A guarantee of failure in Iraq

In an address to the American nation on 10th September, President Barack Obama cited Somalia as a success story in the fight against terrorism, and rightly so. The African Union, with scant resources, has led an African solution to an African problem. Showing remarkable resilience, the African Union Mission to Somalia (Amisom) has battled al-Shabaab ever more closely and sustained casualties that no western democracy would accept.

Amisom has raised, trained and incorporated Somali units into its order of battle in a way that provides an object lesson to western mentorship programmes in Iraq. A similar sophistication has been evident in an innovative and highly effective information campaign that has drawn on local culture, tradition and religious practice to isolate foreign jihadists as the enemies of the people, rather than the champions of Islam. Crucially, the battle for perception has also been won within the Somali diaspora and the external stream of funding and volunteers has gone into emerging business opportunities rather than terrorist organisations. Above all, a coherent political message operates at every level from local to international, underwritten by the United Nations and without the fingerprints of western interventionism all over it.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron loses no opportunity to intone darkly that we face a generational struggle against the same terrorist threat. And, for as long as that terrorism draws on conflict within the Middle East, he is probably right. The region is currently shaped by three separate conflicts: Israel versus the rest; the violence that has followed the Arab Spring; and the civil war within Islam. Of the three, it is the war between Sunni and Shia that is the most significant and in many ways looks like the Thirty Years’ War of our times.

So, big stakes, and what is our response? Two jets on combat air patrol looking for something to bomb and a shipment of heavy machine guns based on a design first used 90 years ago. Even the casual observer will detect a gap between the ends we seek and the means we are willing to deploy. A less casual observer might go further and note that we are breaking the first rule of strategic engagement: asymmetry between ends and means is the surest guarantee of strategic failure.

The Prime Minister may, of course, take the advice of a number of recently retired military luminaries who have confidently asserted that the west could sort things out within six months, if only we were willing to commit ground forces. In that boots on the ground would reduce the gap between ends and means, they may have a point, even if they miss the poignant irony of paraphrasing “it will all be over by Christmas” a hundred years on from 1914. But in the wars we fight now the decisive engagements take place in the minds of protagonists and neutrals, and not on the battlefield. Any deployment of a crusader army would be a narrative gift to ISIS and others and allow them to draw on the deep well of historical resentment that many Muslims feel towards the arrogance and hegemony of the west and the contempt with which it has treated Islam.

In fact, we may be approaching an exquisite moment in the generational struggle where the aggregate value of the most effective armies in the world could count for less than the aggregate damage their deployment would cause. For us, it would only ever be a limited commitment but it would provoke an unlimited response and that represents a strategic calculus within which we could not win. It breaks the second rule of strategic engagement: never fight an enemy willing to suffer more than you are.

There must undoubtedly be boots on the ground, but not ours. The civil war within Islam will only ever be resolved within that belief system and to think the west holds the ring is facile, dangerous and ahistorical. So let’s return to Somalia. The original and definitive failed state was dominated by jihadism in its most atavistic form; today it is an African nation with a future and the lessons contained in that transition are profoundly instructive. The generational struggle sounds remarkably like the global war on terrorism; one defined by time, the other by space, but both implying a protracted conflict with an implacable enemy. Yet the last thing we need is to be drawn back into tired language, obsolete assumptions and an obsession with the moment. We need to respond, probably over decades, and with strategies that are sustainable, local and with the hard and soft components of smart power; Somalia has shown us how.