The Counterinsurgency Dilemma: Foreign Fighter Influence on Insurgencies in Afghanistan and Somalia

When a group like Al-Shabaab becomes deeply embedded in the population, which it is now, it hardly lets foreign fighters have any say over anything. They only rise to a certain level of the organization. But when it was detached from society, when it was just sort of shadowy entity that didn't have pre-war ties to the population, weren't clan leaders in Somalia, they were much more open to foreign fighters because foreign fighters are bringing the kind of experience and tactics that they need to launch an insurgency. Yeah, I do want to mention one policy approach that I thought of in reading, you know, Trisha's book and it gets to this foreign fighter issue. So what I now wish I had done more aggressively would be to seize on Al-Shabaab's wanton murder of Somali citizens using suicide bombings and portray that using Somali voices as unsomali as foreign import and really try to weaken its potential support. Welcome to episode 154 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host Ben Jeb, joined today by my co-host Alex Chinchilla. Today's episode explores how foreign fighters shape insurgencies. When they strengthen groups, when they become liabilities and what their presence reveals about the underlying strengths and weaknesses of a given insurgency. Today we are thrilled to be hosting Ambassador Stephen Schwartz, former ambassador to Somalia and Professor Trisha Bacon, author of the counterinsurgency dilemma, foreign fighter influence on insurgencies in Afghanistan and Somalia. Her book serves as the anchor for today's conversation. The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a joint production of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can find more resources at the Irregular Warfare Initiative website at www.irregularwarfare.org. Support for the Irregular Warfare Podcast comes from members of the IW community like you and from Hadean, an AI company focused on synthetic environments for training, planning, and decision support. We hope you enjoy today's conversation with Trisha Bacon and Ambassador Stephen Schwartz. All right, Ambassador Steve Schwartz, Professor Trisha Bacon, thanks for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast today. It's great to see you. Trisha, you're a repeat offender. You've been on the show before. What have you been up to since we last spoke? I am a repeat offender. Thank you for having me back. I think I was actually working on this book project when I was here last time, but I've managed to finally finish it up, so I'm glad to return with the project completely done on foreign fighters for role in insurgencies. Wonderful. And you are, you're teaching at American University right now, correct? Yes, I'm teaching at American. I've been in DC, I guess, 25 years at this point. I spent the first half of my career at the State Department, mostly in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and then I moved over to American University and have been there since about the last 10 years. And I'm teaching in the Terrorism and Homeland Security program there. Well, as a podcast that tries to marry national security theory, practice, and policy, I think you are both the ideal guest and listener for the show. And Steve, would you mind giving us a little bit about your background? We know you've served, you know, within the State Department for a while, but I'd love to hear more. After college, after earning a degree in business and deciding I didn't want to go into business, I joined the Peace Corps, good thing to do. Spent a couple of years in Cameroon in Central Africa, worked at the Peace Corps headquarters for three years, also in the Africa Bureau, came back to Washington and worked in the Africa program at the Berkney's Institution with Francis Deng, who was the senior fellow there at the time, and he had a program on conflict resolution. I was just a research assistant, but it was great exposure to that area of people who'd been senior practitioners and had advanced academic degrees. It was really in a great environment. And from there, on the third try, got into the Foreign Service in 1992. It's been 26 years in the Foreign Service, most of it with Africa. Great career retire in 2017 after being the US ambassador to Somalia. And from then, I started working as a subject matter expert in the special operations community, different exercises and training events, and I've been doing that episodically ever since. Delighted to be invited to do this. Really enjoyed reading Trisha's great book. Wish I'd read it 10 years ago when I should have done something useful with the very, very good knowledge provided, but delighted to be in this forum. Well, luckily, we may not have had the book 10 years ago, but we're going to cover some of the most important themes from the book in today's conversation. Trisha, let's just start big picture here. What drew you to the topic of insurgencies and foreign fighters for your newly released book? So when I think about it, it's actually probably the seeds go back about 20 years to when I was an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Whether or not at the time I had all of Africa, the whole continent, I was the analyst to work on terrorism. So it was clearly a different time. But I was spending a lot of my time on Somalia during that period. There had been a cell of East African al-Qaeda operatives who were involved in the embassy bombings in Tanzania in Kenya in 1998 and the 2002 attacks in Mumbasa on the Paradise Hotel and an attempted shoot-down of an airliner there who had essentially relocated to Mogadishu and they were hiding out there under the protection of a small sort of shadowy network of Somali extremists. And at the same time, the Islamic court union was rising to power in Mogadishu. There had been, I think, 14 attempts by this point to create a new government in Somalia, all unsuccessful. But the Islamic court union rose to fill sort of a basic vacuum in a story we'll see