Al Qaeda, Uncivil Society and 7/11

The Monitor and The New Vision, Uganda's leading dailies have been running a series of human interest stories about the aftermath of 7/11 the day on which suicide bombers (a first in Uganda) blew themselves and several other people up in Kyadondo and Kansanga. In the wake of the bombings as the particularly graphic pictures of the victims were made public, there was talk about how Uganda had dealt with such a situation before, possibly referring to the urban terror campaign run by the Allied Democratic Front (ADF) in the mid to late nineties.

I was drawn back to an expletive laden conversation back then, with a British Ex-paratrooper who had served in Northern Ireland. He assured all who cared to listen that the ADF were Sunday footballers compared to the Irish Republican Army when it came to bomb making, and , when we Uganda  finally got hit by a pro in the same league as the IRA we would know the difference.  7/11 showed us the difference between Sunday footballers and professional footballers, metaphorically speaking.

The law enforcement response was quick, the crime was quickly attributed to Al Qaeda affiliate Al Shabab based in Somalia, a geopolitical quagmire located in the horn of Africa. A  wave of arrests followed by the obligatory parade of suspects all underscored by reports of rivalry between civilian and military intelligence as to who should run point on the investigation and perhaps who should be blamed for the failure that allowed 7/11 to happen.

As each of the victims and their families dealt with their personal loss and pain at an individual level, beyond their grief and pain, there was talk of Uganda having provoked this attack by sending Soldiers to Somalia when there were no clearly articulated national security goals.

The President on the cusp of hosting an AU summit went all macho, telling all and sundry that he was willing and able to flood Somalia with troops. Promises for more troops were made at the summit , to date, to the best of my knowledge , none have been met, and Burundi and Uganda the only countries to have committed troops a year ago, are still the only ones that have committed troops.

In all this, I would like to believe serious questions; beyond the intelligence failures were posed. How was 7/11 possible in the first place? The taking of ones life is universally frowned upon by virtually all traditional cultures and faiths in Uganda, suicide victims are not formally buried and the body of a suicide victim is usually subjected to beatings and in some cases is set on fire, the traditional treatment given to a suicide victim’s body can be harrowing for those left behind. Against this cultural and religious zeitgeist what would convince anyone to take their own lives and the lives of others.

The major suspects arrested for the attacks of 7/11 had two things in common, they were young and they were Muslim. While they were from all the three traditional East African countries and in spite of the fact that they were ‘doing’ Al Shababs' bidding; they were by and large not directly ethnically related to the Somalis.  The key recruiters and financiers were almost certainly Somali, taking advantage of the large local Somali community, and the even larger Somali refugee community to hide in plain sight. Reaching out to local disenfranchised and disgruntled youth with promises of money or a better life in Heaven, each lure tailored to the individual needs of the potential recruit, seemingly rational young men were convinced to commit an irrational act.

In the same manner Civil Society locally and internationally coalesces around societal grievances, building a critical mass upon these grievances to cause change. Al Qaeda and its franchisees operate on the same model and that is what I believe made 7/11 possible and perhaps makes possible solutions intractable. 

In scenarios repeated countless times across the world, a foreign recruiter takes advantage of the need for money, the power of ideology, coercion or compromise and one of Maslow’s  mid to higher order needs for recognition ,affirmation  or belonging young men are being lured into organizations that channel their energy into destructive purposes. In the stories told by the suspects, money and ideology, in this case radical Muslim ideology are the recurring themes.

For the intelligence professionals across East Africa, this has got to be causing some sleepless nights because , the pool from which these franchisees can recruit is virtually limitless, placing all potential suspects under surveillance would be impossible as it would, in the case of Uganda, mean surveilling 80% of the youth population without gainful employment.

For the political leadership a more nuanced approach is necessary, terrorism is in its very nature criminal, a military response such as the kinetic operations by AMISOM in Mogadishu especially if the state does not have the capacity to deal with extended operations of this nature can backfire.

