President Biden signed off this month on a plan returning US troops to Somalia — and reversing former President Donald Trump’s pullout of roughly 700 troops from the East African country.
Biden authorized a “persistent” US military presence in the East African country, with an estimated cap of 500 Americans, a US official said Monday on a White House-organized call. The move was first reported by the New York Times.
The troops will help Somalia’s fledgling government fight the al-Shabaab militant group, which is affiliated with al Qaeda.
“We are proud, first and foremost, to be supporting the Somalis’ own efforts to rebuild their own state and we are working closely with other international partners,” the US official said before side-stepping a reporter’s question about the possibility of US troops fighting a “forever” war in the country — a concept against which both Biden and Trump campaigned.
“This is a step that rationalizes what was essentially an irrational arrangement that we inherited,” he replied. “It was irrational because it created unnecessary and elevated risk to US forces as they moved in and out of the country on a rotational basis.”
In December of 2020, Trump ordered US troops to withdraw from Somalia and the Pentagon said the exit had been completed days before Biden took office in January 2021.
On Monday, the US official slammed Trump for removing troops in the first place.
“Against the advice of senior US military leadership, the previous administration had directed the withdrawal of approximately 750 US military personnel from Somalia. It was an abrupt and sudden transition to a rotational presence,” the official said.
The “rotational” use of special operations troops as needed resulted in “loses [of] time when our operators can be doing the work we want them to do with partners to address terrorist threats,” he said.
“Restoring a persistent US military presence will help to increase the security and the freedom of movement for other personnel such as State Department and USAID colleagues as they conduct critical diplomatic and development missions,” the official added.”The president made this decision to increase the safety and effectiveness of our special operators who have spent the past year-plus since the last administration’s decision moving in and out of Somalia episodically.”
Biden is redeploying troops to Somalia despite holding firm to a pledge to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan after two decades of US occupation. He did not change course even as the Taliban reclaimed control of the country in the final weeks of the US presence.
“I’m now the fourth American president to preside over [the] war in Afghanistan — two Democrats and two Republicans. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth president,” Biden said in August of last year when the nation’s fall to the Islamist group became clear.
The latest deployment is likely to be met with bipartisan support — and opposition. Party leaders in Congress generally favor US military deployments, while left-wing Democrats, libertarians and some conservative Republicans favor a more restrained global US role.
US troops have fought Islamic extremists in Somalia since the George W. Bush administration and before that famously intervened in the country’s civil war, with 19 US troops killed in a 1993 operation that inspired the film “Black Hawk Down.”
Executive branch officials say the US intervention in Somalia is legal under the Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress passed three days after the 9/11 attacks. However, al-Shabaab became affiliated with al Qaeda in 2012 and critics argue the 2001 AUMF does not cover Somalia.
