Center for a New American Security

Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung have the A1 above-the-fold article in the Post today on how the Obama team is considering what the appropriate response to the problems in the Horn of Africa should be.

The administration has not shied away from missile attacks, launched from unmanned aircraft, in Pakistan, targeting what U.S. intelligence says are top members of al-Qaeda. Evidence against al-Shabab in Somalia is far murkier and the argument in favor of a strike is based on the potential threat the group poses to American interests.

"There is increasing concern about what terrorists operating in Somalia might do," a U.S. counterterrorism official said. According to other senior officials, the camps have graduated hundreds of fighters.

The FBI and intelligence officials have said that at least 20 young Somali American men have left this country for Somalia in recent years to train and fight with al-Shabab against the Somali government and occupying Ethiopian military forces. In February, a naturalized American -- 27-year-old Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis -- killed himself and many others in a suicide bombing in Somalia.

The U.S., Canadian and European fighters at the al-Shabab training camps are, for now, being used primarily as cannon fodder in Somalia's chaotic internal wars, Philip Mudd, the No. 2 official at the FBI's National Security Branch, told Congress last month. "We do not have a credible body of reporting right now to lead us to believe that these American recruits are being trained and instructed to come back to the United States for terrorist acts," he said. "Yet, obviously, we remain concerned about that and watchful for it."

Some officials have said that those trained at the camps could leave Somalia, making their way through countries such as Yemen, where al-Qaeda has a stronger presence. But officials said there has been little movement outside Somalia.

Does it not strike anyone else that what we're doing in the Horn of Africa looks a lot like what we were doing in Afghanistan before 9/11?

Here is the problem into which the Obama team has backed itself. By saying -- in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- that we're not going to allow the terrorists to maintain safe havens from which they can plot and train to carry out attacks, the Obama team now has to explain why we're not pursuing the same kind of whole-of-government approach toward bringing effective governance to the Horn of Africa. And the flip side to that question is even more devastating: if we're not doing it in Somalia, why are we wasting our time and money doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan? This, to me, is the biggest problem I see in the Obama plan for Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's not that we are establishing some terrible precedent, really, but rather that you can point to places on the map where similar problems to the ones in the Pashtun tribal belt present themselves and are not being addressed -- or even discussed -- in the same way. Why have we been seeking to manage the piracy problem off the Horn of Africa -- and the terror problem within the Horn of Africa -- yet are pursuing far more ambitious means and ends in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Depending on the perspective from which you ask this question, you could either get drawn into a strong argument for taking population-centric counter-insurgency operations to all kinds of new places on the globe or be drawn into an even stronger argument for a new(ish) kind of realist argument about terror and how we address it. I'm not sure I like being caught between imperialism and off-shore balancing, though. Surely there is a middle way?