The future does not augur well, as the more balanced, if you can call them that, leaders of the Al Qaeda franchise fade into the background replaced by younger, more radical, certainly more violent individuals.

Mutebile and Museveni

The verbal skirmish between the governor of the central bank on the one hand and the presidential spokesman and the gentleman from the NRM communication bureau on the other has caused quite a stir in the media and in private conversations across the country.

The facts are familiar, earlier this year the government made a decision to purchase fighter jets, to that end it drew 400 million dollars from the foreign reserves to pay for this purchase. It then sought retrospective authorization from parliament, dominated by the ruling party which it was granted as part of a supplementary budget. That there was no real debate in parliament on the necessity or the timing of this purchase or the fact that the supplementary budget was far in excess of what is allowed by the constitution seems to have been relegated to the sidelines as unnecessary or unduly pedantic.

How are decisions made in this country? My understanding would be that the Uganda Peoples Defense Forces through the Ministry Of  Defense would make a case for the purchase of these jets, the strategic imperative if you will. This imperative would be interrogated and if the reasons put forward were sound a decision to fund the purchase would be made. Of course this decision would have to be considered alongside other pressing concerns like health care or education.  Does such a process exist?

Every thing I have read about these jets leads me to believe that they are first rate in terms of their technical performance but at the back of my mind I am worried. Why? Because many of the purchases we have made have been great technically, it is just that what we pay for and what we get tend to be worlds apart and no commission of inquiry has been able to reveal why this is so.

Furthermore, there are other issues that come to mind will the amount of money we have paid include consumables like bombs, bullets and missiles? Does it include a technical support package in terms of training and spare parts? If it does not then we are in for more surprises and not the pleasant kind.

In reading about all this I came across an interesting term ‘aircraft reimbursement rates’ a very big word for the cost of maintaining a fighter jet in the air. Comparable fighter bombers such as the Tornado or the F-15 can cost as much as 30,000 dollars an hour in fuel costs to maintain in the air. That does not include the costs of consumables bombs and missiles which can cost as much as 100,000 dollars for a single item.

 Lets think about this in perspective, with anywhere between one third and one half of our population living on  less than a dollar a day, with a per capita income of  600 dollars annually it begs the question is our economy geared towards supporting a war in which this equipment is used? The short answer is no.

Maybe just maybe this is what has Mutebile all worked up, the fear that these planes are nothing more than a glorified white elephant, a securocrats fantasy and rational economist’s nightmare.

He who wants peace must prepare for war

Uganda and the trillion shilling jet purchase.

The peace of Westphalia in 1648 brought an end to the thirty Years war in Europe, reorganized and consolidated the complex web of overlapping jurisdictions of political authority in Europe into a system of sovereign states and, introduced two concepts that have defined political life since then, concept of sovereignty and the concept of the state. Sovereignty traces its linguistic origins to the Latin term superanus through the French term souveraineté and through common usage came to mean the equivalent of supreme power.

In the context of feudal Europe with hundreds of lords who were in effect competing centres of power, sovereignty was used justification for the concentration of power in the hands of the king.  Sovereignty was the divine right of the kings who were next to God and they could not be challenged by mere mortals. This sentiment was perhaps best captured by Louis the fourteenth of France in his famous utterance L’Etat cest moi I am the state and in many ways he was right, the state and the king were fused and indistinguishable and since the king drew his power from God, the exercise of absolute power by the King could not be questioned. However, the concept of sovereignty has changed with time.

By the time of the French revolution in 1789 and the subsequent creative destruction that followed sovereignty as we knew it changed. Sovereignty was reinterpreted from the divine rights of the kings to, a manifestation of the will of the people through a social contract. The kings would serve at the pleasure of the people rather than the reverse, the people through the electoral process would delegate to government authority to be used in their name but they are the ultimate masters and could withdraw that allocation by voting governments out of office.  In words immortalized by the French constitution of 1791 ‘Sovereignty is one, indivisible, inalienable and imprescriptible." But, whether based on the divine right of kings or the unchallengeable will of the people, sovereignty became the unqualified reference point in international relations, the ultimate principle upon which all notions of global order should be based.

