It's the critical question right now.
As the African Union peacekeeping forces begin to redeploy, the current strategy is that we have to accelerate support to Somali armed forces and the Somali security sector, so that they can step in and assume the very important roles AMISOM has been playing, protecting key installations and preventing al Shabaab from retaking major towns that they lost over the past five years.
The challenge there is, as Dr. Spears said earlier, that we have already been spending billions of dollars on the Somali security sector, with very little to show for it. The problem comes back to massive corruption. Somalia is one of the most corrupt countries on earth. People are making millions of dollars diverting foreign aid. We have got to find ways to combat corruption.
We won't eliminate it in Somalia; we have to be realistic. But we have to have enough of the money flowing to the soldiers and the police who are waiting for their salaries so that they don't defect, desert, or double hat, which many of them are doing. They're police by day and al Shabaab informants by night. That of course gives al Shabaab all kinds of opportunities to penetrate the security sector and know more about what's going on there than the security commanders themselves do sometimes. That's going to make it very difficult.
For me, it starts with combatting corruption. The bad news is that we're on the clock. The African Union peacekeeping forces, as they redeploy, are going to be doing so over the next two to three years. We could be facing a major crisis in Somalia if the security sector can't be minimally stood up to do the job it's expected to do.