...but how? What can the U.S. do to provide effective relief in Somalia?

CAP's ThinkProgress Security has a guest post this afternoon from John Norris, Executive Director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at CAP, on the subject of wasted aid money to Somalia. Turns out the outside world has pumped something like $55 billion into that country since 1991, to little evident effect. Here's Norris's solution:

The world has been willing to spend billions on arms transfers, counter-terrorism efforts and military approaches, but sensible diplomacy and working at the local level to build durable peace agreements have usually been an afterthought. The United States and the international community needs to be much more principled and effective in delivering aid in order to help shape a functioning central government in Somalia that enjoys the faith and support of its own people.

Ok, but what does that mean exactly?

I'm no expert on Somalia (as my colleagues are eager to point out!), but my impression is that the security situation in much of the country would be prohibitive to the delivery of development aid or food relief. That means there'd need to be an effective military intervention before any of the humanitarian facts of the situation could be changed, and I'm not sure who has the appetite for that (aside from Ethiopia and AMISOM, to the limited extent they're currently engaged).

If you could start from scratch and set U.S. policy toward Somalia tomorrow, what would you do?

Max Boot is gonna learn us all up about Somalia! (UPDATED)

LULZ.

It is hard to believe anyone could be outraged by the U.S. government paying for contractors to train the Somalian armed forces. Those armed forces are the only thing standing in the way of a complete takeover of the country by the Shahab, the Taliban-like militia which has close links to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There is absolutely no appetite in Washington for sending any troops into Somalia, beyond perhaps an occasional Special Operations raid; everyone remembers all too vividly the Black Hawk Down disaster of 1993. So how do we stop the Shahab? The CIA has an active presence there. But that’s not enough. We also need to provide arms and training to the Somali government troops, and because we’re not willing to send even U.S. trainers, that job has been contracted out indirectly to a security company called Bancroft Global Development, based in Washington.

1. No one is "paying for contractors to train the Somalian armed forces." Somalia can barely be said to have armed forces. We're paying to train Ugandan and Burundian soldiers who operate as peacekeepers under the auspices of AMISOM, the African Union Mission in Somalia.

2. I know you've been talking about the Iranian threat for a while, but I don't think Somalia's going to be taken over by intermediate-range ballistic missiles. More likely what you meant is Shabab, Somalia's AQ-linked militia. Shabab, not Shahab. (Dude, you wrote it three times. Don't tell me it's a typo.)

3. Don't you think it's a little strange to say that Americans lack the appetite for U.S. military action in Somalia -- with the exception of SOF raids -- because of troubling memories of the "Black Hawk Down" incident? Uh, all those Rangers and Delta guys were killed during a special operations raid.

4. This may be a news flash to you, but "we're not willing to send even U.S. trainers" almost anywhere (assuming you mean uniformed American servicemen) with the exception of Iraq and Afghanistan, in large part because of the massive manpower requirements of those wars. The bulk of U.S.-provided military training in partner nations is performed by contractors like DynCorp and MPRI (and innumerable subs); sometimes it's contracted through the State Department (as with putative peacekeeping training in Africa), and sometimes it's executed by DoD through foreign military sales.

5. Let's repeat this one to make sure you've got it: this isn't about training and equipping Somali military forces, but African peacekeepers deployed in Somalia. Maybe try reading and understanding next time.

(All of that said, I kind of agree with Boot that the Times article makes a mountain out of a molehill. It conflates peacekeeper training with mercenary military operations by highlighting the role of some European soldier of fortune that could've been an extra in "Blood Diamond," and intimates that U.S.-contracted PSCs are taking direct action against the Shabab in order to fill the gaps in what's described as a poorly-directed, "piecemeal" policy toward Somalia. Dude, this Rouget guy is not the "face of the American campaign against militants in Somalia," unlikely or otherwise. He's just a guy doing a job. The only "American campaign against militants in Somalia" is being waged by intelligence officers, drones, and the occasional special operator.)

UPDATE at 1555 ET 12 AUG: I threw this post together in about 90 seconds after reading Boot's piece yesterday afternoon, largely because I wanted to embarrass him before his mistakes were quickly noticed and surreptitiously corrected. It came as a small surprise when I checked back repeatedly today and noticed that the original post remained unchanged. That is, until some time in the last hour (h/t to @slowfalling on Twitter, who noticed and brought it to my attention); changes are in bold, and I've supplied the original language in brackets.