Closely related to the concept of sovereignty is the concept of the state, the French principle Non Terre sans seigneur translated as no land without a master was the bedrock upon which the state was formed. The master had to manifest effective control over land, more often than not through the monopoly of force. From this we have genesis of the tenets of the modern state; the monopoly of force, the effective control of a clearly defined territory and a permanent population.

Once the internal political dynamic changed and the feudal lords had been cowed, they were no longer seen as a threat to the power of the king, states began to look outside for their potential enemies. Security was aimed at minimum values of territorial integrity and national independence while strategy was a fusion of means that were aimed at maintaining the integrity of the state in a hostile external environment. Strategies employed changed with time and with circumstances, dynastic marriages were a common device employed as were alliances.  However the one pillar of strategy that has never been discarded is the pillar of force.

In his treatise De Re Militari the Roman strategist Flavius Vegetius Renatus laid down what has become an immutable law, Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum translated as he who wants peace must prepare for war, or peace through strength. In much the same manner of the Roman Empire of old, states to this day have continued to arm themselves in anticipation of threats real and imagined. The logic of peace through strength has prevailed through the ages almost unchanged; the idea of security however, has not survived the ages unchallenged.  

The concept of security has mirrored the changes in the understanding of sovereignty; in the times of the absolute monarchs the security of the monarch was synonymous with the security of the state. While it was previously unthinkable for the security of the state to be different from the security of the citizens, now it is accepted that there could be a divergence between the security of the state and the security of its citizens.  In the 21^st century, security is more of a collection of factors as opposed to the logic of arms.

It is against this back drop that we question the decision to invest 1.7 trillion shillings to purchase military equipment. The political establishment has argued ‘These jets are strategic national defence assets. Critics do not seem to grasp the fact that our country’s security must take precedence over other social service imperatives. They are conveniently forgetting that our stability over the last 25 years has not been accidental but because military strategists took a proactive rather than a reactive approach to our security’ 

Arguments against this purchase have centered largely on the possible alternative uses of the funds that have been spent in light of the socio economic conditions that plague the vast majority of the people in Uganda. Malaria is easily preventable and yet it claims 120,000 lives every year a dose costs no more than 20,000 shillings. Maternal mortality stands at 550 women per 100,000 live births, a dysfunctional public health system that is seemingly unable to deal with even the simplest diseases and an education system that has done well on quality but has failed on quantity.

The 1.7 trillion shillings is not a onetime payment, if this figure does not factor in training, spare parts and maintenance costs for the aircraft, this figure could run substantially higher. Are these jets necessary based on the various threats that face the state? Even if we accept the modernization argument as put forward by the political establishment is this equipment appropriate?

The Strategic Environment

On July 11^th 2010, two maybe more men walked into the rugby grounds at Kyadondo and the Ethiopian restaurant in Kabalagala. Both venues were full of people watching the world cup finals between The Netherlands and Spain. They were probably subjected to nothing more than a cursory glance, moving around they chose a central location amongst as a many people as possible. Unbeknownst to the revelers around them, these men had only a few minutes left to live and they intended to take as many unwilling people with them as possible.

A few minutes into the match there was an explosion, both men set off their explosive vests, the carnage that followed was the stuff of legend. Assuming they were using military grade explosives the blast wave generated moved at 9,000 meters per second, the human body is not designed to take such punishment. The use of improvised explosives such as Triacetone peroxide TATP favored by Al Qaeda and their allies affectionately called ‘The Mother of Satan’ with a detonation velocity of 5,300 meters per second would not have guaranteed less punishment either. When the butchers’ bill was presented, almost eighty people were dead, several dozen were horrifically injured. In the days and weeks that followed we all asked how this was possible. How could we defend ourselves better? The attack on July 11 2010 brought to the fore the fluid nature of the threat that we face.

