Shadow Wars: Chasing Conflict in an Era of Peace

6. Empowered

91 6 Empowered Kenyan Kennedy Mwale was a fisherman, plying the waters off Kenya and Somalia in search of tuna and other big fish. But with piracy taking root in lawless Somalia, fishing and the sea trade were becoming riskier and less profitable by the day for the small operators. One of the final straws for Mwale was a close call in 2002 with a band of fourteen pirates that sneaked up on the eleven-man refrigerator ship where the then-twenty-six-year-old Mwale was the chief engineer. The reefer ship followed behind the fishing boats to store fresh catches. They came at night, as the ship was anchored near Mdoa Island, surprising the sleeping crew and their one Somali bodyguard . When the pirates failed to wrestle away the guard’s rifle, a standoff ensued. The pirates demanded the crew’s money and EmpowErEd 92 possessions, plus all the diesel fuel stored on deck—and wanted the ship sailed to the Somali port of Kismayo. If the crew didn’t comply, the pirates would start killing people, they said. The crew coughed up all their cash—just a few dollars for most, but around $700 in the case of the ship owner’s secretary—and handed over possessions, including a new boom box stereo. But the captain refused to give up the diesel or to sail to Kismayo. He would not allow the ship to enter into captivity, nor strand it at sea. The captain had only as much leverage as was afforded by his one armed guard, but it was enough. The pirates compromised . They agreed to go to Mdoa and continue negotiations. That apparently was a clever bit of strategizing on the captain’s part, for he had called at Mdoa earlier, seeking the ruling committee ’s permission to fish Somali waters. The committee had endorsed the expedition. And when the pirates rolled in with Mwale and his shipmates in tow, the committee immediately branded the captors criminals and had the local militia seize their weapons and return everything they’d stolen. They gave back the boom box, but denied taking anything else. The penniless Kenyans now were free to sail home. This story has a happy-ish ending, but for Mwale, it was another near-miss in a career full of them. Every day the arguments mounted against working at sea. Already, three of his friends had been killed by sharks. And with piracy making profitable fishing a dicey venture, Mwale soon decided he’d had enough. He went ashore, for good, and for five years was unemployed on Mombasa’s sweltering streets.1 Piracy was about to get worse—because Somalia was about to get worse. The long-suffering country’s late downward turn dovetailed with the rise in secret U.S. warfare—and revealed a key weakness in American strategy. EmpowErEd 93 Miscalculation The hard-line Islamic Courts Union enjoyed a few years of loose controloveralmostallofshattered,scarredSomalia.AnEthiopianbacked secular regime called the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) held onto a splinter of northern territory. The ICU’s ruling judges issued decrees based on sharia law that were enforced with swift brutality by the young thugs of Al Shabab, a militant Islamist group with links to al Qaeda. No music. No dancing. No movies. Petty crimes could be punished by flogging, mutilation, or death. Somalia wasn’t a pleasant place to live under the ICU, but it was more lawful and orderly than it had been for most of the previous decade.2 But the ICU, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, miscalculated hugely. It offered safe haven to members of al Qaeda and other terror groups. In the early 2000s no major terrorist attacks were launched from Somali soil—in sharp contrast to what occurred in Afghanistan—but the mere potential for attacks set the stage for a period of renewed upheaval in Somalia, instigated by the United States, but executed by a new and close American ally: Ethiopia, Somalia’s neighbor to the west. What happened when the Americans and Ethiopians targeted Somalia for its second major intervention in fourteen years revealedboththegreateststrengthanddeepestflawintheemerging U.S. shadow war construct. For two years, Ethiopia acted as the main U.S. proxy in Somalia , waging a war that Washington desired but stood no chance of undertaking alone—not after 1993, and not with more than two hundred thousand American troops plus thousands of U.S.paid...