Fareed Zakaria on Somalia, Ukraine and More

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Given all the attention in the last few days to the shootings in Buffalo, obviously the Roe versus Wade reversal draft, the baby formula shortage, which we'll talk about later in the hour, the new COVID surge and a few other things, there hasn't been much discussion of the leak yesterday by the Biden administration to several news organizations that the President is planning to send hundreds of US troops to Somalia in East Africa because of a growing threat there from the insurgent group Al Shabaab.

The CNN report on this quotes an unnamed US official saying, "We have seen, regrettably, clear evidence that Al Shabaab has the intent and capability to target Americans." Noting that the group had killed over a dozen Americans in East Africa in recent years, including three at a US military base in Kenya in early 2020.

Now, by way of background, the Council on Foreign Relations describes Al Shabaab as an insurgent group formed in the early 2000s that seeks to establish an Islamic state in Somalia. The group is capable of carrying out deadly attacks across East Africa despite suffering setbacks in recent years due to an African Union-led military operation.

It says the United States has sought to prevent Al Shabaab from destabilizing the Horn of Africa, and it has increasingly relied on airstrikes against suspected fighters. That from the Council on Foreign Relations. By way of further background, President Trump, this hardly made the news at the time with all else that was going on, but he brought 750 US troops home from Somalia near the end of his administration. President Biden brought all US troops home from Afghanistan, as you know, and he won't send any to Ukraine, as you know, but now he's speaking about US redeployment to Somalia.

What's going on with that? Why there? Why now, and are we in the global war on terror business again? Back with us to talk about this and other world affairs is Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post columnist, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS on Sundays and the author of Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. Plus his new special on CNN is Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin that aired on CNN over the weekend, it's going to re-air on the 22nd. We'll spend a few minutes talking about that, too.

Fareed, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Fareed Zakaria: Thank you, Brian. Always a pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Are we back in the global war on terror business?

Fareed Zakaria: Well, the truth is, Brian, we never left. There have been a number of terror groups still active around the world, Syria still has some ISIS elements. The United States has been supporting anti-terror operations in places like Syria, obviously, it was doing it in Afghanistan, and in the Horn of Africa.

The way to think about this is I think one of the reasons you haven't had that much terrorism in the last 10 years is that the United States has found a way to partner with local governments that are trying to eradicate some local insurgency or terror group, and the US provides the intelligence and sometimes the special forces.

I think this is more in that context. I am worried about President Biden's decision because Al Shabaab is not really a global terrorist organization. There have been one or two examples of some members who have tried to do things in the United States.

I think the two things we should always look for in these kinds of American involvement is, first and most importantly, is the local partner a legitimate government that has legitimacy on the ground? In other words, we should not be in the business of nation-building, we should not be trying to create a legitimate local government. That's what we were doing in Afghanistan.

If there is a legitimate local government that has credibility, and needs help, because it just does not have the military capacity to deal with a terrorist organization that has found some little on government space in its territory, then the United States does play a very useful role because it does have that military and intelligence capacity. The second--

Brian Lehrer: How do you see the government of Somalia in that respect, worthy by your standards as you just laid them out?

Fareed Zakaria: They're sort of in-between. They're not quite Afghanistan, but they're not totally stable legitimate government. I think on that front they do okay. You have a new government in place, the guy who was running Somalia for the last decade is now back. He does seem to have his grip on the country. Then the second question is, are these really terrorist groups of global reach?

To put it very bluntly, if they're engaged in a political struggle with the local government, the United States should help the local government, these are bad guys, but I think there's a different level of help to fight a terrorist group that has global ambitions, that is trying to kill Americans, Europeans all over the-- trying to have a big presence all over the world like Al-Qaeda, like ISIS.

On both grounds, this is like, I don't know, 5 out of 10. It's a small deployment, these counter-terror operations have been fairly effective. I'm willing to give the Biden administration the benefit of the doubt. I don't know the intelligence that they're looking at, but we should always be wary of mission creep in these situations. Will helping counterterrorism then turn into stabilizing some part of Somalia that is unstable, because that instability is what breeds terrorism, and then you get into the business of war. How do you create stable government in that part of Somalia? You provide assistance to the local government, then you're back in Afghanistan.

