Where Have We Seen This Before?

Twin bombings in Uganda indicate that yet another Islamist militant group has gone global. Defeating al-Shabab will require more than Western firepower

By Alex Perry/Kampala Monday, July 26, 2010
    • AFP / Getty Images

    The restaurant, after a deadly bomb detonated, killing many soccer fans

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    The Kampala bombings suggest that that approach isn't working. There are questions as to whether A.U. troops are up to the job. Ugandan soldiers, for instance, have sometimes responded to al-Shabab attacks by mortaring civilian areas of the city. Sheik Ali Muhammad Raghe, an al-Shabab spokesman, tells TIME the attack on Kampala "shows we will not accept that."

    Al-Shabab's ability to strike in Uganda — which doesn't border Somalia — and its use of plastic explosives indicate a growing ambition and sophistication. "It's telling us they have access" to hard-to-obtain matériel, says Anneli Botha, a terrorism expert at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. Botha suspects the Somalis are now working closely with Middle Eastern Islamist groups — perhaps with al-Qaeda's franchise in Yemen, which helped plan the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing over Detroit. A Western diplomat in Kampala says he expects the attacks to "bring a lot more U.S. and international attention to the region." He hopes the next A.U. meeting in Kampala, beginning July 19, will result in a decision to send more African troops. "What is really needed is for African states to step up and participate," he says.

    But the lessons of other battles against terrorist groups suggest that adding soldiers is not the only solution. "The number of troops it would take to stabilize Somalia is on the order of 100,000," says Bronwyn Bruton, a Somalia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "When you have less than that, you escalate, you don't resolve. That's likely to make the situation a lot worse."

    What Somalia truly needs is a strong, legitimate government, development and smart counterinsurgency. That's easy to imagine, very hard to implement. The TFG, despite formal recognition from the U.N. and the A.U., controls no more than some districts of the capital. "There are real divisions within the TFG," a senior State Department official tells TIME. "They're unable to make a difference on the ground." So any development plans are stillborn, and war will continue. As Somalia is one of the world's poorest countries and its worst humanitarian crisis, war is often the only "work" available to young Somalis.

    That leaves counterinsurgency. Some Somalia experts say the best course is to divide the enemy — and al-Shabab is ripe for splitting. Roger Middleton, an Africa analyst at the Chatham House think tank in London, says many local fighters are "opportunistic" and easy to buy off. Some of them are at odds with the foreign fighters and disagree with the decision to publicly announce affiliation with al-Qaeda earlier this year. But divide and conquer is a long-term plan. As two of them just demonstrated, al-Shabab's operatives work to a far shorter timescale.

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