Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation. His latest book is Things Come Together: Africans Achieving Greatness.
U.S. Army Spc. Dominic Deitrick at an unidentified location in Somalia on June 12, 2020.Tech. Sgt. Christopher Ruano/Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa via AP
Africa today is more insecure than ever. Islamist insurgencies are gaining increasing agency across the vast sub-Saharan lands of the Sahel, Somalia and now northern Mozambique, and fundamentalist forces allied to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are growing stronger. The Mozambican civil war threatens to spill northward into Tanzania and southward into additional provinces in the country.
And yet, the waning Trump administration in the United States is electing to retreat in the face of these challenges. The U.S. is withdrawing the 700 American special soldiers who have spent years, with some success, training and assisting a 1,000-strong Somali commando unit to combat al-Shabab, a jihadi terror group that has destabilized Somalia’s cities, towns and villages since about 2006 with deadly bombings on roads and buildings. The Trump White House has also ignored the worsening fracas in Mozambique, and it has threatened to take surveillance and attack capabilities away from U.S. detachments near the Sahara.
President-elect Joe Biden’s administration will urgently need to restore those efforts to beat back al-Shabab. Defeating those fundamentalist Islamists will keep the globe safer, while also reducing the flight and plight of refugees. Al-Shabab remains a dangerous enemy – and it cannot be allowed to regroup.
Indeed, despite the U.S.’s limited contributions – as well as a 19,000-person African Union military operation and efforts by the Somali army – guerrilla attacks by al-Shabab continue almost unabated in Somalia. The group is still able to extort tolls from traders and consumers across the Somali countryside, smuggle produce in and out of the territory, and import heroin and other narcotics from Pakistan and Yemen for transshipment to Europe.
Meanwhile, in the Cabo Delgado province of northern Mozambique, a shadowy al-Shabab clone that is also affiliated with the Islamic State is now killing villagers, outwitting the divided and undermotivated Mozambican army and police, and pinning 4,000 or so expatriate oil and gas workers to a narrow peninsula jutting out toward offshore drilling sites in the Indian Ocean. This Islamist group calls itself Ahlu Sunna wa Jama (ASWJ), and it, too, survives owing to lucrative profits that derive from transferring heroin and other drugs from the east southward to South Africa. North American special military contingents and surveillance-gathering capabilities could be deployed in this troubled region to help Mozambicans contain an insurgency that has so far baffled a corrupt and militarily weak regime.
This year, ASWJ attacked 395 villages, towns and government installations across northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania. Hundreds of civilians have lost their lives. ASWJ has also attempted to impose strict Sharia law on villages and has harassed Pemba, the main city in the region. It controls Mocimboa da Praia, a small port and threatens nearby islands. Nearly 500,000 people have been forced from their homes and compelled to shelter elsewhere.
Cabo Delgado is a poor and neglected region with many Muslims and disparate ethnic groups that have long competed for land and water. Christian governments discriminate against residents of the province, withholding access to infrastructure and social services. The finding of oil and gas off the region’s coast also stimulated the insurgency. Total, a French petroleum company, recently ceased its drilling operations for safety reasons. Exxon Mobil remains active, as do several smaller entities. A private army protects their peninsula redoubt.
Neither the Somali nor the Mozambican conflicts will end without global actions to curb profiteering from narcotics and military assistance to shore up local efforts at containment, especially through coastal patrols.
French, British, Dutch and U.S. special forces have been attempting to do the same in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger for seven years. France’s contingent numbers nearly 6,000 in the region, bolstered by much smaller detachments from other European nations. Two American bases in northwestern Niger have used drones to support them. The Biden administration needs to back up the French, not withdraw.
The incoming U.S. administration should not shirk its already limited extensions of American military involvement, especially since al-Shabab has revealed its intentions to attack U.S. cities; earlier this month, a Kenyan Somali accused of planning to pilot an aircraft into buildings in the U.S. was brought to New York for trial.
Once again, containing a key Islamic State and al-Qaeda outpost is a critical goal of world order. Mr. Biden’s administration can improve chances of world peace, minimize hunger, and reduce flows of migrants and drugs into Europe by joining allies in keeping Islamists at bay, if not on the run. Now is not the time to pull back from Somalia, Mozambique, or the Sahel.
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