I expressed confidence back in the summer that we would do something about the gains made by the Islamic Courts jihadis.
Early on, I wondered if we were working with the Ethiopians.
I was a bit discouraged as time went on and we did nothing. I wondered if locals would fight the enemy without us and expressed my frustration that we appeared to be doing nothing to help.
Once Ethiopia went in, I speculated about whether we were duplicating our actions in the Balkans in 1995 when we--through retired generals in MPRI, a private military advisors company--helped the Croatians train and organize their troops and planned their offensive that drove the Serbs from Croatian territory.
I also figured we'd need to get involved to exploit the Ethiopian Horn Storm success. When we started shooting, I was glad we were exploiting the Ethiopian success.
Well, it looks like we really did do a Horn Storm, helping the Ethiopians before and during the campaign. Our help is becoming more obvious now, but we've been involved from the start:
U.S. ground forces have been active in Somalia from the start, a senior military intelligence officer confirmed. “In fact,” he said, “they were part of the first group in.”
These ground forces include CIA paramilitary officers who are based out of Galkayo, in Somalia’s semiautonomous region of Puntland, Special Operations forces, and Marine units operating out of Camp Lemonier in Djibouti.
The presence of U.S. airpower in Somalia became public knowledge yesterday when CBS News reported that an AC-130 fixed-wing gunship carried out a strike against suspected al-Qaeda members in southern Somalia. Unmanned aerial drones kept the targets under surveillance while a gunship operated by the U.S. Special Operations Command flew from its base in Djibouti to the southern tip of Somalia. ...
Dahir Jibreel, the transitional government’s permanent secretary in charge of international cooperation, who said that U.S. planes and helicopters with their markings obscured have been striking targets since December 25.
Given late breaking developments, SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw was unavailable for comment at press time.
Jibreel said that the U.S. and Ethiopia planned this military incursion for several months. He said that he saw U.S. military planes and soldiers at Wajer, a strategic airstrip in Kenya, in October 2006.
Asked about the revelations of early U.S. support for the Ethiopian intervention, Jibreel said, “We believe that the United States was very helpful in defeating the al-Qaeda-guided and al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Courts Union, and the foreign fighters who were essentially Eritreans, global jihadists, and Ethiopian opposition groups.”
The ground forces have been serving in the role of military advisors. Their duties include identifying ground targets for the Ethiopian air force.
While this is all good, our role is not being trumpeted at home enough to help us regain a sense of forward motion that I said we could get with an operation in the Horn region.
Will a Marine battalion go ashore in the southern tip of Somalia to make sure the holed up jihadi survivors die in place? Or a Ranger battalion to exact some revenge? That would be poetic justice.