repeatedly in years to follow. They rose by offering dispute resolution, justice, order, some really basic public service, like picking up the trash and got a lot of momentum in the process of doing so. But the shadowy network of Somalis protecting the East African al-Qaeda operatives was part of this big tent that was the Islamic court union. And so there was this sort of contesting pressure of, was this a new Taliban, right? This is five years after 9-11 and people were very wary of the Islamic court union. And so there was this point where the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs at the time made a public statement that essentially said that the East African al-Qaeda operatives were running the Islamic court union and that the extremists were in charge of the Islamic court union. And while they were there and they were an important faction, that was not an accurate assessment. It was a conflation of an external terrorist threat with influence within the insurgency. And it led to a prescription that was supporting the Ethiopian invasion, which overthrew the Islamic court union in a matter of days and weeks, very, very quickly. And those very extremists then emerged to lead the insurgency and that was what would become al-Shabaab with the East African al-Qaeda operatives playing really senior roles in the insurgency. And so that sort of analytic experience of trying to communicate to policymakers, they're this kind of threat but not this kind of threat. Clearly left sort of an imprint that motivated me more than a decade later to tackle this book project to try to disentangle when foreign fighters get influence in insurgencies and how they go about doing so. Tricia, if we could, your book talks about insurgencies and the role of foreign fighters in insurgencies. Could you just quickly define what do you consider to be a foreign fighter? Yeah, no, that's an important baseline to establish. Three of the parts of a foreign fighter are pretty widely agreed on. And one is essentially a foreign fighter is someone who volunteers to join an insurgency. It is not acting on behalf of a state. They aren't part of a state army. They aren't sent by a state. The third part is they're not primarily motivated by money. It doesn't mean they don't get some compensation, but we're trying to make a distinction between foreign fighters and mercenaries who are doing it solely for the money. The fourth component is a little debated. And in my case, I opted to exclude from the category of foreign fighters people who had ethnic and kinship ties to the insurgency. And this ends up being really important in my book because it means, for example, that ethnic Somalis who live abroad because of the prolonged state failure or who live in Kenya or Ethiopia, I don't treat them as foreign fighters. They're not locals. They're not foreign fighters. They're sort of a gray area. In Afghanistan, it will be a similar situation where I don't treat posh students who from Pakistan who go to Afghanistan as foreign fighters. So people treat that differently in different definitions. And then the fifth component that's specific to this book is that I'm looking at Sunni jihad as foreign fighters. So I'm looking at people who are motivated by, you know, the adherence to their religion as Sunni Muslims who are seeking to defend fellow Muslims in a conflict that they identify as a jihad. So Steven, I want to take the conversation to you. You've served as ambassador in Somalia and other countries that are affected by terrorism and extremism. So have you encountered or been deeply involved in understanding how insurgent groups are operating? I've been in a lot of countries where there have been insurgent groups of different kinds. I visited and covered South Sudan, obviously Somalia, Burundi during an ongoing sort of civil war. I worked on Nigeria in the Boko Haram problem set. And I went to Ethiopia just after its revolution with the TPLF and the EPLF and the like. And they varied. And Trisha's book, particularly the aspect of embeddedness is really important. I mean, the first one that I really became aware of was sort of learning about the Eritrean people's liberation front, the Tigrayan people's liberation front. They were extremely disciplined organizations, well rooted in the populations that they were representing and on whose behalf they were fighting. This went on for decades, but you found different things in different places. So in South Sudan, you had rebels who embedded to some extent or, you know, of the people they were ostensibly fighting for, but very undisciplined. And then Nigeria was a bit, I think, similar to Somalia in the sense that you had Boko Haram's gaining in strength and territory. But at the same time, what you saw and what we worked on more because we're government to government was a Nigerian government entirely incapable, possibly unwilling to do what was necessary to provide for the people in the region Boko Haram was, but also to mount any kind of effective opposition to it, be it military law enforcement, providing services, providing justice, providing anything. So there was really no governance or weak governance. I think a lack of will, it seemed anyway. And then Boko Haram just spread. Boko Haram at the time had really no affiliation, was not respected by the local population. It just preyed on it horribly. But there was no other counterbrailing power. Makes sense. I'd kind of like to start to ground our discussion in theory. So could you just discuss your central arguments and how it seems to be local insurgent groups, maybe not foreign fighters, but who are really in the driver's seat for the insurgencies you studied? Absolutely. It's an interesting puzzle that maybe is obvious on the ground, but Merritt's sort of pulling out in terms of what people have researched thus far. And that is it, that there is a body of research that shows that insurgencies that have foreign fighters cause more battle deaths. There's more suicide attacks. There's more violence against civilians. There's less willingness to