Assessing the Consequences of the Failed State of Somalia

United States House of Representatives

Committee on Foreign Affairs

Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights

and

Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade

on

“Assessing the Consequences of the Failed State of Somalia”

Thursday, July 7, 2011

12:30 p.m.

Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2212

Washington, D.C.


Chairman Smith, Chairman Royce, Ranking Members Payne and Sherman, Distinguished Members of the Subcommittees:

I would like to thank you very much for the invitation to appear before you today to contribute to your assessment of the consequences of the failed state of Somalia in general and, in particular, the policy of the United States towards the challenges that arise thereof.

As we meet, the situation in Somalia has reached a critical juncture. Two decades after the collapse of the last entity that can be plausibly described as “the government of Somalia” and no fewer than fourteen failed attempts to reconstitute such a centralized authority later, the country is still fragmented into multiple fiefdoms. The current “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) is limping towards the August 20 expiration of its already extended mandate with little indication that it has made any positive progress since the time I testified here two years ago that it was “not a government by any common‐sense definition of the term: it is entirely dependent on foreign troops…to protect its small enclave in Mogadishu, but otherwise administers no territory; even within this restricted zone, it has shown no functional capacity to govern, much less provide even minimal services to its citizens.” While Islamist insurgency spearheaded by the al‐Qaeda‐linked Harakat al‐Shabaab al‐Mujahideen (“Movement of Warrior Youth,” al‐Shabaab) has suffered a series of setbacks at the hands of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)—to say nothing of recently increased strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles, presumably operated or at least coordinated by U.S. forces—it is far from defeated. Moreover, even allowing for the most optimistic interpretation of recent gains by the Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers fighting in Mogadishu, the fact remains that their commanders claim to have secured barely half of the sixteen districts of the city and the area under their effective control today remains smaller than that which the departing Ethiopian forces relinquished to them just two years ago. Finally, with the fate of Yemen still very much undetermined, there is the specter of the already existent links between al‐Shabaab and al‐Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) expanding and proving an even greater threat to regional and international security, to say nothing about the increasing threat posed by maritime piracy in the waters of the Gulf of Aden between the two countries and beyond.

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