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Jeff Gettleman has a good piece in the Times about the decline in popularity of al-Shebab now that Somalis get a taste of the viciousness of that organization. I am not going to presume to have any idea how representative the sample of Jeff’s piece is, as he’s in Mogadishu and I’m not. But I note that in 2006, the Islamic Courts Union — which, to be extremely oversimplified, spawned the Shebab after the U.S.-backed Ethiopian overthrow of the ICU — demonstrated real popular appeal. So, not to give into wishful thinking, I’ll just point out that this is the right metric to evaluate the staying power of the Shebab: the demand for it. That’s obviously not a function of popularity, since that reverses the order of operations here: popularity is the indicator of the demand for an movement that can provide security, governance, opportunity, justice and liberty. It is, however, what you want to watch for, since it gives an indication of the durability of anything Shebab does or any anti-Shebab efforts that emerge.
Demand-Side Security In Somalia |
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| By: Spencer Ackerman Wednesday March 24, 2010 11:57 am | |
4 Comments
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In other news, the Sadrist movement is dead.
Like I said, I’m not assessing the merits here!
That’s not entirely true- one reason (among many) why the ICU got rolled back so quickly was because the people really didn’t like the hard line sharia law the ICU was laying down once it secured control. That, along with pissing off the warlords and the Ethiopian invasion is what knocked off the ICU. Al Shabaab is a meaner version of the ICU, so it’s not a shock that one of the reasons for their weakness on this front is the unhappiness of those in their territory at their governance.
That being said, there is certainly a fairly strong base of support for SOME type of Islamist government in Somalia, to the point where finding one that wasn’t (too) anti-American or liable to rouse a popular opposition due to their own behavior might not be a bad thing for the stability of the southeastern portion of the country and in turn the stability of the region overall.
;-) I’m 60% just yanking your chain.
If the level of foreign involvement in Shehab really is that high, this has a much better chance of being true – cf. the Communists in Malaya or Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
But I’d be very surprised if Somalia alla sudden becomes enthusiastically pro-Ethiopian, which is basically what our “strategy” there amounts to. If it’s not the Shehab it’ll be someone else, unless the would-be central government can get some distance between itself and Addis Abeba/Washington.