It is hard to believe anyone could be outraged by the U.S. government paying for contractors to train the African Union peacekeepers trying to keep Somalia from totally spinning out of control [orig.: the Somalian armed forces]. Those armed forces are the only thing standing in the way of a complete takeover of the country by the Shabab [orig.: the Shahab], the Taliban-like militia which has close links to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. There is absolutely no appetite in Washington for sending any troops into Somalia, beyond perhaps an occasional Special Operations raid; everyone remembers all too vividly the Black Hawk Down disaster of 1993. So how do we stop the Shabab [orig.: the Shahab]? The CIA has an active presence there. But that’s not enough. We also need to provide arms and training to African Union peacekeepers, and because we’re not willing to send even U.S. trainers, that job has been contracted out indirectly to a security company called Bancroft Global Development, based in Washington.

On a scale of 1-10, how surprised are you that neither Commentary nor Boot saw fit to make note of the corrections? -6 or so?

UPDATE 2: At Jeremy Scahill's suggestion, I feel it's my responsibility to retract all negative statements about Max Boot's expertise in the cultural and military dynamics of the Horn of Africa. I should also note that the errors in Boot's original post were merely spatio-temporal as opposed to factual, and that we could sort all these little disagreements out rather simply if we'd just send 100,000 U.S. troops to my office to conduct a fully-resourced Gulliver-centric counterinsurgency campaign en route to Mogadishu.

Map of control in Mogadishu--quick link (updated)

I thought some of you might be interested in this: a map of control in Mogadishu.

And since I don't think I linked to this when we last had a discussion of Somalia, go read this May 2010 Crisis Group report on "Somalia's Divided Islamists."

I apologize for not adding more but work and life are keeping me busy. I will post more once things have settled.

Update: An anonymous commenter points out this map (thanks!).

Gettleman--This time on Somalia and pirates

I really shouldn’t read the NYT’s Gettleman. I end up as wound up as Gulliver over some of the inane stuff he writes about Africa. This latest piece, "In Somali Civil War, Both Sides Embrace Pirates" is pretty bad. Seriously—don’t paint Somalia as some stylized Hollywood movie, it’s more complicated than that. Newspapers readers can handle sober descriptions and analysis. We don't need news to be pitched like movie scripts.

Ok, so first of all, stop describing pirates as if they’re some kind of action heroes. What’s up with all the “pirate lair” and “pirate den” language? Second, when you’re describing the forces of a pirate/militia group, use accurate nomenclature. Last I checked, small infantry divisions are made up of way more than “several hundred men.” I’m sorry but 6 technicals and 80 heavy machine guns does not an infantry division make. And then avoid the reference to “grappling hooks”—this is not Pirates of the Horn with Johnny Deep. Third, the hole “check” gimmick…seriously? Finally, “pirate middle manager”? This always makes me think of calling Pirate Inc. HQ, and having a receptionist answer ‘Good morning, Pirate Inc., for middle managers, press 5.’ Though I suppose if they’re Shabab-affiliated it would be minus the elevator background music. Seriously, this is reporting?

So far, I’ve been ranting about style. Now on to substance (sort of): is there anything important in this article? Did you learn anything of import by reading it? Umm, not really, in fact more than likely you didn’t. Why, because there’s nothing there. Of course both sides are leveraging pirates for their own gains, of course these alliances may be temporary, of course the pirates are building up their land bases and of course Western presence is making things harder for their operations. The article read like an email a sixteen year old sends his brother after going on a really cool class trip (the trip was arranged for journalists the article says). There are ways to write about this that actually don't make Somalia and its people look like an adventure film and its hapless characters. Start writing that way, please.

What exactly does the Washington Post want done in east Africa?

The Somali insurgent group al-Shabaab has claimed credit for the suicide attack in the Ugandan capital of Kampala that killed 74 civilians on Sunday, leading a whole bunch of front pages to squeal about how "al Qaeda's east African branch" had demonstrated its capacity and desire to undertake external operations. The Washington Post's editorial board, for one, is pissed.