negotiate. And there's even less likelihood that the government will have a victory, though not necessarily that there will be an insurgent victory. So there's this array of correlations that the previous scholars have found. Foreign fighters are at most typically 5% of insurgents. And that doesn't really add up. The emphasis on that small of a number of combatants and those sized effects led me to think there's something going on here that's unaccounted for when we're focusing on the presence or absence of foreign fighters. And in a way, it's a basic calculus, which is 95% of insurgents are local insurgents. So they have a numerical superiority and they have all the strategic advantages over their foreign fighter counterparts. They know the local terrain. They know the local language. They know the local customs. And they're fighting for their country, their neighbors, their community, their family. So it doesn't add up on its face that they automatically sort of defer to foreign fighters and allow them to have this much influence. So the puzzle for me was to understand actually, when would foreign fighters gain influence? Under what circumstances do local insurgents either limit foreign fighters' influence or allow it? That essentially we had to bring the focus back to the insurgents who are the numerical majority and the strategic, the superior force, which is local insurgents, to really understand what foreign fighters' effects are and when they're likely to have a major influence on an insurgency. So Trisha, I want to ask a follow-up about that. I think what you've made clear here is that there are a lot of bad things that can happen, like escalation of the conflict when you bring in foreign fighters. So insurgent groups are making trade-offs when they decide to do that. So what are the conditions when they decide, hey, that trade-off is worth making and other conditions when they say, no, we want to stay in the driver's seat and not work with these foreign fighters? There really is a cost-benefit calculus that almost every insurgent group or insurgent movement has to make vis-a-vis foreign fighters. Of course, foreign fighters don't join insurgents equally. There are some that they are more attracted to than others, that they're capable of reaching more than others. But when they do arrive and local insurgents decide to work with them, they have some potential advantages. That they can come with combat experience or military experience that they can confer on to local insurgents, especially if the local insurgents aren't that experienced. They can bring manpower. Right? We talked about how they're not a large number necessarily relative to local insurgents, but they can improve the fighting strength of specific local insurgent groups. They sometimes have trainings and tactics that they learned in other places that they can essentially export to this new conflict or act as trainers or creating explosive devices and having technical skills that the local insurgents don't have. Sometimes they also have their pipeline to money. They come with their own funding or they have access to donors and so they can bring resources to the groups that they join. Almost the majority of the time, if not almost all times, they're much more risk-acceptant than their local counterparts. They want to be on the front lines. They get impatient when there's not enough action. They volunteer to be suicide operatives. They will engage in combat like seeking to die during combat. The things that their local counterparts are maybe more reticent to do. And that's of course because they're bringing an ideological commitment that can outstrip their local counterparts. And finally, they can shift the balance amongst the different local insurgent groups. If foreign fighters join one group specifically, they have the potential to change that group's position within the broader insurgent movement. If we think of an insurgent movement as both a contest against the government and an internal contest among groups for superiority, local insurgent groups might see advantages to having foreign fighters to improve their position. But they come with a ton of drawbacks too. Sorry, Tisha. Before discussing some of the risks with bringing in foreign fighters, I do want to pause quickly to see if I can understand some of the theoretical benefits of incorporating them. Because I feel like these concepts are actually pretty super important to understand for your book. But it sounds like insurgent groups are basically making a cost-benefit calculation. On the plus side, foreign fighters can bring experience, skills, and sometimes funding. They make groups more effective tactically, add manpower, and pass on things like training or bond-making expertise. They also tend to be more risk tolerant and ideologically driven, which I didn't really think about, which can make a group more aggressive, which I think, as you said, can be a good or bad thing. And if one group gets them, it can even shift the balance of power within the broader insurgency. Alright, if I got that right, you were saying that there can be serious drawbacks associated with foreign fighters. Can you go over what those risks are? They don't always bring superior training or experience. They don't always bring more fighting power. Sometimes they had, Steve probably heard this in Somalia too, you'd have jihadi tourists. And these are these foreign fighters who showed up who were not equipped to be fighting in Somalia for a variety from a skills perspective and just from a living in Somalia perspective. So they can sometimes actually be a drain on resources or they, because they're obviously outsiders, especially in a place like Somalia, you can quickly identify a foreigner. They're not useful for guerrilla attacks and they can't be used in certain kinds of operations. And they can inadvertently signal to locals that they don't need to join. These foreign fighters are coming and they're willing to fight, so we don't have to go fight. And so they can dampen local recruitment. But I think