What is the U.S. doing in Ethiopia?

Well, I guess it is a case of "we can't save the world" kinda thing. So many things going on in different places, plus they don't have oil do they?

 

It looks like they are trying to kill or capture terrorists connected with Al Qaeda. I wish we were doing more of this kind of anti-terrorist warfare and were not bogged down in Iraq. This is a move I support.



February 23, 2007

U.S. Used Base in Ethiopia to Hunt Al Qaeda


By MICHAEL R. GORDON and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 — The American military quietly waged a campaign from Ethiopia last month to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, including the use of an airstrip in eastern Ethiopia to mount airstrikes against Islamic militants in neighboring Somalia, according to American officials.

The close and largely clandestine relationship with Ethiopia also included significant sharing of intelligence on the Islamic militants’ positions and information from American spy satellites with the Ethiopian military. Members of a secret American Special Operations unit, Task Force 88, were deployed in Ethiopia and Kenya, and ventured into Somalia, the officials said.

The counterterrorism effort was described by American officials as a qualified success that disrupted terrorist networks in Somalia, led to the death or capture of several Islamic militants and involved a collaborative relationship with Ethiopia that had been developing for years.

But the tally of the dead and captured does not as yet include some Qaeda leaders — including Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam — whom the United States has hunted for their suspected roles in the attacks on American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. With Somalia still in a chaotic state, and American and African officials struggling to cobble together a peacekeeping force for the war-ravaged country, the long-term effects of recent American operations remain unclear.

It has been known for several weeks that American Special Operations troops have operated inside Somalia and that the United States carried out two strikes on Qaeda suspects using AC-130 gunships. But the extent of American cooperation with the recent Ethiopian invasion into Somalia and the fact that the Pentagon secretly used an airstrip in Ethiopia to carry out attacks have not been previously reported. The secret campaign in the Horn of Africa is an example of a more aggressive approach the Pentagon has taken in recent years to dispatch Special Operations troops globally to hunt high-level terrorism suspects. President Bush gave the Pentagon powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to carry out these missions, which historically had been reserved for intelligence operatives.

When Ethiopian troops first began a large-scale military offensive in Somalia late last year, officials in Washington denied that the Bush administration had given its tacit approval to the Ethiopian government. In interviews over the past several weeks, however, officials from several American agencies with a hand in Somalia policy have described a close alliance between Washington and the Ethiopian government that was developed with a common purpose: rooting out Islamic radicalism inside Somalia.

Indeed, the Pentagon for several years has been training Ethiopian troops for counterterrorism operations in camps near the Somalia border, including Ethiopian special forces called the Agazi Commandos, which were part of the Ethiopian offensive in Somalia.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to discuss details of the American operation, but some officials agreed to provide specifics because they saw it as a relative success story. They said that the close relationship had included the sharing of battlefield intelligence on the Islamists’ positions — a result of an Ethiopian request to Gen. John P. Abizaid, then the commander of the United States Central Command. John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence at the time, then authorized spy satellites to be diverted to provide information for Ethiopian troops, the officials said.

The deepening American alliance with Ethiopia is the latest twist in the United States’ on-and-off intervention in Somalia, beginning with an effort in 1992 to distribute food to starving Somalis and evolving into deadly confrontation in 1993 between American troops and fighters loyal to a Somali warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The latest chapter began last June when the Council of Islamic Courts, an armed fundamentalist movement, defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the Central Intelligence Agency and took power in Mogadishu, the capital. The Islamists were believed to be sheltering Qaeda militants involved in the embassy bombings, as well as in a 2002 hotel bombing in Kenya.

After a failed C.I.A. effort to arm and finance Somali warlords, the Bush administration decided on a policy to bolster Somalia’s weak transitional government. This decision brought the American policy in line with Ethiopia’s.

As the Islamists’ grip on power grew stronger, their militias began to encircle Baidoa, where the transitional government was operating in virtual exile. Ethiopian officials pledged that if the Islamists attacked Baidoa, they would respond with a full-scale assault.

While Washington resisted officially endorsing an Ethiopian invasion, American officials from several government agencies said that the Bush administration decided last year that an incursion was the best option to dislodge the Islamists from power.

When the Ethiopian offensive began on Dec. 24, it soon turned into a rout, somewhat to the Americans’ surprise. Armed with American intelligence, the Ethiopians’ tank columns, artillery batteries and military jets made quick work of the poorly trained and ill-equipped Islamist militia.