Brian Lehrer: The CNN report on this says the Biden administration believes that Al Shabaab remains, "A notable priority given the threat it poses," and that, "A persistent US presence there will be necessary to counter the group." I guess I was

wondering, why would they consider Al Shabaab more of a threat than the Taliban in Afghanistan, since we decided that that wasn't a big enough threat to Americans to keep a persistent force there?

Fareed Zakaria: Well, partly, it's much easier to do it here because you have a local government that wants it, that is inviting it, that is actively fighting Al Shabaab. I think that's a legitimate reason. The Taliban is a kind of-- this is a separate conversation, it's a very weird and strange entity in that Taliban members, in general, have not engaged in terroristic activities against countries outside of Afghanistan. The Taliban basically wants to run Afghanistan. There are very few examples of Taliban members being involved in terrorist activities in Europe, in the United States, in Africa.

The Taliban's one great sin, which is a huge sin, was that it housed Al-Qaeda for a while, before 9/11. Even after, even when the United States turned its full force on them, they struck back at US forces in Afghanistan, of course, but outside of Afghanistan, they've tended to have limited ambitions. This is the kind of nuanced and complicated conversation we should be having about terrorism because there's a great danger of just going out there.

This is something Bin Laden said, he said, "The easiest thing to do with the Americans is you raise the flag of Al-Qaeda anywhere in the world, and they'll pour troops and money into it." Part of his strategy was meant to be to bleed the United States. I'm wary of that and I want to make these distinctions, even with a very nasty organization like the Taliban.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I don't know if we have anybody out there right now with ties to Somalia, who wants to weigh in on the worthiness of sending US troops there right now? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer, or anything else for Fareed Zakaria. Maybe you have a question from watching Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN this past Sunday or the special with the creepy premise of Inside Vladimir Putin's Brain or other world affairs, 43-212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Just before we get off Somalia and this kind of thing, I can imagine the scenario if it's Trump versus Biden again in the 2024 presidential election, where this would actually become an issue and I don't know how much of a salient voting issue, foreign deployments and support for Somalia or support for Ukraine even would come up as something that makes voters decide to go to the polls for one candidate or another.

You have Trump as the isolationist pulling American troops out of Somalia. You have Trump now even opposing the financial aid to Ukraine. He's against that $30 billion or so that was just allocated by Congress that President Biden wanted. There's really US role in the world versus what some people might see as US necessity of focusing on itself with respect to these things that might come up and if an American gets killed in Somalia between now and 2024, you can imagine what the politics of that are going to be.

Fareed Zakaria: You're absolutely right. Look, Donald Trump is returning the Republican party to a very unhappy period in its historical development, which is he is turning the Republican party into the party of isolationism. The Republican party became the party of isolationism largely after World War I. Before that, Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was a very committed internationalist and the Republican party was a party that believed in a strong American presence in the world, military presence, and such differed from Woodrow Wilson's conception, which was rooted more in international law and that kind of thing, but there was still a very strong internationalism at the core of the party.

That then morphed after World War I into a kind of isolationism which was embodied by people like Charles Lindbergh at the extremes and the America First movement. It got discredited because of World War II and even after World War II, there were still many Republicans who were very isolationist. Robert Taft, who was in many ways-- he's called Mr. Republican, was against NATO.

A lot of Republicans were against the creation of NATO and Trump in a way is returning us to that tradition. The Republican party, by the way, shook that tradition only because Dwight Eisenhower became the Republican president. He could have been president if he could have been nominated by either party. He chose to be nominated by the Republicans and he was himself a committed internationalist.

In a way, Trump is playing on a familiar historical American isolationism. It's very unfortunate because the United States is needed to help create some degree of order, stability, decency in the world and the price is not very high, but Trump is a great demagogue, and this is a good issue to demagogue.