Such a campaign poses, at the least, a serious risk to the stability of Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, which all have tried to prevent an al-Shabab takeover in Somalia. Given the U.S. passport holders known to have joined al-Shabab, an attempt to attack the U.S. homeland -- such as that attempted by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen last Christmas -- is entirely plausible. The Obama administration hasn't ignored the danger: In addition to providing aid to the Somali government and army, it has ordered raids by U.S. forces on terrorist targets in Somalia.

But Kenya's foreign minister, Moses Wetangula, was right when he said last week -- before the Uganda bombings -- that the United States was not doing enough to combat the threat. The Somali government and army need more help, and ideally, more foreign forces; more should be done to stop the flow of weapons into the country. More U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Shabab leaders should be undertaken. The situation in Somalia, Mr. Wetangula told the Associated Press, is "very, very dire." It is time for the United States to recognize that -- and to respond before al-Shabab can escalate its foreign attacks.

Now I don't mean to sound dismissive about all of this, but what exactly does the Post want to have happen? As noted in the article, the USG is already providing aid to Somalia and has undertaken strikes against al-Shabaab targets on African soil. American personnel are also providing training and support to the Ugandan forces that make up the bulk of the African Union peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu. So what else?

Well, "ideally, more foreign forces," says the Post. The U.S. obviously isn't going to be the one to provide those forces, so one can only presume that they're asking for more international peacekeepers. The AU force is holding on by a thread, but it's hard to imagine NATO or UN troops going in to push back al-Shabaab forces. So this means more Africans. Is the U.S. really best positioned to go asking for others to participate, considering extant suspicions about our intentions vis-a-vis AFRICOM, U.S. mil presence in Djibouti, and so on?

Furthermore, are more Africans really going to do all that much? I'm not suggesting that the AU force is incompetent, or that more forces couldn't tip the balance, but are there any really good reasons to believe that they will?

What else does the Post have in mind? "[M]ore should be done to stop the flow of weapons into the country." Ok, fine, fair enough. But why? Between this and the plea for more foreign troops, it's clear that the editorial is focused on preventing AS from making further gains in its military campaign against the Transitional Federal Government. But does that really have all that much to do with AS' ability to launch terrorist attacks against the U.S. or its interests abroad? Does AS need to hold the capital in order to have the much sought-after "safe haven" apparently so essential to mounting successful terrorist operations with global reach?

Is the AS-TFG military struggle really all that meaningful to U.S. interests? Don't get me wrong, I think it's probably a better scenario if we can shrink the list of states that are categorically and irreversibly opposed to everything the U.S. says and does, rather than extending it. But from a concrete, tangible perspective, does it really matter all that much who is "running" Somalia (to the extent that it's ever being run at all)?

This line of reasoning (and questioning) is obviously very relevant to the war in Afghanistan. After all, if we've concluded that we have to fight a war in south Asia to eliminate a possible terrorist safe haven, then it shouldn't come as any great shock that others would conclude that such a safe haven needs to be eliminated in east Africa. But even if the TFG "wins," is the safe haven gone? And even if the safe haven is gone (as it apparently is in Afghanistan, at least within that state's borders), does that mean that terrorists can't operate effectively?

So the Washington Post wants action. So does Kenya's foreign minister, apparently, for whatever that's worth. But can someone tell me exactly why it's so essential that we intervene? And if it is so essential, how we're going to do it? Because it we're going to keep zapping known AS guys with AC-130s and UAVs and Tomahawks and whatnot, fine with me. But it seems like that's about our only option, and it seems like a pretty good way to get the rest of Somalia to pick sides, too.

US Support to Somali Forces

This story ran in the New York Times this weekend (and I'm late in posting about it)--it explains current US support to Somalia.

The interesting part starts with this:

But it seems there has been a genuine shift in Somali policy, too, and the Americans have absorbed a Somali truth that eluded them for nearly 20 years: If Somalia is going to be stabilized, it is going to take Somalis.

“This is not an American offensive,” said Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary of state for Africa. “The U.S. military is not on the ground in Somalia. Full stop.”

He added, “There are limits to outside engagement, and there has to be an enormous amount of local buy-in for this work.”

The article then goes on to discuss an upcoming offensive to help the Transitional Federal Government take full control of Mogadishu and concomitant work to provide food and other essential assistance to Somalis. So here are my questions--how different are these efforts? Is it a cosmetic thing or is it really being done differently?