“The Ethiopians just wiped out entire grid squares; it was a blitzkrieg,” said one official in Washington who had helped develop the strategy toward Somalia.

As the Islamists retreated, the Qaeda operatives and their close aides fled south toward a swampy region. Using information provided by Ethiopian forces in Somalia as well as American intelligence, a task force from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command began planning direct strikes.

On Dec. 31, the largely impotent transitional government of Somalia submitted a formal request to the American ambassador in Kenya asking for the United States to take action against the militants.

General Abizaid called Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and informed him that the Central Command was sending additional Special Operations forces to the region. The deployment was carried out under the terms of an earlier, classified directive that gave the military the authority to kill or capture senior Qaeda operatives if it was determined that the failure to act expeditiously meant the United States would lose a “fleeting opportunity” to neutralize the enemy, American officials said.

On Jan. 6, two Air Force AC-130 gunships, aircraft with devastating firepower, arrived at a small airport in eastern Ethiopia. American Special Operations troops operating in Kenya, working with the Kenyan military, also set up positions along the southern border to capture militants trying to flee the country.

A Navy flotilla began to search for ships that might be carrying fleeing Qaeda operatives. Support planes were deployed in Djibouti. F-15Es from Al Udeid air base in Qatar also flew missions. Intelligence was shared with Ethiopia and Kenya through C.I.A. operatives in each country. American military planners also worked directly with Ethiopian and Kenyan military officials.

On Jan. 7, one day after the AC-130s arrived in Ethiopia, the airstrike was carried our near Ras Kamboni, an isolated fishing village on the Kenyan border.

According to American officials, the primary target of the strike was Aden Hashi Ayro, a young military commander trained in Afghanistan who was one of the senior leaders of the Council of Islamic Courts.

Several hours after the strike, Ethiopian troops and one member of the American Special Operations team arrived at the site and confirmed that eight people had been killed and three wounded, all of whom were described as being armed. After sifting through the debris, they found a bloodied passport and other items that led them to believe Mr. Ayro was injured in the strike and probably died. Several members of the Special Operations team were also in Somalia at the time of the strike, one official said.

The second AC-130 strike, on Jan. 23, had another of the Islamic council’s senior leaders, Sheik Ahmed Madobe, as its target. Mr. Madobe survived and was later captured by the Ethiopians, Americans say.

American officials said that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the mastermind of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the alleged ringleader of Al Qaeda’s East African cell, remains at large. Some officials caution that while the Ethiopians have said additional “high-priority targets,” including Abu Talha al-Sudani, a leading member of the cell, were killed in their own airstrikes, American intelligence officials have yet to confirm this.

In late January, American officials played a role in securing the safe passage of Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the second-highest-ranking Islamist leader, from southern Somalia to Nairobi, Kenya. The exact role of American involvement is still not clear, but some American officials consider him to be a moderate Islamist.

Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/w...8405730-dcYW00/nFItaF4A0k6Fk6A&pagewanted=all



(for those challenged souls who don't know where these countries are)




Impeach Bush.

 

Last time I checked Dafur was on the continent of Africa.

 

that makes no sense.

 

It's an alliance of convenience. Mostly, we are bribing the Ethiopian leadership so that they would do the 'heavy lifting' for us in Somalia. The Ethiopian military has been raping and brutalizing Somalia for over a year now, far beyond the scope of a 'counter-terrorism' operation. Indiscriminate shelling, raping of women, burning of villages...a lot of atrocities.

This is precisely why some people argue that the U.S. is in "no position" to lecture China about Darfur. Our client state -- Ethiopia -- is running roughshod over Somalia, committing unspeakable 'war crimes' with no one to answer to.

Here's an article about the treatment of ethnic Somalis by Ethiopia, that highlights its own human rights record and U.S. leverage there...


Calling Our Ethiopian Ally to Account for Abuses

By Daniel Hemel
Wed. Oct 31, 2007

http://www.forward.com/articles/11927/

American Jews stand at the forefront of the international campaign to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur. The coalition of conscience that the Jewish community helped build is pressuring Sudan’s patron, China, to put an end to the slaughter.

