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Somalia is Paying a Colossal Price in the War on Terror

In the past three months, 150,000 people have arrived in the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya. About 80% of them are women and children and many have walked 100km to reach the sprawling, crowded camp of 440,000 that now counts as Kenya's third largest city. This is all we can see of Somalia's famine – the ones who manage to get out. Those suffering in Somalia are largely beyond the reach of the television cameras and the aid agencies. This is a catastrophe the world is finding it easy to forget.



Aid agencies are beating their chests with guilt and anguish. "It's a catastrophic breakdown in the world's collective responsibility to act", declared Oxfam . But the prediction system worked – it warned of the imminent famine a year ago. Moreover the public response to the appeal has been generous – the British government's response in particular. So why is this food crisis likely to become the worst famine ever in Somalia?





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From the start Somalia was sucked into the war on terror, a hapless bit-part player in a much bigger global drama. The presence of a small number of people with links to al-Qaida was sufficient to provoke US anxieties that the country could become a haven for al-Qaida members fleeing Afghanistan. Soon after 9/11, the US froze the assets of Somalia's biggest remittance agency and a pillar of the economy, al-Barakat, and many lost money. Another US counterterrorism measure criminalised organisations whose support could end up in the hands of those with terrorist links. This has made any negotiations with al-Shabaab over aid to the regions they control very difficult for aid agencies.

Meanwhile, as US troops – and their embedded journalists – invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and dominated the world's attention, the covert operations directed from the US base in Djibouti got under way in the already chaotic Somalia. At frequent points local warlords and governments in the region exaggerated and used the US fear of al-Qaida to serve their own ends. In Somalia the US has assassinated, rendered, interrogated and bombed by drones those it perceived to be its enemies while funding those it believed to be allies to fight proxy wars. Enemies were switched to allies and vice versa in a dizzyingly complex history: the current president, propped up by the west, is a former enemy who was ousted by an Ethiopian invasion backed by the US in 2006.

The roots of al-Shabaab's rise lie in that fatal US miscalculation (backed by the EU) to support with air strikes Ethiopia's occupation of Somalia and remove the relatively moderate Islamic Courts Union, despite it being the only force to have achieved any degree of stability in the country in the past 20 years. Deep historic enmity between Ethiopia and Somalia provided al-Shabaab with the chance to exploit widespread nationalist anger to gain power.

Scahill grimly comments that "a decade of disastrous US policy [has] ultimately strengthened the very threat it officially intended to crush". Even more depressingly, he adds that Obama, far from drawing the war on terror to an end, has intensified its deployment, authorising and "normalising" violent operations wherever the US deems fit with deeply destabilising consequences.

But no aid appeal wants to complicate things with politics, and agencies such as Oxfam prefer to place the emphasis on the worst drought in 60 years rather than get into a tricky controversy criticising the US or UK government; Oxfam is receiving large amounts of UK aid for its operations in the Horn of Africa. Only Médecins Sans Frontières has openly criticised US policy for provoking al-Shabaab's conviction that aid is a western political tool and that it has been used as such in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sideshows in a war, by definition, are not centre focus either for policymakers or those who might call them to account in the media. With that kind of neglect, policy becomes erratic, often made on the hoof with little discernible strategy or careful analysis. US policy has not only been spectacularly counterproductive, it has also been grossly irresponsible. As a result, the sideshow – as Cambodia discovered with the rise of the Khmer Rouge and its disastrous consequences – can be even more brutal than the main theatres of war. And the tragedy is Somalia's.

Madeleine Bunting

Madeleine Bunting is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. She writes on a wide range of subjects including politics, work, Islam, science and ethics, development, women's issues and social change



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