The External Environment

Somewhere in Brussels in 1996 and a decade later in 2006 a group of men and women sat in a conference room, in a process repeated in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Brasilia and New Delhi and a hundred various capitals the world over the discussion focused on how to take advantage of the new opportunities the new world order presented. Five years after the end of the cold war acutely aware that the international political landscape had radically changed.

Militarily the United States was unassailable and was making strides to lock down the South, Central and Latin American hinterland. Russia was embroiled in various wars in the former Soviet Union but even in its weakened state, the bear still packed a lethal punch. China and India are experiencing a meteoric rise on the back of a huge internal market; however this rise has created a demand for raw materials to feed the Chinese and Indian industrial machine.

Europe as a region is acutely aware of the fact that the economic wheelhouse of the world is shifting east, while in the the second half of the twentieth century, the United States, Europe and Japan drove the global economy. Today they are being joined by increasingly open and expanding economies, in particular China and India, but also Brazil, Russia and others. China is already the 3^rd largest exporter and likely to entrench its position as the second largest national economy a few years from now.

The burning question is how does Europe punch above its weight in the new political arena? The answer lies in economics. The strategy is encapsulated in the document ‘The Global Challenge of International Trade: A market access strategy for the European union and crystallized in the Global Europe Strategy: Competing in the World is born, a strategy aimed at securing the European future. In consultation with European businesses, targets are selected based on the market potential, the level of protections against EU export interests, the number of competing trade agreements that shut out EU interests and the degree to which the local regulatory regime is incompatible with EU interests.  Key areas of interest are secure market access for key goods, opening up public procurement markets, setting up a regulatory framework for issues like competition, investment protection and the protection of intellectual property rights.

Two key facets of this strategy is ‘prior consultation clauses’ and a realignment policy, a synchronization of the internal regulatory framework within the EU, the international regulatory framework through multilateral trade agreements under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the internal regulatory framework of the target economies through bilateral or multilateral agreements.

For Africa in general and Uganda in particular economic sovereignty is at stake, through prior consultation clauses trade partners could get the right in some cases to veto future trade agreements that affect them adversely.  Perhaps more insidious is the realignment policy, the net effect of negotiating some of these agreements is the policies we apply will be the same in Europe and in Uganda. This may seem like a good thing and in some cases it is however consider this scenario, if the rules on say government procurement are synchronized it could mean that a local firm would be considered on the same standards as a European company to supply goods to government, talk about an unfair fight.

Africa in general and Uganda in particular has shown remarkably little in the way of connected thinking to counter this coordinated double envelopment strategy aimed at securing the economic future of the powers that be. The decision to liberalize in the 80’s, privatize in the 90’s disinvest in tertiary education and cost share in hospitals are examples of the near total loss of economic sovereignty. A new front has been opened up with the push for liberal rules on investment, the opening up of public procurement and rules on the trade in services will constitute the fronts along which realignment pressure will be applied and for which we have no response.

At the end of the cold war, political thinkers argued that competition between nation states would continue, but it would be largely economic. Security was no longer seen in purely military terms, geo-economics took over geopolitics. Edward Luttwak preeminent geoeconomist argued, in the geo-economics glossary each standard business and economic policy or measures could be read in a strategic key:  the equivalent of firepower is investment capital provided or guided by the state, the equivalent of weapon innovation is product development subsidized by the state, market penetration supported by the state replaces military bases and garrisons’

With the shift in logic from bases and garrisons to market penetration, there have been losers and winners, the losers have been the states that previously parlayed their locations for geostrategic reasons that in the present dispensation have no discernable economic benefits. One of the unintended consequences of the shift in logic has been the increase in the number of failed states; these states like Somalia, Congo Zaire have fallen through the cracks of the international system.

