Mogadishu,(insidesomalia.org)- Last week, the “Transitional Federal Government” (TFG) of Somalia and the rump faction of the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) led by Shaykh Sharif Shaykh Ahmad signed a peace deal after United Nations-brokered talks in the neighbouring statelet of Djibouti.

The accord, inked on August 18, calls for the withdrawal of the Ethiopian National Defence Force troops which have been propping up the TFG and their replacement with a UN peacekeeping force.

Ahmed Abdisalam, the “deputy prime minister” who led the TFG delegation, pronounced the talks “very successful,” a view echoed by Robert Wood, acting deputy spokesman at the United States Department of State, who declared that America “welcomes” the agreement and “reaffirms its support for rapid deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Somalia, and calls on all Somalis who seek peace and stability to support implementation.”

Unfortunately, the comity has been less than universal: beginning the day after the peace was announced, a constant barrage of mortars has rained down on Mogadishu’s Villa Somalia, sometime seat of the TFG’s largely-absentee “president,” Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmad, underscoring both the would-be regime’s utter lack of capacity and the consequent likelihood of continued, if not escalating, violence, peace accords and wishful thinking notwithstanding.

If this account has more than a whiff of déjà vu about it, it is because that just two months ago, on June 9, the “prime minister” of the TFG, Nur “Adde” Hassan Hussein, had signed yet another “peace agreement” with Shaykh Sharif after 10 days of negotiations hosted by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Somalia, Mauritanian diplomat Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah.

The State Department likewise voiced its satisfaction with the accord, while insurgent attacks spiked and shells pounded Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmad as he tried to board a plane to get out of his putative capital.

I have always argued that the failure of international policy towards the former Somali Democratic Republic is rooted in the obstinate refusal to deal with reality.

Specifically, how can anyone but the most process-bound functionary expect the TFG, an entity which otherwise lacks not only political effectiveness, but also moral credibility, to deliver on any accord?

As for the other side, those interlocutors the TFG could attract were parleying precisely because they had no other cards to play – a point underscored by the fact that the ARS central committee is expected to meet in the coming days to depose Sharif Shaykh Ahmad from his position in its leadership. 

In contrast, those opponents of the TFG who have real military strength, including the al-Shabaab terrorists, have no need to sit down with a literally broken septuagenarian like Abdullahi Yusuf who spends the majority of his time outside the country he pretends to lead and what little bit he is forced to actually be within it cowering in a bunker or making a run for the next flight out.

The fact is that the ARS is, as I pointed out in testimony to the Africa Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US House of Representatives nearly a year ago, a very broad coalition whose members have “little in common other a desire to drive the TFG from Mogadishu,” one indication of which was that its central committee had no fewer than 191 members.

I noted that while, “not all the members of the Somali opposition alliance are Islamists, much less Islamist terrorists,” it appeared certain that “militant Islamists form the core of the movement.”

The faction that showed up to the Djibouti kaffeeklatsch were the moderates, who control neither effective force or much of a popular following, while the hardliners, who are based in Eritrea, where they enjoy the sponsorship of the rogue regime of Isaias Afewerki and direct the activities of a large body of militants, did not deign to participate in the process.

Meeting in the Eritrean capital of Asmara the day after the latest peace agreement was signed, members of the opposition alliance reiterated their allegiance to Hassan Dahir ‘Aweys, an al-Qaeda-linked hardliner who chaired the Islamic Courts Union shura during the brief reign of the Islamists in Mogadishu in 2006, as head of the ARS.

An al-Shabaab leader, Mukhtar Robow, a.k.a., Abu Mansur, a veteran fighter alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, confirmed to participants in a media conference call last week that the attacks were indeed to show Somalis that the peace deal was “futile” and that “the jihad will continue, there is no peace agreement, the martyrs will move ahead on the path of jihad bath even if Ethiopians pull out” until “Islamic law is the constitution of the Somalis.”

Subsequently, the Los Angeles Times has reported that Robow both acknowledges al-Shabaab’s ties to al-Qaeda and its desire for a closer relationship.

Robow also boasted, but offered no confirmation, that foreign fighters, including Kenyans, Sudanese, Iraqis, Afghans, Algerians, Indonesians, Chechens, and even Americans, had joined up with al-Shabaab.

While the country they pretend to govern is literally burning down around them, TFG officials seem more concern about personal enrichment. Last week, Mohamud Ali Salah, who resigned as Energy and Natural Resource minister earlier in the month, popped up in Kuwait to sign a deal, apparently approved by Abdullahi Yusuf, setting up a “Somali Petroleum Company” to explore for oil. The TFG will own 51 per cent of the new outfit, while the Kuwait Energy Company and Indonesia’s PT Medco Energy International will each own a 24.5 stake.

Unfortunately, many American policymakers are either caught up in the election campaign or, in the case of exiting incumbents, either packing their golden parachutes or looking for a soft landing. Those not otherwise distracted (as well as their counterparts in rest of the world) are wont to be preoccupied with higher profile geopolitical challenges like Russia’s menacing resurgence in Eurasia and Iran’s unrelenting pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Consequently, expect the wait for an approach that actually engages the realities of power, social dynamics, and political legitimacy in the Horn of Africa — rather than repeating the failures of the past two decades while piously mouthing tired nostrums — to be that much longer.

In the meantime, the former Somalia will remain, as the US State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2007, released April 30, noted, “a permissive operating environment and a potential safe haven for both Somali and foreign terrorists already in the region.”