the biggest drawback and the most important one is the effect they have on the local population and the local and surgeon groups relationship with civilians. They don't have a personal stake in the conflict, which is why they're willing to be so much more violent, why we see these violent effects when foreign fighters are involved. As I mentioned, they're very impatient for action in ways that may rebound on the local population, but don't have an advantage in terms of advancing their objectives or reaching your goals. When they're in high profile roles in particular, you tend to see that civilian populations will be, start to resent the foreigners. When they're too high profile or they're too much of a leadership position, you get to this sort of local resentment. And these hard line ideologies that they have are not necessarily shared by local insurgents or the civilian population. They had to have that level of ideology to join a conflict voluntarily, but it may not be shared. So there can be a lot of stress and strain there. Steve, I'd just be curious if you saw it was local actors who were generally in control on the ground or if outside influences also seem to shape operational dynamics in a meaningful way. You know, when I was there, my sense is that it was a Somali-driven organization. The question I had throughout was to what extent does Al-Shabaab support or take instruction from greater al-Qaeda? It was that global relationship that I was interested in. In truth, never got a good handle on. So that's where I imagine if there was some relationship, of course, and to the extent that Al-Qaeda central was making demands of or giving instruction to Al-Shabaab, that would be where you'd have foreigners, not foreign fighters necessarily, influencing Al-Shabaab's operations. I think that raises a really important point in that we mentioned earlier about the East African Al-Qaeda operatives who were so central to the U.S. calculus. And they tried at various points to exert influence over Al-Shabaab with some success because they were highly respected for their al-Qaeda ties and sometimes not as much. And those same operatives would appeal to Al-Qaeda leadership to try to get Al-Shabaab to make specific changes. In particular, Al-Shabaab has long really killed more Muslims than any other population. And Al-Qaeda leadership sent a message to Al-Shabaab's leaders and said, you need to be more careful, essentially, of that. And it didn't really change Al-Shabaab's behavior. So it was a situation where Al-Shabaab's Somali leaders had a certain level of resistance of being dictated to by foreigners, even once they had declared allegiance to. They certainly did respect Al-Qaeda both locally and at least leadership level, but it didn't translate to the kind of command and control that I think Al-Qaeda central and the East African Al-Qaeda operatives wanted. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Sort of tracks with a project that I did where we essentially looked at all the suicide attack groups and kind of looked at where they got their suicide attack technology. And a lot of them had these loose ties, but they were not super controlled by any of these central organizations, more like learning from them. So I'm just curious, Steve, did you see in sort of how the US policy apparatus was thinking about this? Was there a lot of concern that these groups were more dictated to by groups like Al-Qaeda central or was there more of an understanding that they were kind of just free floating? I think the feeling we treated Al-Shabaab for the most part as a focused Somali organized organization. It's still Al-Qaeda of some unknown specificity or degree, but that it was really a Somali phenomenon. And I think by the time that Steve got to Somalia, that was definitely the case, right? There was this early period where Al-Shabaab had some foreign fighter influence when it was learning to become an insurgent organization, right? Which initially it had been this shadowy sort of terrorist network and had to emerge as a full fledged insurgency against the Ethiopians. So there was this period where there was this foreign fighter influence, especially from the Al-Qaeda operatives. And then this evolution that by the time Steve got there, the Somalis had really reasserted control over the movement and areas where foreign fighters tried to assert too much movement or too much influence. They found themselves on the wrong side of Somali Al-Shabaab leadership, which could result in being imprisoned or killed or exiled in some kind of way. And so I think that's one of the most interesting facets of this dynamic is that over time, Al-Shabaab went from being an organization heavily influenced by a fairly small number of foreign fighters to this really deeply embedded, homegrown Somali-driven Somali-run organization that has been very successful, quite frankly, in Somalia as a result. Yeah. Personally, I'm always very interested in how these conflicts metastasize and where terrorist groups essentially get their base of support. So for Steve, as someone who's seen rebel groups and insurgencies, not just in Somalia, but kind of all over the globe, where do these insurgencies get their base of support? Well, I think it depends. The local population is their natural source of support. And as Trisha talks about in the book, really how they conduct themselves, how they orient themselves will play a large role in how successful they are at obtaining recruits and money and intelligence and the like from the population. I come back time and again to, they tend to be the more successful ones, frankly, much better organized and focused than the opposing forces, i.e. governments, right? I mean, whether it's Shabaab or Boko Haram, I mean, they could, they organize themselves, you know, with taxation or justice or military training or recruiting, propaganda. I mean, they were unfortunately pretty good and they learn and they adapt. And I didn't see either Nigeria or Somalia anything like that kind of success by governments, right? At any