In Opinion: U.S. strikes in Somalia are likely to continue — and if the Somali government has its way, ramp up. One just hopes policymakers across the U.S. interagency are cognizant of the big picture.
But a bit of perspective is in order. First, the vast majority of al-Shabaab attacks are unimpressive, downright rudimentary operations against targets that are either defenseless, such as civilians walking down the street, or static, such as checkpoints and bases in isolated areas. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to smuggle a car bomb into a city, park the car in the middle of a busy neighborhood and set off the bomb with a remote-controlled device during rush hour.
Yes, Americans have been killed by the group before — the most notable being a January 2020 predawn raid on a Kenyan airfield that U.S. forces used as a training and support base. But the base was only 50 miles or so from the Somali border. It’s one thing to strike a facility a dozen or so miles from territory you control and quite another to launch the type of strategic, 9/11-style operation the U.S. has gotten very good at detecting.
While the 2001 authorization against al-Qaida could apply to operations against al-Shabaab, it most certainly doesn’t expand to the U.S. actively participating in a civil war. Even the “collective self-defense” claim uttered by U.S. military officials is suspect.As Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who now works for the think tank the International Crisis Group, told me, U.S.
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