Newshoggers.com

System Stability for Global Hegemons

By Fester:

Andrew Bacevich in the Los Angeles Times argues that great powers must remember their interests first and foremost before concentrating on the means to the desired ends.  The conflation of priorities towards means instead of ends is deadly to hegemonic powers that depend on managing a stable rule set. He uses Great Britain's lack of grand strategy in the First World War and the Edwardian Era as his example:

Back in December 1914, the Admiralty's impatient first lord was Winston Churchill, appalled by the slaughter on the Western Front. Intent on breaking the stalemate, Churchill became a font of ideas. Mired in Flanders? Then launch an amphibious assault against the Dardanelles, he urged. Were German machine guns cutting down British Tommies venturing into no man's land? Then support the infantry with tanks.

Yet Churchill's innovations failed to deliver a quick resolution. Instead, they prolonged the war and drove up its cost. When the guns finally fell silent in November 1918, "victory" left Britain economically and spiritually depleted. Revolution wracked much of Europe. And the seeds of totalitarianism had been planted, producing in their maturity an even more horrendous war. Some victory.

Churchill and his Cabinet colleagues had spent four years dodging fundamental questions. Fixated with tactical and operational concerns, they ignored matters of strategy and politics. Britain's true interest lay in ending the war, not in blindly seeing it through to the bitter end.

Great Britain's great interest was maintaining a balance of power in Europe and keeping the German Fleet from being too powerful.  Once the defensive goals of keeping France in the war was achieved, Britain had achieved its minimal strategic aims by Christmas, 1914.  After that the Allies and the Central Powers engaged in an attempt at system transformation war when it was in the best interests of Britain to maintain the system before the war.  Expansive goal sets led to intermediate term victory and a long term defeat of British power and strategic objectives.

Great Britain would not have been exhausted if there was a peace of 1915 with a settlement similar to almost all other settlements since the Peace of Westphalia; mild adjustments to borders, trades of colonies for concessions to be named later and perhaps an indeminity of some small size as the war was already a stalemate.  A non-exhausted Britain and more importantly a non-exhausted Europe would not have needed their version of Chimerica to continously refinance hard currency debts.  Without the massive war debts and reperations, post-war Germany would not have suffered the hyper inflation that delegitimatized liberal democracy and led to Hitler. And without the opening for a hard right fascist party, World War II was far less likely to have been a global war instead of another colonial African war with Italy and a general Pacific War with Japan.  Either one of those conflicts would have not bankrupted Britain like the global nature of the Second World War. 

As I have argued before, the United States should adapt a policy of geo-strategic minimalism as grand goals are unattainable at any cost that is proportional to the non-priaptic benefits that expansive goals can achieve.

The US's best interests are served by seeing pockets of stability form and sustain themselves so that global interconnections can be made, and multi-issue linkages are possible. These pockets of stability may or may not be in the form of traditional states of the Westphalian model, but they are valuable none the less. These pockets are often a recognition of reality on the ground; local elites, networks and tribal connections as well as sometimes being the strongest group of thugs around who have fairly limited objectives can be sources of needed stability from which proto-states can emerge to better reflect ongoing realities....

working with the reality that there really is no such thing as a unified Somali state with an effective central government but there are regional pockets of stability that are effectively serving as limited proto-states will be far more successful in accomplishing the limited political/economic goals of the United States (smooth flow of global trade, sidelining of radical Islamists who have the capacity and intent for global strikes) then attempting to re-create a unified Somali state....

Not doing much on the ground is often the best policy option because there are no good policy options available; instead the options are expensive, intensive interventions with low probabilities of success and 'success' defined with severe limitations.

The United States is not a rising power any more.  Expansive goals of resource access and influence expansion can only be financed by external borrowing and the pay-offs are minimal if not negative.  Instead we have spent sixty odd years creating a system including both iterations of the Bretton Woods system that benefit our preferences.  It should be the basic goal of American foreign policy to either maintain the superstructure of a beneficial system arrangement or at least ease the transition to a new global rule set.  Frittering away power, influence, authority and capacity in the pursuit of low value but expansive goals is counterproductive to that basic goal. 

Humility Helps

By Fester:

Andrew Exum is commenting on the Lebanese elections and has a simple insight that should be taken to heart by any American policy maker:

In general, it might be healthy to admit that what we did and did not do in Washington had a far smaller impact on these elections than what the Lebanese did and did not do in Lebanon proper.