 Somalia was made possible because, in the global games of the cold war competition either displaced or sublimated social disintegration and the US and the USSR co-opted many weak regimes into their strategic alliances. Once the USSR collapsed the stability that had existed in these regions evaporated, leaving in their wake countries without leadership, without order, without governance itself. Across the continent, states collapsed in a medley of long simmering ethnic tensions, religious and territorial disputes poverty, environmental degradation and unstable governments. Made even more violent by small and light weapons stock piles built up during the cold war.

Somalia, a failed state has provided a base for Al Shabab in much the same way Eastern Congo provided secure rear bases for Interehamwe and Allied Democratic Front (ADF). These states form hubs from which instability spreads out like ripples on waters. Eastern Congo is still unstable, to the north Southern Sudan has endured decades of instability and is likely to be a source of further instability, and is already at war with itself.

What does Somalia teach us? Well, for one thing the concept of borders is redundant, the threats that we face are transnational in nature. Transnational terrorism is made possible by another feature of the end of the cold war, the increasing importance and potency of non state actors in the international arena.

We earlier argued that the state was the cardinal line along which international politics was arranged, and interstate diplomacy was the primary method of dealing with conflict and tensions between states. That has changed, non states actors organize at sub state level exploiting discontent and alienation across several countries aggregating these efforts intro a mass movement with global reach.

Al Qaeda and its cohorts such as Al Shabab are a good example of this new breed of non states actors that have the ability to project force like some diabolical superpower. Borders do not mean much in these cases because of the organizational model; taking advantage of Muslim discontent they are able to do things previously thought unthinkable. The attack of July 11 2010 was planned in Somalia executed in Uganda by a Somali and a Ugandan, The suspects have been Ugandan, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Somali with one underlying characteristic they were all Muslim.

These changes on the international scene have fundamentally altered the nature of warfare, interstate conflict in its purest form does not exist anymore, and we are more likely to be involved in complex multisided irregular warfare against an enemy who avoids massing of forces and prefers irregular warfare which takes any advantage away from force multipliers like jets and tanks.  Bringing it home, how would fighter aircraft have been useful in the LRA conflict? The short answer is not very useful; LRA operated in small bands, fought along the lines of irregular warfare and generally avoided pitched battles. This has been replicated in battles against the ADF and the WNBF where decisive battles were settled by boots on the ground rather than fighter jets in the air.

The Internal Environment

Uganda has made progress over the last twenty five years, the state shows minimal competence with respect to service delivery, that there are still gaps goes without saying. The state has the greatest capacity to transform lives, the state endowed with the manpower, the resources and the good will has within its ambit the ability to meaningfully change lives.

However, within this matrix lies the greatest threat to national stability. The resources that the state controls far outweigh anything that is available in the private sector at least in Uganda and it is these resources that are a double edged sword. It has been a trend, not limited to Uganda that those closely associated with the ruling powers have also found themselves in positions of untold wealth. The struggle for political power is underwritten by the struggle for these virtually unlimited resources controlled by the state as such politics is fundamental, zero sum, brutal.

The foregoing is complicated by the formal/informal dichotomy that exists in Uganda. While formal institutions exist more often than not they are systematically undermined. Leaders have more often than not counterbalanced the formal institutions with ‘informal’ institutions. The concept of the verandah and the air conditioner was coined to describe the informality of the state in Africa in general and Uganda in particular. While formal institutions exist (the air conditioner) there is still a high degree of personal rule that takes place (the verandah) institutions are undermined and in some cases made irrelevant through this personal rule.

Massive official corruption presents a clear and present danger to the social fabric in Uganda. World Bank statistics estimate Uganda loses Three hundred million dollars annually to corruption. To call it a loss is a misnomer, that money lines the pockets of the nouveau rich, the comprador capitalist class men and women, who manufacture nothing, create nothing, and trade in nothing except access to the powers that be. In April 2011 Geoff Colvin Fortune Magazine columnist argued the societal effects of corruption are subtler and arguably worse. Initiative and ambition shrivel: Why try when it is not the source of success? Respect for authority evaporates. Anger and resentment build, especially as a society becomes richer and the gulf between ordinary citizens and the officially tolerated crooks grows wider.