level, state, federal. I think it's sometimes a mistake to talk in terms of support in these situations. I'm not sure how much support Al Shabaab actually has. What Al Shabaab is able to do is be predictable and impose a certain order that if you comply with it, you will be safe. And so it is able to exert enough sort of influence to get the population to adhere to the order that it provides. And that means you pay taxes when the group tells you to pay taxes, you listen to its rulings when its courts give some kind of decree. And so they outcompete the government in terms of being predictable and the kind of order that they provide. And the civilian population comes to accept that they have to comply with them. But I don't necessarily think that means that the population supports them. I think they just realize that there's not a better option available. The government won't be as reliable, won't be as predictable, and won't keep them safe. And so they learn to sort of adapt to the situation where they comply with it. And Al Shabaab is particularly effective at that. One of the most effective organizations in the world, I would argue, in having imposed this shadow government over most of Southern Somalia, where the population really does comply with what the organization demands of it. And I think Steve was the first person to say to me when we met in Movedishu, Al Shabaab provides a predictable order, and that's better than the alternative. And I think that has long been true and continues to be true in that case. I agree completely with Trisha's last point. Yeah, in Somalia, I had the impression that very few, almost if any Somali citizen supported Al Shabaab, in other words, desired its rule. But they tolerated it, they accepted it because either they couldn't get rid of it, but they had no alternative. There wasn't another option for them, which is really unfortunate. And I think in Nigeria, people like Boko Haram even less, because it provided even less. It was really just predatory. It's interesting to think about these groups as essentially it's like an evolutionary process where it's survival of the fittest, right? They may not even be all that popular, but they're good at what they do, which is creating violence and using the resources that are available to them. So I want to think about that, about how these groups are adapting to these different resources in the foreign fighters. And Trisha, how did you see that go down when the groups are able to successfully incorporate the foreign fighters and control them in some of the ways you've been talking about in other cases where they get sort of subsumed by the foreign fighters who end up shaping the group itself? I think that it gets back to some of the trade-offs that I was mentioning earlier, that there are cases where foreign fighters can bring advantages that allow a group to improve their position in the movement. And when they provide those kinds of assets to groups that are dissatisfied with their situation in the movement, that are looking to out stronger organizations and improve overall, like their chances of benefiting in the post-war order, that creates some receptivity towards foreign fighters. And that doesn't mean they let them take over, but they'll be more receptive to the kinds of innovation and the kinds of violence that foreign fighters are most likely to bring. And the same goes for the relationship with the population. And a group like Al-Shabaab becomes deeply embedded in the population, which it is now. It hardly lets foreign fighters have any say over anything. They only rise to a certain level of the organization. But when it was detached from society, when it was this sort of shadowy entity that didn't have pre-war ties to the population, weren't Klan leaders in Somalia, they were much more open to foreign fighters because foreign fighters are bringing the kind of experience and tactics that they need to launch an insurgency. But there's a trade-off at some point. And that is, as the group tries to become more embedded in the population, the foreign fighters become more and more of a liability for the reasons I mentioned. They don't speak the language. They don't understand the culture. They want to use violence that's perhaps more indiscriminate against civilians. They may be famous treat civilians. So they become more and more of a liability to the local insurgent organization. And frankly, sometimes they are in the insurgency long enough that they want to keep power. They want power within the local insurgent group, and they don't necessarily give that up readily. And in multiple cases, I saw that there is actually eventually violence between local insurgents and foreign fighters when that step balance is shifting, when local insurgent groups are gaining more traction with the population in terms of being able to coerce and get compliance from it, when they become more satisfied with their situation in the local insurgent movement, they want to sort of reduce foreign fighter influence. And that doesn't always happen readily. So it was an interesting sort of evolution over time with Al Shabaab and Somalia, but that wasn't the only place that we saw that, that as a local insurgent group gets stronger and more embedded in society, the space for foreign fighters gets smaller and smaller. So some of the groups that you think are actually going to be most successful because they're embedded in the local populations are the ones that don't really need the foreign fighters in the first place. I think that's absolutely right. If you see a situation where foreign fighters are exerting a lot of influence over a local insurgent group, chances are that local insurgent group is struggling with some pretty serious weaknesses. And those are weaknesses that can be exploited either with their relationship vis-a-vis their constituents or their position in the insurgent movement in particular. But it is a way that you can quickly diagnose that there's some deficits with that local insurgent group if foreign fighters are playing an outsized