While the Western commentariat busies itself parsing the latest pantomime of budget airline surcharges or lamenting the evaporating billions of digital currency speculators, an actual empire of good intentions is quietly striking its tents. Uganda has begun withdrawing its troops from Somalia. After twenty years, thousands of dead soldiers, and billions in European Union subventions—monies that kept Kampala’s officer corps comfortably loyal, if notoriously unhurried—the vanguard of the African Union mission is finally heading home.
One searches in vain for the triumphant communiqués. When Uganda first dispatched its battalions to the pulverized boulevards of Mogadishu in 2007, we were assured that African solutions for African problems, that most pious of donor-conference clichés, would succeed where American helicopters and United Nations bureaucracy had so catastrophically foundered. It was an elegant theory, marred only by the stubborn reality of Somali politics, which operates on an ancient economy of clan grievance and tactical betrayal that no amount of Western capacity-building could ever hope to dilute.
What, precisely, did two decades of blood and donor fatigue purchase? It bought an enclave administration in Villa Somalia, whose writ rarely extends beyond the range of its presidential guard’s rifles, and an al-Shabaab insurgency that has perfected the art of strategic patience. The militants, who have outlasted four American administrations and an entire alphabet soup of peacekeeping mandates, need only wait for the final transport plane to clear the tarmac at Aden Adde airport. They understand, as foreign ministries perpetually refuse to, that an expeditionary force measures time in biennial budget reviews, whereas the religious fanatic measures it in generations.
The real scandal, if one still possesses the capacity for outrage in these matters, is that every participant in this drama understood the terms of the transaction. For Uganda, the deployment was a diplomatic masterstroke: it converted a restless domestic army into well-compensated foreign legionnaires, immunized President Museveni against Western scolding over his domestic democratic hygiene, and turned Kampala into an indispensable security partner. For Brussels and Washington, who financed the venture with the resigned sigh of an absent parent paying maintenance, it was an outsourcing arrangement, infinitely preferable to explaining flag-draped coffins to their own electorates.
We are watching, in slow motion, the familiar mechanics of imperial liquidation. The African Union transition mission will wind down, well-fed diplomats will gather in Nairobi ballrooms to praise the courage of the departing peacekeepers over dry white wine, and Somalia will tilt back toward its natural equilibrium of warlordism, local accommodation, and radical Islam. It is Afghanistan on the Indian Ocean, minus the cinematic tragedy of desperate civilians clinging to the fuselage of transport planes, because no one in Mogadishu was ever naive enough to believe the foreigners were going to stay.
Perhaps there is a grim mercy in the silence that has greeted this retreat. No Western statesman has had the temerity to declare victory, nor the honesty to admit that twenty years of armed social work was merely an extraordinarily expensive exercise in postponing the inevitable. The Somalis, at least, are spared our condescending optimism; they will inherit the wreckage, as they always do, while the circus of international benevolence packs its four-wheel drives and scans the horizon for the next catastrophe to mismanage.
— Rupert Halloway