Biden sought to end endless wars. So what’s the military doing in Somalia?

President Joe Biden pledged to end the “forever wars” in the Middle East. He withdrew US forces from Afghanistan last year and has announced that the United States is no longer at war. As he wrote in advance of his trip this week to Israel and Saudi Arabia, “I will be the first president to visit the Middle East since 9/11 without U.S. troops engaged in a combat mission there.”

But the rhetorical contortion of no “U.S. troops engaged in a combat mission” is a little different from being able to simply say that there is no American military presence. That’s because the US still has troops in Iraq and in Syria. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Yemen, the US military is, among other things, advising on counterterrorism, and the Pentagon keeps more than 700 personnel in Niger and thousands in Djibouti. The US also deploys drone strikes and special operations forces against targets across the Middle East and Africa without much accountability or oversight.

And in May 2022, Biden agreed to send about 500 US troops to Somalia.

Those troops will return to Somalia soon to fight the extremist group al-Shabaab as the resurrected government of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM) deepens ties to Washington and seeks the support and legitimacy provided by the American military. But on a deeper level, this US deployment represents the continuity of the so-called war on terrorism in spite of Biden’s best efforts to end it.