"Somalia for Yemen is becoming like what Pakistan is for Afghanistan"

This according to Saeed Obaid, a "Yemeni terrorism expert who wrote a book on al-Qaeda's Yemen affiliate," quoted in Sudarsan Raghavan's piece in today's Washington Post.

Thousands of Somali boys and teenagers fleeing war and chaos at home are sailing to Yemen, where officials who have long welcomed Somali refugees now worry that the new arrivals could become the next generation of al-Qaeda fighters.

As the United States deepens its counterterrorism operations in Yemen, officials are concerned that extremists could find growing Somali refugee camps fertile ground for recruiting. U.S. and Yemeni authorities also fear that Islamist fighters from Somalia could slip into the country among the throngs of refugees, deepening ties between al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen and the particularly hard-line militants of Somalia.

Fleeing a failed state for a failing one, the Somali youths arrive daily in this refugee outpost, which is filled with rickety tents and tales of misery, in the vast desert of southern Yemen. They bring stories of brutality and forced conscription by al-Shabab, an Islamist force battling Somalia's U.S.-backed transitional government.

Considering the national media's Yemen-gasm over the last couple of weeks, I suppose it's about time we linked to something on the subject. Here's a start.

UN Security Council Imposes Sanctions on Eritrea

The UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Eritrea today by a vote of 13 to 2 (with Libya voting against and China abstaining). The sanctions (you can read the resolution here) include a travel ban and assets freeze on Eritrean officials and, of course, an arms embargo on Eritrea.

Now this has been under discussion for a while because of Eritrea's long-standing role in supporting armed groups in Somalia, in particular Al-Shabab (if you want to read about that, check out the reports of the Security Council's Monitoring Group on Somalia, here). The other main justification for sanctions is Eritrea's refusal to withdraw from territory it took from Djibouti earlier this year in a border dispute.

A couple points of interest: as far as I know, this is the first time that the Security Council has imposed secondary sanctions on a country that's been accused of violating sanctions against a first country. In other words, these sanctions were imposed because Eritrea violated sanctions on Somalia.

Second, when the Security Council imposes sanctions it normally creates a sanctions committee. Well, instead of doing that, the Council has asked the Committee on Somalia to monitor the implementation of the Eritrea sanctions. In addition, the Council has now asked the Monitoring Group on Somalia to also track sanctions on Eritrea. All of this makes sense but, like I said, as far as I know, it's the first time it has happened.

Finally, for just a bit more context, you might want to read this Reuters story with excerpts from the interview the President, a former Marxist guerilla who led his country to independence from Ethiopia back in 1993, gave to the news service back in October.

Ethiopian Troops Back in Somalia

Regional media are reporting that "hundreds" of Ethiopian troops have entered Somalia.

Heavily armed Ethiopian troops with several army trucks have reportedly crossed the border into central Somali regions of Hiran and Galgadud, residents and reports said.

Residents of Balanbale town in central Galgadud region said they have seen Ethiopian military forces backed by army vehicles in the outskirts of the town.

One resident said the troops have dug trenches in positions without prior notice of the elders.

Ethiopian troops have also crossed the border and reached Kalabeyr town in Hiran region, about 22km (14 miles) from the Somali-Ethiopian border, according to locals.

A resident told Garowe Online "a lot of troops arrived in the area on early Saturday and have started making military manoeuvring."

This helpful BBC timeline reminds us that back in late December 2006, Ethiopian troops entered Somalia and remained until the beginning of 2009. The African Union has a small mission deployed to Mogadishu (AMISOM) and many governments, including the US, play an important part in backing the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the development of its security forces.

So, how long will the troops stay this time? How far into the country will they go and what impact will their presence have?

This is exactly why a light footprint counterterror campaign will never work in Afghanistan!

Stand-off CT missions lack necessary intelligence. We can't get to targets in time. We'll never tell friend from foe. The bad guys will never show their faces if they're allowed to live in places controlled by sympathetic regimes or factions. Al-Qaeda is too capable and dangerous to try to fight from the other side of the globe. Large troop commitments are necessary to sustain the logistics and support operations that accompany counterterrorist trigger-pullers. Like so:

American commandos killed one of the most wanted Islamic militants in Africa in a daylight raid in southern Somalia on Monday, according to American and Somali officials, an indication of the Obama administration’s willingness to use combat troops strategically against Al Qaeda’s growing influence in the region.