role, given their small number, given the other disadvantages that they have. That's really interesting because often the way we think about this, and I know this was a huge discussion with the Islamic State, it's like, look, they're recruiting foreign fighters, they're recruiting people from all over the world, look how strong they are. But you're saying that's actually a bad sign potentially for the group. It's a bad sign in their prospects for sort of strategic success. Those foreign fighters can be, for example, incredibly violent with the population. So that is a threat. That is something to look at and be concerned about. They can go home and engage in violence afterwards or go to other conflicts and worse than them. So they do pose a number of threats. But when a group is relying on foreign fighters, that typically will mean that they don't have the relationship they need to have with their constituency and they can't rely on it for fighting power for resources, for support, etc. Or that they can't overcome and usurp other organizations within the movement. When you think about the Islamic State, think about how violent they were against other groups in the movement. It wasn't necessarily primarily against the Assad regime. They targeted rival groups with as much intensity at times as they targeted the Assad regime. And that reflected that dynamic with the foreign fighters having this outsized role so that they were seeking to improve their position within the insurgent movement in Syria while not having the groundedness of being embedded with the constituency there. Tricia, I know that you talked a little bit about this before, but something I just want to home in on is one of the interesting parts of your book is that you mentioned the relationships between foreign fighters and kind of indigenous ones changes over time. Would you mind just explaining how the relationship evolves over time and what drives those shifts again? As I mentioned, there's two key factors. There's this relationship with the constituency and there's a group's position within the insurgent movement and their orientation towards it. If they're satisfied with the status quo, if they're seeking to improve their position, or if they're incredibly weak and less frustrated by their position. And I think when I traced the situation with al-Shabaab over time and I traced the situation in Afghanistan with the Taliban over time, typically the first indication that foreign fighters were losing influence was an improvement in their situation in the insurgent movement. In both cases, the groups become overwhelmingly the dominant group in the insurgent. Basically don't have any competitors or any rivals. So that's the first move is when they gain that satisfaction with their position in the movement, you start to see them try to manage foreign fighters more. Try to sort of move them into certain kinds of roles, allow them only certain kind of activities, even monitor them a little bit more. There's more of a management approach that happens with the relationship to foreign fighters. And then over time, the process of embeddedness was one in both cases that was fits and starts. They would make some progress and then they would overreach or they would make some progress and then there'd be military operations and they would be ousted from territory. Interestingly, I think al-Shabaab was quicker to gain embeddedness in the situation in Somalia than the Taliban was in Afghanistan, perhaps in part because of the intensity of the military pressure in Afghanistan was much greater. But in both cases, when they did become fully embedded in their populations, the foreign fighters were basically just an instrument for the insurgent groups. They could be a useful instrument, right, that they could help them with certain capabilities, but they had no decision-making power. They didn't have influence over decisions. They weren't allowed to behave outside of the sort of strict parameters that the local insurgents had set for them. So something we had talked about earlier and Stevie had brought this up where groups like al-Shabaab essentially have de facto governing authority because they may be the best option available. So based on some of the real-time experience you have with endeavors like improving governance, state capacity, and even helping with some multinational efforts to professionalize foreign militaries, would you just mind reflecting on your experience with some of those kind of state capacity efforts? Sure. Well, first of all, I think as a government, the U.S. during my career, we spent much, the majority of our time, money, people working on the military side of the equation and much less on governance, development, services, information, and the like. On the military side in Somalia, there are actually two very different examples. The U.S. government paid, actually State Department, paid to build a special operations brigade, the Donup, which is multi-clan and quite capable. And it operates at a national level and at a member state level and could do things and it was disciplined and therefore accepted and welcomed, sometimes desired by local populations. They were not seen as predatory. And I think that was a big success by the U.S. in Somalia over a decade or so. I don't know today how Donup's doing and the U.S. is withdrawn. I think a lot of its financial support and maybe some of the training, but it was a successful program and they did a lot of good work in Somalia. They were Somalis working successfully against Shabaab in Somalia. On the other hand, there's the Somali National Army writ large, which isn't an army in any effective way. It's a collection of former clan militias that were given new uniforms and they're on a payroll. They, I don't think, have ever fought against any opponent. I'm not sure they're capable of it, but we can't do that for them. They had to want to do it and there was no will to take on powerful people, important clans, and the status quo was fine for most Somali officials. And we went nowhere on