Blowing the Horn
By John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen
From Foreign Affairs
April, 2007
Summary: The Greater Horn of Africa, the hottest conflict zone in the world, is a legitimate concern of U.S. officials. But their overwhelming focus on stemming terrorism there is overshadowing U.S. initiatives to resolve conflicts and promote good governance — with disastrous implications for regional stability and U.S. counterterrorism objectives themselves.
The piece is strongly opinionated, something NDP tries to stay away from, but Prendergast does outline the major problems facing the Horn with a clear and concise, country-by-country structure. These are nine pages that will dramatically enhance anyone’s understanding of the geopolitical dyanmics as they relate to counter-terrorism efforts within the region.
Key exerpt:
The Greater Horn of Africa — a region half the size of the United States that includes Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda — is the hottest conflict zone in the world. Some of the most violent wars of the last half century have ripped the region apart. Today, two clusters of conflicts continue to destabilize it. The first centers on interlocking rebellions in Sudan, including those in Darfur and southern Sudan, and engulfs northern Uganda, eastern Chad, and northeastern Central African Republic. The main culprit is the Sudanese government, which is supporting rebels in these three neighboring countries — and those states, which are supporting Sudanese groups opposing Khartoum. The second cluster links the festering dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea with the power struggle in Somalia, which involves the fledgling secular government, antigovernment clan militias, Islamist militants, and anti-Islamist warlords. Ethiopia’s flash intervention in Somalia in December temporarily secured the ineffectual transitional government’s position, but that intervention, which Washington backed and supplemented with its own air strikes, has sown the seeds for an Islamist and clan-based insurgency in the future.
Worth the read.