Western intelligence agents have described the militant, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, as the ringleader of a Qaeda cell in Kenya responsible for the bombing of an Israeli hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002. Mr. Nabhan may have also played a role in the attacks on two American embassies in East Africa in 1998.

American military forces have been hunting him for years, and on Monday, around 1 p.m., villagers near the town of Baraawe said four military helicopters suddenly materialized over the horizon and shot at two trucks rumbling through the desert. The trucks were carrying leaders of the Shabab, an Islamist extremist group fighting to overthrow Somalia’s weak but internationally recognized government. The Shabab work hand-in-hand with foreign terrorists, according to Western and Somali agents, and in the past few months, as the battle for control of Somalia has intensified, the group seems to be drawing increasingly close to Al Qaeda.

American officials on Monday provided few details, but confirmed that Special Operations forces, operating from a nearby American warship, participated in the helicopter raid.

Whoops. Turns out all that stuff I said up there was wrong, and this is an example of exactly how the light footprint can be done.

Ok, ok, I'm being smarmy and I'm not really engaging substantively in this debate. I get it. And just because you can do it in one place doesn't mean you can do it -- or that it's the best way to do it -- in another place. The Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier is less accessible to offshore assets. There are more targets there. Surveillance is probably more difficult than in the desert of Somalia. I get all of this.

But please, please, can we stop dealing in self-assured assertions like "remote, kinetic counterterrorism would never work in South Asia"? Killing one guy ain't the same as winning the war, I know. But until we (all of us that are involved in this debate, I mean) stop taking everything so personally and clutching on to our beliefs like baby birds, stop refusing to accept anything that doesn't fit into our construct, stop labeling people as "gets it" or "doesn't get it," it's going to be really difficult to make any progress.

African Union Soldiers and Killing Camels

This story is either funny or not, depending on your perspective. Maybe some readers can shed some light on whether this is unusual or not.

Anyway, here's the story:

African Union soldiers shot dead 11 camels in the Somali capital on Saturday night, mistaking the galloping animals for an insurgent attack, residents said.

Al Shabaab rebels sometimes use passing civilians and vehicles to give them cover before attacks, police said, and the peacekeepers from AMISOM mission thought they were behind the camels which ran past the entrance to Mogadishu's airport.

"We thought Islamists and AMISOM were fighting last night, but this morning we just saw 11 dead camels," resident Farah Aden told Reuters. "Each camel had at least 10 bullet wounds -- the whole area was covered with blood."[...]

"It was our new forces and they were not aware of the camels' movements. They say they were attacked, and so opened fire," [an AMISOM spokesperson] told Reuters.

Are these the preemptive/offensive operations that follow the change mandate we discussed recently? Is it easy or not to mistake camels for insurgents? It just strikes me as weird.

So how did the French hostage escape?

You may recall that over a month ago, two French DGSE agents, while on official mission to train forces from Somalia's Transitional Federal Government were abducted by Somali insurgents. But that's the easy (and rather straightforward part of the story), the rest of it, as we say in French, is rocambolesque--that's means fantastic/incredible but that doesn't really do the word justice because rocambolesque involves some degree of unpredictability, slapstick theater and tragicomedy.

Anyway, according to press reports, the kidnapping didn't go very well. First off, the vehicle the two officers were packed into broke down literally minutes later. So other groups that were nearby basically stole the hostages from the initial kidnappers. Then those people got into a fight and split them up...

In any case, news today emerged that one of the hostages had escaped. The first thing out this morning was that the agent had killed three of his captors and escaped. Now, if that had been true, it would have been bad ass...Then there were other stories that he'd "escaped" after a ransom had been paid (something the French deny).

That didn't happen though (I suppose unfortunately if you're on the lookout for these types of stories). What did happen, according to an interview that the agent gave to Radio France Internationale was that (my quick and easy translation):

Tuesday night, close to midnight, I took advantage of my captors sleeping. They were tired because of Ramadan. Because my cell was badly closed, I took off, without using violence. In any case, if I had fired shots, I would have been killed. Then I walked almost five hours through the night, using the stars to guide me to the area I hoped to reach. Someone tried to shoot me but I ran, hid and they missed me.