that. So some success, some not. You know, there were other programs outside the military. USAID ran a good stabilization program in villages where Shabaab had been pushed out. They'd come in with sort of quick development programs administered locally to try to kick start governance and the like. But in almost every case, there was no actual governance to follow by Somalis. All right. So in 2022, Hassan Sheikh launched a military offensive against Shabaab, you know, and they had support of a lot of clan militias. And it was very successful, but it didn't take a genius to know that it was doomed to failure because it wasn't supported by any hold force, wasn't supported by any governance. And they cleared Shabaab out of vast areas and Shabaab just came back. You know, I'd say it had done on a smaller scale for years. I don't know. I'd say it really, to me, comes down to governance and desire. And if there'd been those, we could have helped build the capacity and the like, but we couldn't provide will where it didn't exist. It's interesting when you talk about the knob and the success that that special operations has had, because it's in a way you're describing the same things that have made Al Shabaab effective, which is discipline, command and control, multi-clan, composition, a willingness to fight. But Al Shabaab has been able to do that on a much larger scale than their Somali counterparts, as you've just described, with the Somali National Army. And Al Shabaab started off as having a lot of foreign influence in terms of foreign fighters and wanting the affiliation with Al Qaeda and then really became this Somali centric organization. While the Somali government remains dependent on foreign backers at all levels, basically to function with a lot of corruption and a lack of internal will to do what is necessary. The United Nations at one point said, I think very correctly, that Al Shabaab is actually not Somalia's biggest threat. It's the conditions that cause the internal political strife that Al Shabaab is able to exploit and be so successful as a result. And I think you really captured that in your explanation, Steve. Guys, I told this was a foreign or newly arrived, but I told the two Somali presidents that I worked with my view of the challenge. I told them that I believed the day the Somali government could provide anywhere near the same level of governance, security, justice that Al Shabaab did, that Al Shabaab would just wither away. It would disappear. There wasn't any popular support for it. People wanted to live under certain freedoms and things like that, but the governments just were unable to focus on that aspect of it. And they were, I think, content to let the US and Turkey and others provide enough military support to keep Shabaab, I should say, the Africans, Amazon, Uganda and the like, to keep Al Shabaab from controlling Mughal issue and Kismayo and the like. And that seemed to be, sadly, good enough. Trish, I know we came on here to talk foreign fighters and we'll get back to that very soon, but I just have one more follow up question for Steve, because I think about this often. So do you think that support to security forces to the military should essentially follow support to governance and regime's ability to provide public goods, or do you need to provide security first? Or maybe it's a chicken egg problem and there's really no good explanation. Yeah, I think you need to provide both, but you also need to be clear right about what are your goals and why are you doing it? You know, we said we were doing it. So initially, well, initially, I was saying in the 2010s, we were doing it to provide space for these new civil administrations to gain capability and to begin to provide governance and take over security responsibilities. That didn't happen. We were also doing it to weaken Al Shabaab and by extension Al Qaeda. You know, Qaeda was the global threat that the US recognized was a problem for it. The US doesn't fully think that Al Shabaab is a threat to the United States directly, but really it's the refiliation with Al Qaeda that I think gave us a reason to another reason to want to weaken them to the extent we could. But we never applied even the military resources to crush it. We really were trying to weaken it, keep it at bay. Hopefully give government time to take over. Is that how you saw it, Trisha? I did. I do. And I think that's a question I get more often than any other, which is how much of a threat is Al Shabaab to the United States. And it is an organization that has more capability and that respect than it uses. So it's hard to know what would change that calculus there. It was to apply to fly a plane into the building in Atlanta and they sent an operative to do that. But it's not clear how much they invested in that and how much of a sort of shifting calculus that was. In terms of attacks in the region, it's been a few years since there's been a major attack in Kenya, which is largely where Al Shabaab has been able to strike. But again, it's not clear that that's a lack of capability versus some kind of its calculus about focusing on the situation in Somalia. So one thing we sort of touched on earlier, Trisha mentioned that there can be tensions between insurgents and foreign fighters. So for practitioners on the ground, what should they be looking for when foreign fighters are present and what are ways to exploit these tensions to get an advantage? I'm not necessarily sure that the play here is to try to stoke tensions between local insurgents and foreign fighters. I'm not sure that's something that often the sort of counter-insurgent forces are very well positioned to do. Rather than that, I think it's a diagnostic situation that you can understand the insurgency better when you understand the influence foreign fighters are exerting or not. If they are in a situation where they are essentially an instrument of local insurgents because the local insurgents are strong from connections to their constituents on that side of the equation, as well as in a strong position