
Washington's. They often have conflicts with their
neighbors and are split by domestic divisions. The
danger of the new strategy is that Washington will
be drawn into choosing sides in regional and
domestic conflicts, and will face backlashes if it
supports the losing side. Yet, given the failure
of unilateralism, the new fall-back strategy
appears to be the best that Washington can do to
protect its perceived interests.
Engagement in the Horn of
Africa As the region in the arc that has
attracted Washington's most immediate concern and
one in which it does not face rivalry from other
great powers, the Horn of Africa has been the site
of the fullest development of the new strategy.
Washington's instrument in the region is
the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa
(CJTF), which is based in Djibouti and comprises
1,600 troops from all branches of the armed
services, half of whom are available for civil
affairs and military training missions outside the
base. According to a Defense Department release,
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has called
the CJTF "a model for the future of DoD
[Department of Defense]".
At a
wide-ranging September 21 news conference, CJTF
commander, Major General Timothy Ghormley,
explained that the command had evolved from a
"crisis response force" with a military focus to a
unit of unconventional war concentrated on
fulfilling the new Pentagon strategy.
In a
frank appraisal of his mission, Ghormley said that
the major requirement for its success and his
major difficulty was gaining access to the
region's countries, except for Djibouti. Among the
four core states of the Horn, the CJTF is barred
from Somalia because Washington has ceded
responsibility there to the African Union; it is
unwelcome in Eritrea, which accuses Washington of
backing Ethiopia in the border dispute between the
two countries, and it has achieved solid footholds
in Ethiopia and Djibouti.
Although
Washington's wish is to execute its strategy in an
environment of tightly knit regional cooperation,
it also insists that it is committed not to back
any parties in regional conflicts. Ghormley's
remarks show that even where Washington is not
opposed by another great power, its access is
severely limited and it is constrained, if only by
default, effectively to take sides in conflicts.
In the power configuration of the Horn,
Ethiopia is far and away the dominant player and
its agenda is to isolate Eritrea, play the major
role in determining a future government in Somalia
and keep its access to Djibouti's port.
Thus far, Washington has been constrained
to back Addis Ababa by refusing to pressure it to
honor an international boundary settlement
awarding the Badme region to Eritrea and by
allowing it to provide military support to one of
the factions of Somalia's deadlocked government.
In doing so, Washington has alienated
Asmara and the other Somali factions, and has
supported a regime in Addis Ababa that has become
increasingly authoritarian as it contends with a
noncompliant opposition that has refused to take
its seats in parliament and has threatened to
escalate its protest demonstrations into civil
disobedience.
The US presence in the
region has also been unable to stop the rise of
Islamism in Somalia and to suppress a reported
al-Qaeda cell there, to prevent a renewed military
build up on both sides of the border between
Ethiopia and Eritrea, and even to influence
Djibouti's regime to refrain from actions that
threaten to reignite ethnic-based civil war in
that country.
Conclusion After
having failed in its unilateralist short-cut
strategy in the arc of instability, Washington has
opted for a long war that inserts it into the
briar patches of regional balance-of-power
politics where it faces being drawn into taking
sides with dubious partners with their own
agendas. This is not to say that any other course,
save withdrawal, is open to Washington, but only
that the long war is going to be tortuous and is
likely to have limited success.
Published with permission of thePower and Interest News
Report, an analysis-based
publication that seeks to provide insight into
various conflicts, regions and points of interest
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