By Dave Anderson:
One of the great problems with American COIN is that it is a foreign army intervening in what is often a civil war with local issues fueling most of the fighters and it designates one side as the "legitimate" government. And at that point, the legitimate government is seen as a puppet of the foreigners. That is seldom a good recipe for long term legitimacy. And then as foreign money pours into the civil war to pay for new recruits, weapons and training, plenty of people are trained whose primary loyalties are to anyone other than the newly designated legitimate government. That newly legitimate government lacks significant primary loyalties and tends to be corrupt as hell, so money pools at the top. Shockingly, significant numbers of those newly trained fighters defect or desert once they are trained.
We saw that in Iraq, we have seen this in Afghanistan, and we are seeing this in Somalia:
Hundreds of Somali soldiers trained in a US-funded programme deserted the fragile government to join the Al-Qaida-inspired militants they are supposed to be fighting because of non payment.
Somalia's state minister for defense, Yusuf Mohamed Siyad aka Indha'ade, confirmed to Associated Press that some trainees had joined the insurgent group, Al-Shabab after failing to get paid their $100 monthly wage.
�The US promised to pay the salaries of 1,800 soldiers, while other donor countries pledged to pay for some 3,300 soldiers. This is part of plans to fund the upkeep of 10,000 soldiers that would help the government retain the security,� he said.
He added that the soldiers did not receive their wages for nearly one year.
According to Somali officials, the troops were supposed to earn $100 a month, but about half of those trained in neighbouring Djibouti deserted after realizing that they are not going to get their payments
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