Brian Lehrer: The right doesn't want US troop deployments, those aspects of the right that don't because they see other countries getting over on us, us doing their work for them. Some elements of the left don't want US troop deployments because they see the US doing more harm than good in the world. There could be this strange coalition of people who don't want deployments like this but that's one point where left and right might meet but for different reasons.

All right. On to your CNN special, Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin. The one big question I want to ask you about that is how Putin went from KGB agent to an occasional, if skeptical, friend of the west, as your special lays out, to, as we know now, the architect of chaos in Ukraine and elsewhere. My question is when was he a friend of the west? When was that phase?

Fareed Zakaria: It actually was a fairly long phase, in some ways, because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he first surfaces as a very key age to the very reformist governor of a mayor of St. Petersburg and is therefore very much associated with the liberal circles within the Russian government, so not far-left types, but seen as solidly pro-west, pro-market, trying to make Russia more of a Western Country. St. Petersburg has always had that flavor anyway. It's the most westward-facing part of the Russia and the Soviet Union and was where he came from.

Then he becomes prime minister and president, and he courts the west assiduously.

He goes to Germany and gives a speech to the German parliament in German because it's a language he speaks well, talking about how Russia's destiny was with the west and how Russia was a European nation.

He even talks to Bill Clinton about maybe Russia becoming a member of NATO. Now, it is worth pointing out that during this period, Russia desperately needed Western economic assistance. It had huge debts, it needed foreign aid. It had had a debt crisis in 1998, just a year before he comes into power, and oil prices were very low.

One interpretation, which I lean toward, is that this was all forced on him by necessity and he's a very practical guy and he played the role he had to play, but once you get to the mid-2000s and oil prices are booming, he's established order. He's cleaned up a lot of the crazy gangster capitalism in Russia. As Russia rises, so do his ambitions.

Brian Lehrer: That's a really interesting story. Part of that story, it sounds like he did some good in Russia domestically before he really became the autocrat that we think of him as today?

Fareed Zakaria: Yes, I think it's very important. That's a very important point, Brian. People need to understand that when Putin takes over, Russia has had the worst collapse since the Second World War. Russian GDP has contracted by 50% if you can even imagine that. Chaos, gangs, oligarchs, the government has almost no control, very bad law and order situation, a war in Chechnya that's going terribly.

He restores law and order, restores the rule of the state. I wouldn't call it the rule of law, but at least some degree of stability. He brutally wins the war in Chechnya by essentially outsourcing it to the most vicious gangster armies, but as a result, he wins.

Because oil prices rise, he is able to take advantage of that. Russia's per capita income goes up 400% in that decade after he comes into power. You have a fourfold rise in average Russian incomes. Lots of people attribute all these to Putin as is understandable. Before he came, there was chaos and poverty. After he comes, there's stability and economic growth.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here is Shake in the Bronx. This goes back to our discussion of the announcement from the Biden administration that we're sending US troops to Somalia. Shake in the Bronx I think supports that idea. Shake, you are on WNYC with Fareed Zakaria from CNN. Hi, there.

Shake: Hi, good morning. I love Fareed Zakaria. I love your show. It's great discussion and definitely, there's a lack of democracy. There's a chance in Somalia and US has moral obligation to send the troops and really secure the place. It's good for the democracy, it's good for the country. Good for United States.

It's not only Somalia. I would like to add some [unintelligible 00:18:40] sometimes. There is some democracy, there's a fake democracy in Bangladesh and other places

where, under the name of democracy, there's autocracy taking place, and America should raise the voice. That's good for the local, the regular people. The country should not be only for the oligarch, for the rich, it should be for every people, every common people that live in that part of the land.

Brian Lehrer: Shake, thank you very much. Are you concerned, however, sometimes that the presence of US troops makes things worse rather than better?

Shake: Sometimes it feels like it's tense, but eventually, there's some people who are committing those kind of crime, they'll realize that America is here, if you do something wrong, they'll take care of it. I think even though there's a little tense, I believe in long run is going to benefit the whole country.

Brian Lehrer: Shake, thank you for your call. Another one on Somalia deployment. Jasper in Westport, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jasper.

