"The jihadist leads a double life." That’s the opening line of Scott Johnson’s disturbing report on Somalia in the latest edition of Newsweek. Johnson’s piece covers the worsening conditions in the country, and offers some sobering cost-benefit observations on the pitfalls of burning down the barn to weed the needle out of the haystack.

Standing in the shade of a crumbling, Mussolini-era balcony, a phone headset clipped to his ear, he affects a casual, corporate air. But then he pulls his blue oxford shirt aside to reveal a fresh bullet scar. He spies on his co-workers, he admits, and feeds information about them to the Islamist rebels who are laying siege to Mogadishu. "God willing, we’ll take over the country soon," he tells a NEWSWEEK reporter, one of the few Western journalists who have ventured into Somalia in months. The State Department recently added al-Shabaab (meaning "youth") to its list of terrorist organizations, making the group a target for attacks by U.S. forces operating in the Horn of Africa. The jihadist is unconcerned. "We’re like a centipede," he says. "You cut off one of our legs, we just keep going."

Unfortunately, he’s probably right. In late 2006 the United States backed Ethiopia’s incursion into Somalia, designed to oust the Islamic Courts Union, the Islamist coalition that had taken over much of the overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country. (Al-Shabaab was the Courts’ military wing.) Washington accused the Islamists of harboring Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But the Courts had also brought more stability than Somalia had enjoyed in years. Somalis could walk the streets and do business again, and many welcomed the Islamists just as war-weary Afghans hailed the Taliban in the 1990s.

Now, by trying to prevent another terrorist haven like Afghanistan from developing, America may have helped create another Iraq, this one in the volatile Horn of Africa. "Every year this fighting continues, the situation worsens," says Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Abdul Salaam of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government. The Islamists’ eviction in 2006 left a power vacuum that the U.N.-backed government still hasn’t managed to fill. Ethiopian troops are loathed as occupiers and rarely leave their heavily fortified bases. And al-Shabaab has broken off from the Courts to wage a brutal and effective insurgency. The guerrillas have overrun at least eight Somali towns this year and control parts of the capital. Where once they brought order to Somalia, they now gleefully spread chaos.

There’s more. Go read it. 

Johnson, Scott. "Dilemmas of the Horn." Newsweek (21 April 2008).

Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency

University of Chicago, Dept. of Anthropology, 25-27 April 2008. More… 

This is a quick follow-up to the earlier CTLab post on the spatial dynamics of counterinsurgency, which reported the ConflictSpace project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Up to now, public references to the project have only been made in passing. The first was in a Spring 2007 listing of funded UIUC research projects. The second is on the agenda of the upcoming 2008 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, as part of a paper session on the spatial analysis of conflict, scheduled for Friday, 18 April 2008. 

Geographer and ConflictSpace Principal Investigator Colin Flint is presenting the paper, entitled Conceptualizing ConflictSpace: A Framework to Integrate Spatial Analysis and Social Network Analysis in the Study of the Diffusion of International Conflict. Here’s the abstract:

Current understanding of the diffusion of inter-state conflict is rudimentary. This paper is an initial step in an inter-disciplinary project to analyze how conflicts spread from localized disputes to become regional or even global wars. Using World War One as a pilot study a new conceptual model of the diffusion of conflict is defined and tested through the innovative combination of spatial analysis, social network analysis and agent-based modeling. The proposed new concept of ConflictSpace integrates physical contiguity of states with the position of states within networks of economic, political, and cultural exchanges to explain when and why states choose to enter an ongoing conflict. The conceptual framework and steps toward analysis are discussed. The analysis will include univariate mapping and spatial analysis and multivariate regression and spatial econometrics. After this pilot study the investigators will pursue extra-mural funding to expand the analysis to model how all recorded militarized industrial disputes, conflicts that fall short of war, became regional or global wars or remained limited in geographic scope and political impact.

UIUC’s Office of Public Affairs’ News Bureau, an online bulletin, is carrying a feature on the project posted on the web two days ago (14 April 2008). According to News Bureau, "Social scientists at the University of Illinois are collaborating on a project that seeks to gain new insights on why and how seemingly small, geographically localized disputes can quickly ignite into border-crossing regional conflicts, and even global wars."

The project draws on expertise from various disciplines (geography, political science, history, and complexity science), splices traditional geo-oriented  spatial analysis with the social network variety, and focuses on World War I as its case study. Additional to the conference paper being presented tomorrow, a workshop and public lecture are set to kick off the project next week.

The roster of ConflictSpace participants is worth noting. Flint, who sits on the CTLab Advisory Council and is the author of several books on the geopolitics of conflict, is Director of the Program on Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS). Political scientist and Co-Investigator Paul Diehl is Director of the Correlates of War project. The external grey matter being assembled – all eminent historians of WWI –  is downright intimidating: David Stevenson of the London School of Economics; Mustafa Aksakal pf American University; Frederick Dickinson of the University of Pennsylvania; Richard Hamilton of Ohio State University; Samuel Williamson, of the University of the South; and Rutgers University political scientist Jack Levy.

Flint, quoted in News Bureau, noted that “Current understanding of the diffusion of interstate conflict is rudimentary.” ConflictSpace, he explains, "integrates physical contiguity of states with the position of states within networks of economic, political and cultural exchanges to explain when and why states choose to enter an ongoing conflict. The analysis will include univariate mapping and spatial analysis and multivariate regression and spatial econometrics.” 

Flint also speculates on future directions for ConflictSpace research, “to model how all recorded militarized interstate disputes – conflicts that by definition fall short of war – either eventually became regional or global wars or remained limited in geographic scope and political impact.”

Wired Magazine‘s national security blog, Danger Room, has an update on the U.S. military’s Human Terrain Team program. Newsweek ran an item last week; Montgomery McFate replied to it. An interesting back and forth on the issue.

Weinberger, Sharon. "Gates: Human Terrain Teams Going Through Growing Pains." The Danger Room (18 March 2008).  

In the 11 April 08 edition of the Int’l Herald Tribune, Niall Ferguson reviews Phillip Bobbit’s new book The Wars For the Twenty-First Century (Alfred A. Knopf). Looks like another must read from Bobbit, following his 2002 work The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (Penguin). From Ferguson:

"Terror and Consent" is quite simply the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 – indeed, since the end of the Cold War. It should be read by all three of the remaining candidates to succeed George W. Bush as American president.

Ferguson, Niall. "Phillip Bobbit’s Terror and Consent: Rethinking the Future on Fighting Terror." International Herald Tribune (11 April 2008).