in the insurgent movement, it doesn't make sense to focus on the foreign fighters. That isn't how you defeat the insurgency. It's kind of a red herring in terms of, yes, they can be a very high profile. They can sometimes be very flashy, but they're not really what is going to be the force that makes or breaks the insurgency. Whereas if you have a situation where foreign fighters are exerting a lot of influence, then you understand that that local insurgent group is weak and is in trouble. And so there are ways to weaken it further because it's already vulnerable. So it's a different set of strategies you would use against a group that's being essentially dominated by foreign fighters compared to their counterparts who are just using foreign fighters as a tool in their own instrument. As I say, the trick is in those weakened group situations, the more you weaken the group, the more influence foreign fighters can get. And they are generally associated with higher levels of violence and more indiscriminate violence. So there's a real dilemma there from a counterinsurgency standpoint, but that is the reality of the group that's being confronted. So I think it's more about understanding where foreign fighters position is, what their level of influence is, and devising a strategy to countergroups based on an accurate understanding of that. And I think in the past, there has been the sense that if there are foreign fighters who perhaps are very visible in propaganda or who are big names that they are driving the insurgency, and that certainly was the case in, for example, Al Qaeda in Iraq. So it does happen. But in other places like Somalia, there was an American Hamami who got a lot of attention and was very, very visible, but he actually was not nearly as influential in practice because Al Shaba was bringing foreign fighters to a heel, essentially at that time. So I think it's really about a deeper understanding of the role of foreign fighters and what that says about how to counter the local insurgent group. What's cool is that it's a diagnostic tool that comes out of your work in some ways, because you can't actually observe things like an insurgent group's ties to the local population. Like that's very hard to observe, but you can observe these things like the foreign fighters coming in. And it sounds like if you see that, then you know something about the kind of insurgent group that you're dealing with. And I think at the same time, while we certainly can't determine things like support for the, by the local population, we can start to see whether a local population is routinely complying with the local insurgent group's order. Or if they're resisting it, as they did in 2022 in Somalia, there was a window there where the local population tried to resist Al-Shabaab. And so you can observe that part of the relationship. I think, and that can also be helpful to understanding the role of foreign fighters or lack thereof in terms of their influence. And for Steve, last word here from a policymaker's perspective or rather a senior practitioner's perspective, what do you think we tend to misunderstand about insurgent groups or extremist groups? Yeah, I do want to mention one sort of policy approach that I thought of in reading, you know, Trish's book and it gets to this foreign fighter issue. So what I now wish I had done more aggressively would be to seize on Al-Shabaab's wanton murder of Somali citizens using suicide bombings and portray that using Somali voices as unsomali, as a foreign import, and really try to weaken its potential support from the local population, make it seem more foreign, make it seem more murderous and less desirable. A little, it's little. Every wedge that you can drive in individuals' minds and communities' minds helps. And that's one thing that I think could be done to take advantage of knowing foreign fighter influence, indigenous influence and the like, different cultures. So it takes a lot of knowledge and it really takes a team, right? There's even if the US government knew, let's say, a lot about how Shabaab worked, it doesn't necessarily mean that I as ambassador knew very well how Shabaab worked. Yes, I have a lot of things to do. Right. And yeah, I would read reports and people would come in and I'd have discussions and briefings, but, you know, among a lot of things, you know, now hopefully other people in government, intel side, military side, we're also getting those and able to put things into play, not necessarily in my instruction, but on their own. But there's a lot of knowledge that we needed and a lot of things knowing more that we could do. Well, hopefully this podcast will continue to bridge the gap between the things that we don't know and the things that we'd like to know. But unfortunately, we are at time with both our guests and I want to be mindful of their busy schedules. So Ambassador Steve Schwartz and Professor Trisha Bacon, thanks for joining us on the regular warfare podcast today. It was great to host you both. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. Yes. Thank you so much. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the regular warfare podcast. If you like the show, please spread the word and consider sharing this episode with others. You can subscribe to the regular warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also engage with us on X, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and across many other platforms. If you found value in today's conversation, please leave us a review on Apple podcast. It really helps us reach new audiences. And finally, support for the regular warfare podcast comes from members of the IW community like you and from Hadean, an AI company focused on synthetic environments for training, planning and decision support. And one last thing, what you heard in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point, Princeton University, the regular warfare initiative or any agency of the US or any other government. Thanks again for being part of this community and we'll see you next time.