Issue No. 416

Somalia’s Security Sector is Broken: Negotiations with Al-Shabaab are not the answer (Part 2)

In the pre-dawn hours of 22 June 2022, a sizeable force of Al-Shabaab attacked the remote, dusty settlement of Baxdo, roughly 100 kilometres to the northeast of Dhuusomareeb, the capital of Galmudug state. When the sun rose and the dust settled, the bodies of 67 jihadists, including three foreign fighters, lay strewn around town, with more scattered in the surrounding bush. Somalia’s new President, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM), immediately congratulated the defenders of Baxdo: “This morning you have taught an unforgettable lesson to the terrorists who attacked you. You have sent a message of courage that the days of terrorists hiding in our country are coming to an end.”

HSM’s buoyant message, like his inaugural pledge to step up the campaign against Al-Shabaab, comes at a time of growing pressure from diplomats and policymakers for Somalia’s federal Government (FGS) to initiate dialogue with Al-Shabaab. After more than fifteen years of conflict, one reputable think tank recently argued, the only alternative to negotiation “is more fighting with no end in sight.”

Well-founded consensus exists that neither terrorism nor insurgency can be overcome through force alone. With very rare exceptions, negotiations play a critical role in the latter stage of decline and dissolution of violent extremist groups. But negotiations are most likely to bear fruit either when government is bargaining from a position of strength or, at the very least, when the parties to the conflict have bludgeoned one another into a ‘mutually hurting stalemate’. Moreover, negotiations, devoid of context, have no intrinsic value: they are just one variable of a complex equation that involves timing, sequencing, power, politics, psychology, and law.

Today’s calls for negotiations with Al-Shabaab are based on several deeply flawed assumptions: that coercive countermeasures are ineffective and have essentially been exhausted; that prolonging the conflict is futile; and that negotiation is a politically viable option.

Coercive countermeasures against Al-Shabaab have been neither ineffective, nor have they been exhausted. On the contrary, between 2010 and 2014, military offensives against the jihadists liberated most of Somalia’s major population centres, enabling Somali political processes and institutions to take root. During HSM’s first term of office, political leaders seized the opportunity provided by this secure environment to lay the foundations of a federal state and to agree on the measures required to conclude Somalia’s transition: finalising the constitution, completing the architecture of federalism, and designing an appropriate multiparty electoral system.

The administration of President Mohamed Abdillahi Farmaajo (2017-2022) halted this progress in its tracks, abandoning the fight against Al-Shabaab, debilitating the security sector, and jettisoning the Provisional Constitution. Insisting on dialogue with Al-Shabaab just as HSM and his PM take office, is to hold Somalia’s future government responsible for the past administration’s failures. Instead, HSM’s past track record – uneven and imperfect as it was – offers fresh grounds for optimism in the struggle to restore stability and security to Somalia.

HSM’s previous government did the spadework for the 2017 Security Pact, National Security Architecture (NSArch), and New Policing Model (NPM): realistic, coherent accords that expressed Somalia’s emerging federal structure. HSM now needs to pick up where he left off and revive these frameworks for review and revision with all stakeholders. The Somali Transition Plan (STP), which Farmaajo’s team deployed to sabotage the principles of power sharing and devolution within a federal system, should be re-conceptualised as a blueprint for implementation of the NSArch and NPM – not to pre-empt them.

Revival of the NSArch and NPM would shift the schwerpunkt of the war against Al-Shabaab back to where it belongs: with Somalia’s Federal Member States (FMS). Al-Shabaab’s  effectiveness lies in part in the group’s decentralised command structure, where governance and security functions are devolved to the Wilaayaad (‘Governorates’) – the jihadists’ version of federal member states. Villa Somalia needs to do the same. This would assign greater responsibility for prosecution of the conflict from the SNA to the FMS paramilitary police or Daraawiish – a key principle enshrined in the NPM. Meanwhile, the SNA could be streamlined and re-invented as an efficient, agile professional force.

Security sector restructuring and reform is not a silver bullet. It can only succeed if embedded in a “whole of government” approach that also prioritises the extension of legitimate, effective governance. This must originate with high-level negotiations between the FGS and FMS about the distribution of powers and responsibilities, resource management, and revenue sharing within a federal system. But it also requires the FMS to nurture local administrations that are both representative and accountable to the people they purport to govern. Experience has proven that top-down appointments produce predatory, unpopular authorities that drive people into the arms of Al-Shabaab. A consultative, inclusive process of building district administrations should be a top priority for leaders at both the state and federal levels.

In this context, prolonging the conflict is by no means ‘futile’, nor a prescription for another wasteful, ‘forever war’; it is instead a precondition for constitutional and political negotiations to make progress, for the legislative scaffolding of federalism to mature, and for the state to regain legitimacy with the Somali population. Perhaps five years of Farmaajo’s misrule have irreparably damaged donor confidence that such ‘state building’ goals are a sound investment. But the fashionable alternative – negotiation with Al-Shabaab – is far, far worse.

Negotiations with Al-Shabaab at this juncture would shred any pretext of constitutional rule; Villa Somalia has no mandate to negotiate with the jihadists; the Provisional Constitution cannot be amended without consultation and consent of the FMS.

In addition, the Provisional Constitution and federal architecture remain incomplete and subject to further negotiation between the FGS and the FMS. Involving Al-Shabaab at this intermediate stage would prove deeply divisive amongst the other parties and could threaten to derail the broader political process altogether. And since Al-Shabaab oppose the very notion of constitutional order (as do many other Salafi Islamists), Somalia’s fitful process of constitutional review and revision could conceivably grind to a complete halt.

Inviting Al-Shabaab to the bargaining table would also make a mockery of Western commitments to some form of liberal democracy in Somalia. Ironically, some of the same governments advocating for talks with Al-Shabaab spent much of their energy in recent years lobbying for a 30% quota of female representation in Parliament – a benchmark that would almost certainly be among the first to fall if the jihadists shared power. A more fundamental challenge, however, is that neither Al-Shabaab nor their Al-I’tisaam co-religionists believe in the alternation of political power: once in government, always in government. Or, as the old critique of Islamist parties goes: one man, one vote, one time.

Perhaps the best argument against premature dialogue with Al-Shabaab, however, lies in a characterisation of warfare proposed by the eminent strategist and Nobel Laureate, Thomas Schelling: victory in war “is not winning relative to one’s adversaries. It means gaining relative to one’s own value system”. 

Despite Al-Shabaab’s influence across much of Somalia, very few Somalis adhere to the group’s alien and inflexible theology, its brutal methods of control, or its totalitarian vision for the Somali state and society. That is why the people of Baxdo fought so fiercely to defend their property and way of life against the jihadists. And that is why, having ejected Farmaajo and his cronies from office, the Somali people deserve this fresh opportunity to rebuild a state and society that advances their common aspirations and shared values – not those of their enemies.

The Somali Wire Team