What works in Somalia is not likely to be replicated in Syria

On Sunday, African Union troops along with the Somali Army marched into the coastal town of Baraawe as a part of Operation Indian Ocean. About 135 miles Southwest of Mogadishu, Baraawe had been a useful port city for al Shabaab where foreign fighters and arms shipments entered freely while charcoal exports earned a significant income for the al Qaeda-linked group.

In 2012, The African Union saw a similar victory further west down the coast in an even more economically significant deep-water port town, Kismayo. However establishing a long-term reliable partnership between the Union and those who might govern territory retaken from al Shabaab in Kismayo remains a complex challenge.

In Kismayo it has involved questions of an old warlord system and a desire for an independent autonomous region. The difficulty of reestablishing governance in Somalia raises the question: can the gains in Kismayo and Baraawe be sustained in the long game against al Shabaab?

Such complexities and challenges account for slow pace of progress in Somalia but one simple lesson can be derived from liberation of Baraawe. A robust boots-on-the-ground operation executed with resolve can deliver clear, quantifiable, and positive results. Confronted with such an operation, with the exception of a half-hearted and unsuccessful ambush on the outskirts of the city, al Shabaab fighters fled. Their calculus, when clearly outgunned by a conventional military was not to fight.

The African Union is touting the liberation of Baraawe as a big victory. As a nerve center for Shabaab’s terrorist operations the city has not seen stable government rule in twenty-three years. One hopes this action will serve to quell al Shabaab’s capability outside of Somalia as well as a recent campaign of car bomb attacks and assassination in Mogadishu. It is a positive development but progress is not the same as long-term success.

A seeming strategic blow to al Shabaab, the “primary terrorist threat” in Africa according to the State Department, should quickly bring to mind the eye-brow raising citation of Yemen and Somalia as winning counter terrorism strategies employed by the U.S. that would be replicated when President Obama announced the air strikes in Syria.

Many and most international affairs observers with a pulse quickly described the glaring problems with such a comparison.  The first of such problems; Neither Somalia or Yemen come to fore as models of counter terrorism success in the long run, despite this recent and positive news from Baraawe.  The primary distinction is that the President was referring to a drone strike strategy which describes U.S. involvement.  This could easily be confused as taking credit for the tactical successes of the AU and the Somali military.

(One such article at NPR, by Krishnadev Calamur, lays out the contradictions with brevity in his piece, “Are Yemen And Somalia Good Examples Of U.S. Anti-Terror Strategy?”)

One of the distinctions Calamur makes is the difference between killing a lot of terrorists with air strikes (in keeping with the U.S. domestic political commitment to never put troops on the ground) and winning in terms of strategic progress.

That rings of the big question in debate since the proposition of arming rebels in Syria began. Who on the ground can we trust? In Somalia, there is an answer to that question- the Somali army and the African Union. They serve as proxies we can trust, and they are making strategic progress with boots on the ground. It doesn’t need restating that no one in the U.S. wants to send American troops into Syria, but if the U.S. had forces on the ground in Syria, they could be trusted to accomplish the mission, something that cannot be said for any available proxy. The lesson is that absent such a resolve to rout an international terrorist threat, like al Shabaab, with strategic measure and strategic commitments, even the short term progress seen in Somalia will not be replicated in Syria.