He safely made it to an AMISOM base in Mogadishu and then was shipped off to Nairobi. I guess it's good to know celestial navigation but the story is still rather rocambolesque don't you think? Now we wait to see what happens to/with his colleague.

Somalia-Kenya and Afghanistan-Pakistan?

The New York Times has an interesting article today about how the Shabab insurgents who are fighting the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia are increasingly active in neighboring Kenya. Apparently, the Islamist militants have been threatening westerners, kidnapping kids from schools in Kenya to use as soldiers, etc.

But there's more about this Somalia-Kenya story that strikes me as similar to the ongoing conflict on the Afghan-Pakistani border. The article describes the border:

In most places, this line, the official international border, is not even marked, let alone protected. Here in the village of Hulugo, there’s simply a tattered Kenyan flag and a cinderblock schoolhouse with chicken-wire windows. Then a meadow of thorn trees and donkey dung. Then Shabab country.

Well that doesn't strike me as that unusual for most African countries (or come to that for most countries in general, witness our continuing problem on our Southern border). I mean Berliners routinely point out, it's not really a border unless there's a big wall, guard posts, guys with automatic rifles...

But to return to border challenges:

American and British advisers are working closely with Kenyan counter-terrorism teams, but the area along the Somali border is known to be a gaping hole.

“The Kenyans don’t have the skills to close the border, even if they wanted to,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol. “People are very concerned. But on some level, we can’t defend Kenya’s border for them.”

When asked to assess the level of security at the Somali border, the diplomat flatly stated, “there is no security.”

The raging war in the country next door, between Somalia’s weak transitional government and the Shabab, is rapidly becoming a proxy war — with Western arms and money keeping the transitional government alive, while Arab and Pakistani jihadists with links to Al Qaeda fight for the Shabab.

Now that also sounds familiar. We've been helping with counter-terrorism border capacity building, the article says. I looked at the State Department's budget justification for Kenya and the most I could find about border security capacity building assistance to Kenya was this (yes with a $2.5 million request for "stabilization operations and security sector reform" and another $6 million for "governance"--there was no "rule of law funding"):

Issues such as coastal, port, aviation and border security, cyber crime prevention and detection, professionalization of police and military units, improved immigration controls,refugee and internally displaced person security, domestic terrorism, and violent crime are approached from an integrated,
multi-USG agency perspective.

I think that means anything from a more immigration focused capacity building efforts or knowing who is coming and going, to assistance on monitoring and interdicting all manner of weapons trafficking (from the next to impossible small arms to scary things like WMD). Nonetheless, om the work I've done, bilateral assistance (and come to that international assistance, if you think UN peace operations have systematic mandates to monitor borders and build border management capacity, think again) rarely focuses on building more systematic border monitoring and management capacity, particularly in areas where customs revenues aren't large enough to pay for people to live and work there. I understand that assistance providers would want to focus on trade route firsts (since like I said, customs revenues are the backbone of government revenue in many countries) but still it strikes me that if borders are a problem, then maybe border security forces would be a good idea (I think we're doing some of that in Afghanistan, but we're just starting).

And then, the Shabab are using a typical technique to scare the population away from wider assistance:

But in the areas along the Kenya-Somalia border, it seems anti-Americanism is still spreading, despite the millions of dollars the American government has spent on a hearts-and-minds campaign [I think that the $500 million that's in the budget for health and education].

Take an American-built well in the village of Raya. No one is using it, though Raya is desperately poor and desperately dry.

“The Americans wanted to finish us,” said one villager, Ibrahim Alin, convinced that the American water engineers who built the well had poisoned it to sterilize him.

So if all of this doesn't remind you of Afghanistan/Pakistan, complete with cross border raids, refugee crisis, poverty, insurgency, the weak corrupt government on one side and the stronger, corrupt government and corrupt security forces on the other...and I'm just getting started on parallels here, I don't know what will. The question is, have we learned anything from our experience in Afghanistan that will make dealing with this easier and on the flip side, have we learned anything over the years about dealing with our favorite ally in East Africa, Kenya, that will help us deal with our good friends in Pakistan?