This simple lesson in humility and non-American exceptionalistic ego-centrism would be an extraordinarily valuable lesson that could inform most schools of foreign policy thought and most operational doctrines of foreign policy and military policy implementation. It is not always about us. Local facts and local issues matter, on the whole, a lot more than distant preferences that are often moderately uninformed by the local mileau.

Humility helps. It is not always about the United States as there are many situations that have their own internal logic that is minimally related, at most, to the day to day political drama in the United States.  This removal of ego-centrism is a useful analytical tool as I noted in 2004 regarding a right wing blogger trying to impose a US political explanation on unrelated activities in Iraq:

In response to the coordinated bombing attack against a ceremony celebrating the opening of a sewage treatment plant that killed 35+ children and wounded ten or more American soldiers who were present, Roger Simons makes the following comment:

Is today's carnage in Iraq...... timed for the debate tonight? It's hard to know, but it's far from impossible. We do know, the terror mongers have tried to influence elections before,

I need to respond to this idiocy. The attack was brutal and I wish it did not happen, but Mr. Simons needs to get over himself and his extremely narrow viewpoint. Not everything that is happening around the world is occurring because of its potential effect on the upcoming US elections.

The Iraqi insurgents have been operating on their own rhythm and motives since the very beginning and although there is a political and propaganda component to it, it has not been specifically targeted at immediate inflection points. Instead it has been targeted at isolating the battlefield and dictating a situation where the US becomes more isolated and less able to create winning situations

It is very seldom just about US. 

Local coins for COIN

By Fester:

Zenpundit earlier this month reviewed the Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen and he noted one of the major problems in the entire COIN literature:

First, Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine. In fairness, no major COIN advocate has ever said otherwise and have often emphasized the point. The problem is that a lot of their intended audience - key civilian decision makers and opinion shapers in their 30’s-50’s often do not understand the difference, except for a minority who have learned from bitter experience. Most of those who have, the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Shultzes etc. are elder statesmen on the far periphery of policy

This leads to a massive disconnect in planning, policy and goal sets, as operational goals (securing a modicum and 'decent' level of violence) overrides the minimally existent political constraints and goals. 

The 10 second description of the official US Army counter-insurgency doctrine is simple:

Enhance the host government's legitimacy and capability while denying legitimacy and capacity to the insurgent(s).

From this, everything else derives including the strong inclination to NOT using air strike, the argument that the best metric of success is not body counts but secured villages or neighborhoods.  This basic axiom should guide the actions of every leader from the E-4 fire team leader to the Secrtary of Defense and the President.  All actions that contribute to legitimacy and capacity enhancement of the host government are productive actions strategically.  All actions that do not aid in supporting legitimacy and capability are self-defeating actions. 

Time Magazine reports on the current US plan for Afghanistan.  It involves a surge of a few additional brigades, a doubling of the Afghani Army, increasing the national police force and expanding local militias.  There are many problems, including the dispersion of the legitimacy of violence to non-state militias, but there is a far more pragmatic concern of sustainability:

That's the reason the Obama Administration is considering doubling the size of Afghanistan's military and national police forces, to roughly 400,000. That's more than triple what U.S. officials had estimated would be needed to defend the country shortly after the U.S. invaded in late 2001....

But there's a problem with the option of doubling the size of the Afghan security forces: Officials inside and out of the Pentagon warn that the bill for setting up such a large force, estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion annually for several years, could prove daunting — more than double the budget of the Afghan government, and way more than could be sustained by Afghanistan's own economy for the foreseeable future.

Implied with this statement is that the current Afghanistani force structure is more expensive than the government's current budget.  So doubling the force structure either means the Kabul government will forever be a client government begging for outside funding to fund its oversized armed forces or it will be incapable of providing basic public services or it will be subject to the whims of the IMF and economic cycles that dwarf the Kabul government's capacity to influence.  None of those scenarios are legitimacy enhancing scenarios. 

The disconnect will lead to a minimization of political goals as our national decision loop short circuits itself to subjugating itself to the known processes instead of grappling with the needed questions as to what end states are achievable and desirable. 

Economic Inefficiency as Damning Evidence....

By Fester:

The United States massively and expensively subsidizes local sugar production which means consumers pay higher prices and my soft drinks don't taste quite as good as they could.  We do this because of domestic political constraints and interest group politics that lock in preferential treatment to small, vocal and wealthy groups who are able to scream far louder for concentrated benefits than the mere murmurs from the vast majority of people who are minimally harmed by this policy. 