Jasper: Hey, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to ask, well, really make a comment, I guess, about, I don't really understand the Biden administration's focus on this part of the world, because, obviously, in terms of egalitarianism, it's horrible, Al Shabaab, but it's not really a threat to Americans. I don't see it that way. I think the real threat to Americans should be other Americans at this point as we saw in the Buffalo shooting.

I also wanted to draw attention really quickly. You were talking about Ukraine previously and Ethiopia, there's a huge crisis in Tigray right now. It's essentially a genocide. The Ethiopian government's blockade into Tigray so they can't get any food in. The director of the World Health Organization recently said that Black lives and white lives aren't being treated similarly in the coverage of the wars in Ukraine and Ethiopia. I just think that's a shame. I would love if you did a segment on that because it's an intersection of race and--

Well, the last thing I also wanted to say is why is America still going with this hard foreign policy in terms of military troops? Why should Americans die in another country like they probably will to face some specter of terrorism that doesn't really exist? It's really domestic terrorism that's our number one threat. I think the head of the FBI just recently said that.

China's doing this belt and road initiative, they're using soft power, they're buying libraries in El Salvador and helping out in building highways across central Asia to help basically curry a favor. I don't understand why we're still sticking to these troop deployments. I would agree that America does more harm than good in a lot of these instances across the world.

Brian Lehrer: Jasper, thank you very much for your call. Roughly, he was tying a lot of things together in there and making a lot of comparisons. Very interesting, really, bringing Ethiopia into it and the horrific stuff that is going on there compared to Somalia, which is not far away, and some of the other comparisons that Jasper was making.

Fareed Zakaria: Look, the Ethiopia case is a good example of when it really doesn't

pay for the United States to get militarily involved. Is a very complicated situation, you would be getting yourself in the middle of a very complicated civil war. That way, you have different parties involved. It's a little bit like Yemen. I don't think the United States can provide much in the way of stability. It would be overwhelmed by the local currents that are there.

In that sense, it is different from Somalia where, in Somalia, you do have a government, they have asked for American assistance. It is a discreet mission which is to go in to help against these Al Shabaab terrorists. Looking on Al Shabaab, as I said, it's a complicated story, but there is evidence that some Al Shabaab members have tried to do global terrorism.

I think it was a case last year of Al Shabaab fighters who were taking flight lessons in the Philippines to try to replicate a 9/11. It didn't strike me as super-advanced in terms of their planning and things like that, but it's an indication of their intent.

Now, on his largest point, again, remember some of the reason we haven't had that much terrorism is because we do have a very elaborate counter-terrorism program around the world that the US military is actively engaged in. Partly, here you're seeing a pro system that's working and you're assuming that you don't need it. On domestic terrorism, look--

Brian Lehrer: I know you got to go in just a minute, but what about his comparison between the US trying to exert influence with hard power like these troop deployments versus China trying to curry favor with countries through their silk road initiative which is more economic?

Fareed Zakaria: Look, we should do more of that, but by the way, we do that. The United States is still by far the largest donor of foreign aid in the world. We are the far largest humanitarian donor of aid to Ukraine right now. If you look around the world, people should take a lot of pride in this. The United States is still by far the world's largest humanitarian supporter. It should do more and it should spend less on the military.

One final point about the main point he was making about domestic terrorism. Look, it's a huge problem and I think it's massively exacerbated by the fact that we are 4% of the world's population and we have 50% of the world's guns. You cannot regard that as a normal situation. There's just no way you can imagine solving this problem when you-- Let me repeat it again. We have 4% of the world's population and we have 50% of the world's guns, many of them military-level weaponry with automatic rifles that fire 200, 300 rounds. We are in a crazy situation where we just don't seem able to do anything about it.

Brian Lehrer: There's the line that from all the things we've talked about today, people will probably remember from today's show, we have 4% of the world's population and 50% of the world's guns. We thank Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post columnist, host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, and author of Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. His current special on CNN is Inside the Mind of Vladimir

Putin. We always appreciate it when you come on the show, Fareed. Thanks again.

Fareed Zakaria: My pleasure.

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