The Red Queen question: Can Obama Pass Through The Somali Looking Glass?

US President Barack Obama finally weighed in on the quagmire in Afghanistan by announcing he would send in another 30,000 troops to assist the rigged-in government of Hamid Karzai. One commentator said: “If you closed your eyes during much of the president’s speech… and just listened to the words, you easily could have concluded that George W. Bush was still in the Oval Office.” Obama’s West Point announcement prompted Somalis desperate for a solution to their own Islamist insurgency to claim that the Horn of Africa region deserved a similar such surge.

There are many congruencies between Afghanistan and Somalia and some critical differences that favour the Somalis’ argument. For one, Somali insurgents do not enjoy the all-important advantage of a cross-border safe haven like the Taliban’s tribal areas in Pakistan.

No matter, the strategy is not likely to prove successful in either case. There are technical mitigations for many problems, the enhanced military presence, in this instance, but there are also problems that are immune to this kind of solution.

Back home, William Lind, original author of the fourth generation warfare concept (4GW) and held by some to be the greatest American military strategist of his generation, was disappointed for different reasons.

In a country like Afghanistan, he said, 30,000 troops is a drop in the bucket. The embedded quality of the Taliban and the mountainous terrain makes Afghanistan “a troop sponge. A serious effort would require 300,000 more troops, not 30,000.”

The key principle of 4GW, like other earlier variations on guerrilla warfare, is to isolate the enemy — physically, militarily, and morally. 4GW employs wide systems-based tactics, including sophisticated use of the media and communications to achieve this objective.

For example: Just as Al Shabaab exploits the association with Western powers and Ethiopia to undermine the legitimacy of Ahmed Sheikh Sharif’s government, US acceptance of Karzai’s dubious election presented the Taliban with a major victory on the 4GW battlefield.

As Lind observes, military occupation of some key areas of the Pashtun heartland will at best provide the US with a bargaining chip in future negotiations with the Taliban. “We are fighting the Pashtun, and in the end, the Pashtun always win Afghan wars. ‘This time is different’ is, as always, the battle cry of Folly.”

he Afghan policy is being spun as designed to contain Al Qaeda; the Pentagon’s take on Somalia also emphasises its role as Al Qaeda sanctuary. But General MacCrystal, and the military advisors who pressed Obama to “kick the can down the road” and commit more troops to Afghanistan until the proposed 2011 withdrawal date, know in their heart that to replicate their strategy in the Horn is Folly-times-two.

To be fair, the president was hemmed in by factors not of his making. This brings us to the wisdom of the Red Queen — Lewis Carrol’s Queen of Hearts to be specific. In Through The Looking Glass, “The Red Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!”’ Alice finds this curious: “However fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything.”

This situation where, “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place” gave rise to what ecologists dubbed the Red Queen Hypothesis — that an adaptive advantage by one species catalyses change across the system.

When a predator becomes faster, for instance, the prey become better at hiding. Or they evolve more effective early warning communications. Or they evolve sophisticated camouflage.

One proof of the Red Queen Hypothesis is how the superiority of America’s military in the post-1989 world hastened the emergence of 4GW — which is predicated on using every means available, violent and non-violent, to exploit the asymmetrical faults of state-based enemies.

The military historian, Martin Van Creveld, summarised the dilemma of using conventional forces to combat 4GW insurgencies: “When you lose, you lose; if you win, you also lose.”

The sum of evidence — from Iraq to Afghanistan to Darfur and the Niger Delta — appears to support Van Creveld’s and the Red Queen theses. In the Horn of Africa, the failure of Ethiopia’s US-sponsored armed intervention in many ways places the situation ahead of the 2011 Afghan curve.

Somalia’s political landscape was also once described by a Somali scholar as “an Alice in Wonderland” vortex where nothing is as it appears. The metaphor is reflected in the insurgents’ fissiparous propensities and Islamic double-talk. Deciphering the Somali puzzle may yet present the president an escape hatch of sorts.

The tragedy of the recent heinous bombing of the Medicins sans Frontiers-sponsored medical school graduation at Benadir University presents a made-to-order entry point for passing through the Somali looking glass and developing a new synthetic policy frame for the war-torn region.

The narrative would assure the civilian population, “We are with you for the long run.” Actions like training 30,000 doctors, nurses, and technicians to replace the murdered Benadir graduates would be a good start.

Paul Goldsmith

The East African