It is a stupid policy, but there is a rational explanation for the policy that is rooted in internal domestic politics.  There are plenty of policies that are less than economically efficient but make ideological or political sense. 

Dave Schuler is arguing that economic inefficiency is an indictment on Iranian nuclear ambitions:

Finally, while Iran has a right to pursue the peaceful application of nuclear energy doing so to maintain energy independence makes little sense and it’s a waste of Iran’s resources to do so. They can get more results for less money simply by modernizing their oil production facilities.

National prestige projects, of which nuclear energy is one, rarely have to pass cost benefit analysis.  It would be far more efficient for Iran to open up its entire energy sector to foreign investment and control, but there are strong ideological constraints that prevents this from happening.  It would be more efficient for the US Navy to buy foreign designed and built corvettes but ideological and political constraints prevent this as well.

Dave assembles a bit more evidence to argue against peaceful Iranian nuclear intentions, and that evidence is more convincing, but the economic efficiency angle is damn weak. 

Weekend Book Review - Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story

By Ron Beasley

Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould is a must read book for anyone who wants to understand world geopolitics since the Vietnam war and even before.  It might be surprising what  an important part the small country Afghanistan played in the politics of the cold war.  This was a difficult review simply because there is so much information. Some of it contains information I knew nothing about.  In some cases I had little knowledge but most striking was how much of what I thought I knew was wrong. 

The first quarter of the book covers Afghan history up to 1960 and I did not fully appreciate the country's importance.

A great deal of what is traditionally denoted in historical studies as Persian, Iranian, and even Indian history involves the cities and principalities of what is now Afghanistan. Composed of tribes that were even at the time recognized as ethnically and culturally distinct, such ancient cities as Kandahar, Bamiyan, Mazar, Herat, Kabul, Bagram, and Baikh played a leading role in the evolving history of the region and the civilized world. Over the millennia, rulers from these cities swept far outside their territories to conquer and for long intervals rule over kingdoms stretching from China to the Caspian Sea. At times Afghan dynasties controlled the fate of Indian and Persian empires, while no less a figure than Zoroaster (Zarathustra) is said to have gained renown as a priest-scholar in the northern Bactrian city of Baikh, now located in Afghanistan, not far from Mazar-e Sharif.
But the ancient apocalyptic religious teachings accredited to Zoroaster take on even more meaning when placed against a backdrop of today s holy war. For what may seem to our modern secular society a hopelessly anachronistic throwback to the past is in fact seen by its mystical holy warrior participants in Washington and elsewhere as the final act in an ancient historical drama.

Afghanistan become important to the west in early in the 19th century when Britain saw it as a buffer between Tsarist Russia and it's economic empire in India.  The most significant thing to come out of  the British actions in the 19th century was the Durand Line which sliced off a chunk of Afghanistan and divided the Pashtuns.  That was to remain a contentious issue to this day.

Moving forward to the mid 20th century Afghanistan was still seen as a buffer to Russia by the “B-Team”, which I discussed here.  To the B-Team Afghanistan was more than a buffer, it was a way to further weaken the Soviet Union and pay back for Vietnam.  The Soviets did not want to invade and occupy Afghanistan but the B-Team forced their hand and made it impossible for them to withdraw when that was really what they wanted to do.

Dreyfuss writes, "In the Nouvel Observateur interview, Brzezinski admitted that his intention all along was to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—even though, after the Soviet action occurred, U.S. officials expressed shock and surprise. 'We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would,' said Brzezinski." "'Now,' he told President Carter in 1979, 'we can give the USSR its Vietnam war.'"

To do this they supported and encouraged the very Islamic extremists that were responsible for 911 and we are fighting now in Afghanistan.  Even as the American's and their allies were fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban Pakistan's ISI was giving them support.

This entire effort required that the American people be fed what can only be described as propaganda.  Just like the lead up to the Iraq war the media was more than willing to play along.  The failure of the media to do their job is nothing new.

After the fall of the Soviet Union the Reagan, Bush 41  and Clinton administrations still assumed that instability created by religious extremists in Afghanistan was in the best interest of the United States and watched or even encouraged Pakistan's ISI and Saudi Arabia create the Taliban.  It was only after the bombings of the two US embassies in Africa and the near sinking of the USS Cole that they realized they had created a monster.  The events on 911 were icing on the cake.  But this was good news for the neocons and the military industrial complex – they had an enemy again which would justify military spending.

