Remember that smashing success Ethiopian forces had encountering the jihadists in Somalia? Well, it seems that those people who reported that U.S. Special Forces were the key to the success were right.
The American military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, including the use of an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to mount airstrikes against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia, according to American officials.
The close and largely clandestine relationship with Ethiopia also included significant sharing of intelligence on the Islamic militants’ positions and information from American spy satellites with the Ethiopian military. Members of a secret American Special Operations unit, Task Force 88, were deployed in Ethiopia and Kenya, and ventured into Somalia, the officials said.
The counterterrorism effort was described by American officials as a qualified success that disrupted terrorist networks in Somalia, led to the death or capture of several Islamic militants and involved a collaborative relationship with Ethiopia that had been developing for years.
Put this one under the “success against Al Qaeda” column. This is what has needed to be done, and it’s great to know that the Administration is doing it. These actions are probably what the president refers to when he tells the American public that there are many operations against Al Qaeda that we don’t hear about, because to discuss them would be to tip off the terrorists.
It has been known for several weeks that American Special Operations troops have operated inside Somalia and that the United States carried out two strikes on Qaeda suspects using AC-130 gunships. But the extent of American cooperation with the recent Ethiopian invasion into Somalia and the fact that the Pentagon secretly used an airstrip in Ethiopia to carry out attacks have not been previously reported. The secret campaign in the Horn of Africa is an example of a more aggressive approach the Pentagon has taken in recent years to dispatch Special Operations troops globally to hunt high-level terrorism suspects. President Bush gave the Pentagon powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to carry out these missions, which historically had been reserved for intelligence operatives.
When Ethiopian troops first began a large-scale military offensive in Somalia late last year, officials in Washington denied that the Bush administration had given its tacit approval to the Ethiopian government. In interviews over the past several weeks, however, officials from several American agencies with a hand in Somalia policy have described a close alliance between Washington and the Ethiopian government that was developed with a common purpose: rooting out Islamic radicalism inside Somalia.
Indeed, the Pentagon for several years has been training Ethiopian troops for counterterrorism operations in camps near the Somalia border, including Ethiopian special forces called the Agazi Commandos, which were part of the Ethiopian offensive in Somalia.
Can we have a great big shout-out of thanks to the American military here, please?
You guys rock.
Hurrah!!!
Waiting for the NY Times to deplore this co-op activity as an invasion of another peacefull country.
Hurrah !!
Let’s give these guys a month in the Caribbean, and then send them to Warziristan.
Yes, but I think it would be better to have kept it secret. Now that it is known to be a success, expect the Democrats to try to pass a bill banning such cooperation.
Happy to join in, Meryl. Thanks, guys. Because of people like you, our enemies know they can never truly find safe harbor, that you will root them out wherever they are.
As to negotiating with al-Qaeda and their ilk, I think an AC-130 is a fitting negotiator.
This is good news and great work by our Special Ops forces. It is, however, news I’d rather not have read about.
Sabba hits the nail on the head. While it is good to know these things happen, it is better if they are secret. Without secrecy they cannot be done. Even revealing that US forces were operating in Ethiopia may cause problems that will lead the Ethiopians to end the cooperation, if other African countries bring enough pressure to bear.
There are too damn many officials in the US government who want to preen before the press by revealing secret information (as appears to be the case here) or who want to sabotage some oeprations by revealing them (as with the interception of terrorist phone calls and the tracking of terrorist finances via the SWIFT program). This is a grave institutional weakness of the US.
Color me less than impressed, for I’m not seeing any evidence that we actually killed or captured any al-Qaida terrorists. We may have killed one Aden Hashi Ayro, a high level local Islamist who went through Afghanistan (presumably before 9/11), but there’s no evidence that Ayro was in al-Qaida.
In fact, the only link that’s being alleged between the Somali Islamists and al-Qaida is an allegation that the Soamlis were harboring Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, planner of the African embassy bombings, and other members of al-Qaida’s East Africa cell. A plausible interpretation of events is that the Ethiopians whispered “Al-Qaida” into American ears to get us to fight their war for them in what’s really just a local conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia.
“This is good news and great work by our Special Ops forces. It is, however, news I’d rather not have read about.”
But if you didn’t read about it, then Dubya would be failing to get the message out.
“Getting the message out” may lead to no more action like this. There was an awful lot about World War II we did not hear about until after the war, and that made fighting the war more effective than if we had heard about them.
Of course you have a bunch of twits in the US, including congresscritters, alleging that while we are fighting terrorists in Iraq and prying open some political space for something other than Islamism or dictatorship, we are not fighting the terrorists. The same people who make this argument then blow operations or denounce operations intended to do just that (as the New York Fishwrap does). Feh.
Cuba? Venezuela? :-)
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Guys, this is America. Secrecy can be useful, but telling Americans what our enemies already know is not telling tales out of school.
I remember things that happened during my own military service that you still aren’t going to read about, but that our troops are stationed somewhere and running operations somewhere else? Not a surprise to our enemies who are getting pounded by them.
If George Bush has one great failing as leader of the Free World, it’s that he doesn’t speak up enough, he doesn’t get the word out, he doesn’t publicize our successes enough. So the mainstream, meanstreak media gets to portray all our undertakings as being in vain.
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Lefty, the Somali Islamists don’t have to be card-carrying members of Al-Qaida to be doing their work for them. They were sure well on their way to setting up a local Taliban-style state.
If this was just the latest phase of the Somali-Ethiopian conflict, so be it. We still saw our enemies routed, and for once, Ethiopia did good for some Somalis, instead of running just another cross-border skirmish.
I’m sorry you weren’t impressed. Next time around, maybe we can get the White House to include you in a more detailed briefing.
Ed,
Dubya’s great failing as a war president is not that he fails to get the word out. We could do a lot more about getting the word out without blowing the cover of secret operations, and we ought to do so. We ought to be using radio and television braodcasts to help bring down the Pharaohs of Teheran as we did during the Cold War, for example. But Bush’s greatest failing, the most important one I think, is that he is not ruthless enough. The Duke of Alba (d. 1582) said, out of bitter personal experience “Kings use men like oranges. They squeeze out the juice and throw away the rind.” A President has to do the same thing, it comes with the job. Bush has not done so. Look how long Tenet stuck around after 9/11. It makes Dubya a more amiable man,but it is a weakness in a war president, especially when you consider the character of the enemy.