Next door in Ethiopia, meanwhile, another humanitarian crisis is unfolding. Ethiopian troops are burning villages inhabited by ethnic Somalis in the Ogaden region — using the same scorched-earth tactics employed by the Sudanese regime in Darfur. But there are two crucial differences between Darfur and Ogaden: First, Ethiopia’s principal patron isn’t China — it’s the United States. Second, on the Ogaden issue, the American Jewish community has so far been silent.

Ethiopia claims that it’s conducting a counterinsurgency operation in Ogaden. Admittedly, the terrorist threat in the region is real. The Ogaden National Liberation Front, a separatist group, murdered more than 70 people at a Chinese-run oil field in the region this past April. But Sudan is likewise facing a separatist rebellion in Darfur. That fact doesn’t justify Sudan’s slaughter of innocent civilians, and it doesn’t justify Ethiopia’s conduct either.

A farmer from Ogaden told a reporter that Ethiopian soldiers had strangled his wife to death with a rope; the wife had been nursing the couple’s one-year-old son when she was killed. A 25-year-old woman told The New York Times that Ethiopian soldiers visited her village each night and picked a new girl to be gang-raped. A staff member of Doctors Without Borders said she saw Ethiopian soldiers chasing women and children away from water-wells.

Ethiopia has expelled Red Cross representatives from the region and prevented Doctors Without Borders from gaining access to villages. That makes it harder for food and medicine to reach the desperate population there — and harder for real-life horror stories from Ogaden to reach the West. But a U.N. team did visit the region, and its report — released September 19 — was sobering. The monitors said they had found evidence of “serious violations of human rights.”

The body count in Ogaden is still a tiny fraction of the death toll in Darfur. But even though Ogaden isn’t the bloodiest conflict in Africa, the bloodshed there stains our own hands.

Ethiopia has been a close American ally in the fight against Islamists in neighboring Somalia, and the United States doled out $284 million in non-humanitarian aid to Ethiopia for fiscal year 2007. President Bush has asked Congress to raise that figure to $481 million for fiscal year 2008. If that request is approved, American aid would represent well over a tenth of the Ethiopian central government’s annual budget. In other words, Ethiopia is utterly dependent on American aid. Ethiopia can continue its scorched-earth campaign in Ogaden only if America lets it.

A bill sponsored by Democratic Rep. Donald Payne of New Jersey would halt the flow of nonessential aid to Ethiopia unless the government improves its human rights record and removes “undue restrictions” on aid workers. A House subcommittee approved the Payne bill on July 18; two days later, the Ethiopian government released 38 political prisoners from jails in the capital city of Addis Ababa. The timing of the prisoner release clearly shows that Ethiopia is responsive to American pressure. But while the House has pressed forward with human rights legislation, the Bush administration and the Senate have balked.

In early September, Bush’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, paid what Voice of America described as a “whirlwind” visit to Ogaden, an area larger than the state of Florida. In about a day’s time, Frazer concluded that allegations of human rights abuses there were “unsubstantiated.” She must not have looked all that hard: The U.N. fact-finders said that they had heard “direct accounts” of abuses — and numerous journalists have reported the same. Unfazed by Frazer’s statements, the House pressed on with its efforts: At the beginning of October, it passed the Payne bill by voice vote and referred the legislation to the Senate for action. But it’s been nearly a month since then, and the Senate has yet to act.

While the Bush administration and the Senate have failed to intervene, we Jews have a sacred obligation to defend the victims of senseless slaughter: “Neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor,” the Book of Leviticus commands us. We Jews also have a special relationship with the people of Ethiopia, dating back to the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon, as recounted in the Bible’s Book of Kings. The horrors of Ogaden are especially vivid for us because we know all too well what it’s like to be an ethnic minority in Ethiopia: A previous government slaughtered hundreds of Ethiopian Jews in the 1970s.

To protect the Jews of Ethiopia, Israel airlifted thousands of men, women and children out of the country in the 1980s and early 1990s. American Jews played a key role in coordinating and financing the operations. The effort to protect the ethnic Somalis of Ogaden need not be so dramatic. It can be waged on the home front: Americans must insist that their elected officials place clear conditions on future aid to Ethiopia. But so far, the situation in Ogaden has yet to spark the public outcry that it ought to. It’s time for American Jews to take the lead once again.

-------------------------------------------

Daniel Hemel is a 2007 Marshall scholar and is studying international relations at the University of Oxford.

 

Might be a good change of pace from their own people doing it to them.

Whatever happens I hope we never send any people back to that craphole.