Uganda’s population is growing at 3.4 percent per annum. For the optimists this represents an ever growing internal market and as such it should be encouraged. The flip side of this argument is looking at our situation the demographic spread does not favor us. With the increasing population growth rate there are more dependent people than they are productive people which has an overall negative effect on economic growth.

Further more, the quality of the population is a more telling determinant for economic growth than pure numbers. The international production chain is structured in such a way that real value is held in the creative part of the chain, outsourcing the relatively low value manufacturing process is more the norm. Comparing India and China, India has more investments higher up the knowledge chain that China as a result of the quality of the Indian population.  In an increasingly cut throat international market, knowledge is literally power. Bringing it home, the numbers do not exactly work to our advantage if not backed up by quality.

Uganda is a country rooted in the land; agriculture employs eight out of every ten Ugandans. Our key export earners Coffee, Tea, Cotton, and Flowers are all dependent on the land for sustenance. Nearly all the electricity that powers the homes and factories is natural hydro power. The foregoing makes any radical changes to the natural environment a real threat to our continued existence.  

Climate change presents a clear and present danger to our existence. The drought at the beginning of this decade led to some extreme load shedding and forced us to generate thermal power to cover the gap. What would the cost to the economy be today if we had to generate thermal power with oil at a hundred dollars a barrel? What would happen to the exchange rate if drought severely affected cash crop production? How would these in turn affect the forex inflows and what would that mean for importers and traders and local manufactures?

The  Burden of Geography

Geographically small countries like Uganda are said to be lacking in strategic depth.  . “Strategic depth” is measured as a ratio of the perimeter of a territory to the surface land area.  The perimeter of Uganda is 2,585 Km and the surface area is 240,460 sq Km, giving a ratio of 1:93. Uganda is about 5 times as vulnerable as Sudan to invasion and occupation; and Rwanda is 2 times as vulnerable as Uganda.  Strategic depth is an important element in the strategic equation because it influences the decision on the balance between offensive and defensive assets that a country purchases and deploys

The absence of strategic depth means Uganda has to create artificial strategic depth by creating a potent offensive capability as well as the ability to transfer conflict from territorial Uganda to the territory of the invading state. This is coupled with a potent defensive posture that ideally should be able to extract maximum damage from an invading force should ‘first strike’ not be possible.  However a necessary corollary of the strategic depth argument is who are our potential invaders and does the nature of the conflicts we face or could face support the purchase of these jets.

The short answer is no, the utility of fighter aircraft is against massed formations of troops in a ground attack role or against strategic targets like industries, bridges and dams of the invading country. As a nation we have not faced such a conflict since the liberation war of 1979, looking at the neighborhood we inhabit the threats that we face are more likely to be internally generated. The nature of such conflict is that it is dispersed and decentralized again the utility of fighter aircraft is questionable.

Apart from the strategic depth argument, is the fact that Uganda is completely dependent on imported oil, while there is a policy on the books that requires the country to maintain stocks sufficient for ninety days, this has not been implemented and as such Uganda is at the mercy of the private sector with respect to security of supply. From a security stand point one would be curious as to whether the military has the logistics in fuel terms to sustain combat operations for at least ninety days.

Conclusion.

Uganda’s defense procurement process is not transparent, and that is in part the problem. What is even more puzzling is the decision making matrix with respect to what are our national security priorities and what constitutes a threat and why?

In our submission we have argued that there is a matrix of interconnected threats that exist and present a combined threat that cannot be defeated by arming to the teeth. Furthermore for even those threats that can be defeated by arms, the equipment purchased is of questionable utility, a multi role jet fighter does have its limitations.

Retrospective authorization, an opaque procurement process and a decision making matrix that ignores even the most obvious threats are not the hall marks of s system that has the ability to keep this country safe in the long run. The deceptive logic of arms that permeates the establishment thinking is a Sisyphean labor, futile with as much effectiveness as a blind man peeping.