Taliban now coming to a guerilla war theatre near you

Last month, several hundred jihadis came to link up with Al Shabaab’s latest offensive, and now the Taliban are reportedly flocking to Somalia en masse.

Waging insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal territories is not what it used to be. Pakistan’s military has turned against their Deobandi protégés.

Cross-border drone missile attacks are taking out the Taliban’s militant sheikhs. More importantly, civilians in once sympathetic areas like the Swat Valley are fed up.

According to the New York Times of June 11, Al Qaeda’s foot soldiers are decamping to the Horn. CNN, citing recent US military intelligence, is reporting the multinational warriors and their Shabaab hosts are running several training camps in southern Somalia.

The American volunteer they interviewed personified jihadi tourism; those of the “Afghan Arab” class appear to be Taliban refugees.

The association between Somali’s internal Islamist radicals and international terrorist networks is a function of linkages between a handful of individuals and Al Qaeda. Air strikes targeting the embassy bomber Nabhan and the notorious Al Shabaab commander Aden Hashi “Ayro” have reduced the main suspects to Hassan Dahir Aweys, Hassan Al-Turki and the elusive Faizul Mohammed.

Subsequent developments, and the critical role of Eritrean support, underline the thesis that the current insurgency is essentially a homegrown phenomenon fuelled by regional power relations. The reverse migration of jihadi tourists from Central Asia to Somalia ostensibly contradicts this argument.

So, the Horn is rapidly emerging as the latest theatre in what the Bush neoconservatives christened the “Long War Against Terrorism,” which by extension reinforces some military analysts’ view that the coast of Kenya is a critical front in the larger battle.

If so, the security implications for Igad states supporting President Ahmed Sheikh Sharif’s fragile Transitional Federal Government are obvious enough.

But before East African Muslims start growing long beards and wearing baggy Punjabi outfits, there is an alternative perspective that deserves consideration.

Is the flight of Islamist warriors to war-torn Somalia an exodus underscoring the deteriorating position of radical jihad in the Muslim heartland?

To answer this question, let’s begin by revisiting the rise of the Taliban and its relationship with Osama Bin Laden’s Afghan Arabs.

Both entities are the product of social aspirations suppressed by the autocratic governments dominating most Muslim nations, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provided the crucible where they bonded.

If the Soviet occupation was a blatantly imperialistic gambit, the second government they installed, led by Najibullah, was remarkably progressive in respect to land reform, women’s rights, education, and its effort to modernise entrenched Afghanistan’s feudal order.

Such qualities did not merit objective consideration in the bipolar world of the 1980s, nor did the religious conservatism of the Mujahideen warlords spearheading the anti-communist resistance.