Fitzgerald and Gould close the book with some advice for President Obama:

President Obama will face the toughest foreign policy decisions of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. But among the toughest of those tough decisions will be how to handle the ongoing battle for Afghanistan.

Lest he fall prey to the popular misconceptions and the self-fulfilling delusions of Washington s current Beltway wisdom, he should be well advised that today's Afghanistan is more a creation of Washington, Islamabad and London than it is of Kabul. He should also be advised that achieving anything resembling a real victory will require much more than just additional troops or taking the battle into Taliban- and Al Qaeda-controlled areas of neighboring Pakistan. It will require rethinking some basic assumptions about both Afghanistan, and Pakistan and America's goals in
the region.

I see little evidence that Obama is willing to take the advice.  The same hawks are still in charge.

I repeat,  Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story, is a must read for anyone trying to understand AF/PAK policy.  I have not even scratched the surface of what you will find in this book. And how about a teaser? - Pakistan's ISI was involved in the 911 attacks.

Afghanistan Timeline: Decades

By Fester:

Building on what Steve wrote earlier, the US strategy for Afghanistan is optimistically only a decade long strategy so the Afghanistan War will be eligible to vote when victory can be declared.

Here is some more from David Kilcullen, the leading COIN advocate on an optimistic Afghanistan time-line: h/t Bruce R

As of mid-2008 only about one quarter of Afghanistan was under government control, half was disputed, and the remaining quarter was Taleban-controlled. Should everything go well this year, we will succeed — at best — in stopping the rot, stabilising the country and setting the conditions for progress from next year onwards. Either way, we can expect at least another year or two of serious combat before we can begin handing over more fully to newly expanded Afghan police and military units; these will become available around 2011 as current schemes to increase their numbers come to fruition. This handover process could take another three to five years, and we may then be in a position, after (say) 2015, to drop back to a mentoring, partnering and overwatch role — a role we may need to maintain for several more years to come.

And here is the problem with COIN as a strategic doctrine in and of itself; it neglects the political constraints in barging forward.  As I wrote in March on the weakness of COIN as a preferred policy:

COIN today promises the same type of inputs --- ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis --- with the same type of outcomes --- weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest.

And shockingly the public of democracies don't like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security that operational and tactical successes may or may not generate. 

So if we assume that democracies are not likely to support doctrines, strategies and techniques  that produce long term ongoing costs with minimal prospects of producing desired long term political benefits, the problem in the Clauswitzian perspective is not the grand strategic level, but at the strategic and operational levels where the COIN doctrine is implemented in disregard to the grand strategic appreciation of forces and reality. 

The successes at the lower levels of importance do not align with the grand strategic interests of a democracy. At that point, COIN is an attempt to use tactical and operational success to ignore divergent grand strategic aims.

 

East Asian Proliferation Concerns

By Fester:

I want to riff on a piece by our partner, the Global Post, that reports on South Korean and Japanese nuclear weaponization efforts in response to the North Korean nuclear test that looks to be a highly probable failure.

Considered technologically capable of developing nuclear weapons quickly, Japan and South Korea have eschewed that path up to now and relied on the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

However, in the wake of Monday’s test, Yoshihisa Komori, a commentator sometimes called the “Rush Limbaugh of Japan,” echoed recent calls from elsewhere on the Japanese right that his countrymen at least debate exercising the nuclear option. Meanwhile the conservative Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo suggested that South Korea, despite previous commitments to the contrary, “now requires a deterrent.”

There are a few 'minor' problems with encouraging South Korean and Japanese nuclear break-outs. The Global Post identifies the biggest one:

Nuclear arms in the hands of South Korea and Japan, alarming China, could trigger a “massive” Northeast Asian arms race and at the same time tempt countries in other regions to step over the nuclear threshold, making a hash of international nonproliferation arrangements.

Encouraging allied break-outs makes China extraordinarily nervous for historical and future looking reasons. Chinese historical memory has stong negative remembrances of the Japanese invasion and occupation of both Manchuria and the rest of the country during the 30s and the Second World War. China was weak, fractured and incapable of producing sufficient modern weaponry to resist effectively then, and will not allow themselves to be placed into the same situation. This will lead to an expansion of the Chinese nuclear arsenal and continued improvements in their delivery systems above and beyond currently assumed trends. Furthermore, China is one of the few nations with any effective influence over North Korea. If Chinese interests are threatened, what is their incentive to use their influence for pro-Western ends? What is the quid when there is no quo?

