Conditions are ripe to support terrorism in Horn of Africa

By By Michael SmerconishPhiladelphia Inquirer Page 9 2009-04-24 12:21 AM

Conditions are ripe to support terrorism in Horn of Africa
The Christian Science Monitor It would be easy to dismiss the threat posed to U.S. security in the Horn of Africa as the stuff of wayward, rogue teenage pirates. Especially given the way Navy SEALs were able to dispense with those holding Capt. Richard Phillips this month.
But as I first learned two years ago after getting to play military tourist at the invitation of the Defense Department, our military thinks otherwise.
I was part of a military immersion called the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference that the Pentagon has been running since 1947 for handpicked civilians. My trip was to Centcom, military-speak for the command covering some of the hottest spots in the world: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and 24 other nations. The Centcom area is home to 651 million people and 65 percent of the world's known oil supply.
So it was surprising to learn that Ethiopia and Djibouti would be the final stops on the weeklong trip. While a last-minute security warning prevented our visit to Ethiopia, we did tour a military humanitarian outpost in Djibouti. Located in the northeast corner of the continent, Djibouti borders the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, next to Somalia. It's about the size of Massachusetts and is 94 percent Muslim.
Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion post, is home to the U.S. military there. That's where Rear Adm. Richard Hunt, the commander of the Combined Joint Task Force of the Horn of Africa, and W. Stuart Symington, U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, led a briefing in a makeshift movie theater.
They showed a short but impressive video about the problems of the Horn of Africa and the unique ways in which our military is addressing them. Beginning in 2002, Hunt and Symington said, the military had sought to "win the peace" by advancing a largely humanitarian effort to ensure that Djibouti and neighboring nations weren't overrun by terrorists seeking to establish a new haven.
"We do this so we don't get an Afghanistan," explained Hunt. He referred to the area as "phase zero" in the war on terror, and he said that we need to "change the environment to prevent conflict." The ambassador agreed. "The conditions to support terrorism are ripe," Symington said.
So it wasn't surprising to see that Africa was given its own command (Africom) soon after my trip ended. No longer are Djibouti and seven other African nations being lumped as part of Centcom. And now we know why.
The sea-bound knaves hijacking cargo ships are terrorists. Sure, they're looking for money, not martyrdom. But make no mistake, terror is their tool of choice. And referring to them as "pirates" distracts from the real danger to which we've finally become fully attuned.
The region boasts many of the circumstances the United States encountered in late 2001 after invading Afghanistan. Large swaths of lawless territory. Thousands of armed militia members. An underlying drug culture (opium in Afghanistan and khat, a psychotropic shrub they chew to get high, in Somalia) that heightens tensions among the roving, armed thugs.
In today's Somalia, al-Shabab ("The Youths"), a terrorist organization in the vein of the Taliban, is the landlocked answer for the "pirates" of the Indian Ocean. That group asserted responsibility for firing mortar rounds at a plane carrying U.S. Rep. Donald Payne, D., N.J., out of Mogadishu on April 13. David Shinn, former State Department coordinator in Somalia and the U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia from 1996 to 1999, told me that while it's important to avoid overstating the links between al-Qaeda and al-Shabab, those links do exist.
"There is no question that Islamic extremism in the form of the al-Shabab organization exercises significant influence in Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia," Shinn wrote in an e-mail message. "Although a decentralized organization, it receives external funding and by its own admission has some association with al-Qaeda."
Indeed, Osama bin Laden praised al-Shabab and others in an audio message released last month: "Your patience and resolve supports your brothers in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Islamic Maghreb, Pakistan, and the rest of the fields of jihad."
Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, a former al-Qaeda operative in Nairobi who is wanted for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, is now among the al-Shabab corps. So, too, are Abu Taha al-Sudani, formerly an al-Qaeda leader and financier in East Africa, and Salah Ali Salah Nabhan, wanted for questioning related to a 2002 hotel bombing in Mombasa, Kenya.
It's dangerous to label this simply a "piracy" problem. Or to subscribe to the notion that sending multiple warships to aid one captain held captive by four young "pirates" was over the top. Terrorism - whether motivated by religious fanaticism, perverse national pride, or money - is already a large part of the thread of the region. And those are conditions ripe for organizations like al-Shabab and al-Qaeda to exploit.
It has been two years since Hunt expressed to me his concern that the Horn of Africa could become another Afghanistan. In the years since Sept. 11, 2001 - and especially since the start of the war of Iraq - the United States has let the real Afghanistan fester back into a hub of terrorism and extremism. Here's hoping we don't make the same mistake twice.