More on the Al Qaeda Shift to Somalia

An interesting bit from NightWatch over the weekend. This is something that has popped up in Congressional testimony the last few weeks, something we should think about .

Somalia: Update. The government in Mogadishu will not be able to defeat hard-line al Shabaab militants without international assistance to strengthen its security forces, Somali Interior Minister Abdukadir Ali Omar said 4 October. Omar said Somali security forces are not strong enough, and that African Union peacekeepers have a defensive mandate that prevents them from eradicating the al Shabaab militant group, which recently recaptured Kismayo port.

Omar’s timing in calling for outside troops could hardly be worse. The irony is that Afghanistan has no al Qaida presence, according to National Security Advisor Jones, today, but reinforcements for Afghanistan are being justified on the grounds of stopping al Qaida from re-establishing a base there.

Somalia is on the verge of becoming a new safe haven for al Qaida and any number of other terrorist groups. Unlike Afghanistan, Somalia is a region where the international terrorist threat is authentic, but only two African states, a few French and a few American security specialists and some Somali clans want to stop al Qaida from establishing a base in Somalia.

This is not a good thing if our Afghanistan objective is the destruction of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, because under that definition we may closer to winning than losing, which wouldn't match rhetoric or perception from the DoD.

I'm going to dig through the piracy statistics this week and see what pops up regarding a pattern. Something has changed, and it is more than just 40 ships. It isn't just the number of hijackings that are down, the decline in attacks suggests conditions on the ground has changed significantly.

The presumption that the huge flow of cash from 2008 - early 2009 piracy was preparing pirates for a new round of better prepared attacks late in 2009, but the result has been a large scale ground assault by well armed al Shabaab militants. Unless money grows on trees in Somalia, there would appear to be a much stronger link than previously discussed, or assumed.

The President needs to be very careful. He could potentially be surging troops into Afghanistan only to learn Al Qaeda is now in Somalia. If the US is attacked from groups sourced to Somalia under those conditions, the bloodbath of leaders, both political and in the DoD, would be massive - and likely driven by popularism.