Furthermore adding South Korea and or Japan to the declared nuclear powers does not add to the aggregate security of the Korean pennisula if one assumes that the US nuclear umbrella is credible. Given current North Korean incapabilities of either building a workable light nuclear weapon that can fit on a long range missile AND an inability to build a working long range missile, the trade-off of Los Angeles for Seoul is not a credible threat. Instead it destabilizes the regional dynamic beyond the immediate North Korea problem.

It also destroys any legitimacy to anti-proliferation efforts as the rule set will further be reinforced that proliferation is okay for US approved countries and that the NPT is merely a cudgel against opponents of the US and not an actual international norm.

Interlinked power

By Fester:

Connections anyone?

Via the Torygraph:

Welber Barral, the Brazilian trade minister, said total trade between Brazil and China had amounted to $3.2bn (£2.14bn) in April, representing a near twelve-fold increase since 2001.

The sum was greater than the $2.8 billion of imports and exports to the US and represented the second consecutive month that China had topped the trade table.

Currently the bulk of Brazilian exports is made up of soya beans, for Chinese tofu, iron ore, cellulose and fuel...

Via Information Dissemination:

I think the important part is that Jobim is going to China this fall to basically finalize a deal that will allow Chinese naval pilots to train from Sao Paulo. You can see a little bit about the Sao Paulo aircraft carrier in its Wikipedia Page. I think it's kind of interesting that they chose Sao Paulo, because it's basically the only aircraft carrier with catapult and not serving for a country that current has military embargo on China.

Remimbi diplomacy replacing dollar diplomacy?

They Just Won't Go Away

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The neocon ideology and policy has proven to be a disaster.  Their paranoia driven wars of choice have bankrupted the US both financially and morally.  But it seems like they are still in charge.  Well guess what -  this is deju vu all over again.  The following is an excerpt from a book I am currently reading, Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story, and hope to finish in time for a complete review this weekend.

Proving with 59,000 American fatalities that the use of force in securing victory was nothing more than an illusion, in the final summer of their power the remains of Richard Nixon's secretive brain trust, embodied in men such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, struggled to lay a foundation for rebuilding America's military mythology In response to a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal and Strategic Review by University of Chicago professor, RAND theorist, former Trotskyite, and neoconservative icon Albert Wohlstetter, Gerald Ford's CIA director George H. W. Bush opened an outside door to a small, rightwing corps of like-minded defense intellectuals. Well known as a harsh opponent of the strategic principle of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)and a perennial advocate of the kind of policy that had failed in Vietnam,Wohlstetter's attack was intended to send a message to Soviet and American policy makers, alike.                                                  

Anne Hessing Cahn writes, "Wohlstetter's charges were the opening salvo of a movement determined to destroy detente and to steer U.S.foreign policy back to a more militant stance vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The critics of detente were certain that the Cold War was far from over and were determined that American hegemony should not disappear.

Known as Team-B, Wohlstetter's hand-picked men brought to work in 1976 revived assumptions that were as old as the Soviet Union itself It might even be said that the thinking of the group-mind represented by Team-B was so old-world and elitist as to predate the very existence of the Soviet Union. Led by an obscure Harvard professor of Czarist Russian history named Richard Pipes and composed of a unique combi nation of ex-U.S. military men, retired cold warriors, neoconservatives and right-wing ideologues, the members of Team-B-Lt. Gen. Dame Graham (Ret) Dr. Thomas Wolfe of RAND, General John Vogt, (Ret.)Ambassador Fay Kohler, Paul Nitze, Ambassador Seymour Weiss.Maj. Gen Jasper Welch of the USAF, and Paul Wolfowitz of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency - shared the conviction that detente and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks were nothing more than a Soviet scheme. That scheme was to bargain and talk America into a false sense of security while Soviet agents and proxies subverted American influence both political and military around the globe. Drawn together by their anticommunism and mutual affiliations with a well-established consortium of Wall Street brokerage houses, think tanks, universities and defense contractors (otherwise known as the military-industrial complex,the Team-B members were driven to cast off the hard-won institutional, financial and moral restraints to waging a nuclear war, and their critique of that year's National Intelligence Estimate or NIE left the intelligence establishment reeling.

The Soviets were preparing for a "third world war and were nakedly expansionist, they claimed in their top secret 1976 report. Given military superiority and the will to use it, they reasoned, at some point in the near future the Russians would make a strategic move that the United States would be militarily unable to stop. "The intensity and scope of the current Soviet military effort in peacetime is without parallel in twentieth century history," they wrote that December, "its only counterpart being Nazi remilitarization of the 1930s.                                                         

The assessment at the time was considered radical and, by many, intentionally misleading. Paul Nitze had done this sort of thing originally in NSC 68 and again in the late 1950S with the help of like-minded defense intellectuals at RAND, hounding President Eisenhower to advance the use of nuclear weapons and play "catch-up" with an imagined Soviet threat in the now infamous "missile gap."

The scary assumptions of Soviet strength had been wrong, as the first satellite reconnaissance photos revealed in January 1961. "Even Air Force analysts were embarrassed by the pictures. The images starkly rebutted the estimates of Air Force Intelligence." But the fear they generated had put John Fitzgerald Kennedy into the White House, renewed an arms race that had been slowed to a standstill by Eisenhower, and brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war.

It not only sounds familiar many of the names are even the same.  This "rightwing corps of like-minded defense intellectuals" manages to remain in the policy making loop even though they are nearly always wrong.  As we look at the foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration we can see it's as true now as it was after the Vietnam war.  The result will be many more sad Memorial Days where we remember those who shouldn't have died.

Rumblings from Somalia

By BJ Bjornson

Some interesting stories coming out of Somalia recently that aren't directly related to piracy.  The first is a report from the BBC a few days ago that Ethiopia has sent troops back across the border four months after leaving.  The Ethiopians are denying the reports, but they've certainly done the same thing before, particularly before they launched the major invasion in December of 2006 after the Islamic Courts Union had virtually consolidated their control of southern Somalia and the US and Ethiopian-backed transitional government was about to be overrun.

Also arguing in favour of increased Ethiopian involvement is the fact that said transitional government, whose membership was in neighbouring Djibouti for their own protection last I checked, and whose troops controlled only a few buildings in Mogadishu where they cowered behind a few thousand AU peacekeepers, have suddenly launched an offensive against Islamic forces in the capital over the last couple of days.

Pro-government forces in Somalia have launched a major attack against Islamist militants controlling parts of the capital, Mogadishu.

The forces said they had made some progress during fierce clashes - a claim denied by the opposition leader.

. . .

The BBC's Mohamed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu says most of the fighting is focusing on one of the city's main routes, Wadnaha Road.

"This is a large military offensive against violent people," military spokesman Farhan Mahdi Mohamed told AFP news agency.

"The government will sweep them out of the capital and the fighting will continue until that happens."

The pro-government forces said later on Friday they had made some progress against the militants and then retreated for strategic reasons.

But opposition leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys said his fighters had been holding ground after repelling the attack.

Coinciding with these two moves is a call from the African Union to impose sanctions on Eritrea for its support of the Islamists in Somalia.  The Eritreans deny this charge, but that is another claim I wouldn't put much weight on given the considerable animosity between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

The BBC's Martin Plaut says the AU's call for sanctions against one of its member states is an unprecedented development.

. . .

A statement from the 53-member organisation said the UN Security Council should "impose sanctions against all those foreign actors, both within and outside the region, especially Eritrea, providing support to the armed groups".

The AU also calls for the imposition of a no-fly zone and a blockade of sea ports "to prevent the entry of foreign elements into Somalia".

. . .

Calls for an air and sea blockade of Somalia and for sanctions to be imposed on Eritrea have already been made by the East African regional grouping Igad.

With the whole of Africa now speaking with one voice the demand for sanctions can go forward to the UN, says the BBC's Elizabeth Blunt, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, where the AU is based.

Somalia's neighbours hope the international naval flotilla stationed off the Somali coast will use its warships and planes to enforce the embargoes, our correspondent says.

Somehow I doubt those sanctions will include the arms sent to the so-called "government forces" or the presence of Ethiopian forces in the country.

Take all three of these stories together and it starts to look like a coordinated effort to undermine the Islamists' control of southern Somalia.  The last attempt by the Bush administration and their Ethiopian proxies ended disastrously, with a bloody occupation and insurgency ultimately convincing the Ethiopians to leave and resulting in a more hard-line Islamist force with greater hatred of the US than the one they had overthrown, not to mention a couple of humanitarian disasters among the worst on the face of the planet for the civilian populations of southern Somalia and the Ogaden region of Ethiopia.

It also coincided with a major uptick in the incidence of pirate attacks, one which the reassertion of Islamist control along the Somali coastline looked to be about to reverse.

At some point, you'd think people would learn to leave well enough alone, but the interventionist impulse to "do something" appears far too strong.