Not a single African Union country but Uganda has yet sent troops, and Uganda only did so when the United States footed the bill of the soldiers’ trip. By late 2007, neither African nations nor the United Nations were talking about Somalia much anymore even as the country faced famine again and the prospect of a wider war, with Ethiopian troops terrorizing the populace and another war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, to Somalia's north, threatening.
In a single week in November 2007, fighting in Somalia killed 80 people, many of them women and children. Islamist fighters weren't satisfied with merely killing Ethiopian soldiers. They dragged their bodies through the streets of Mogadishu, letting others spit on and club the bodies in scenes taken horror for horror from the playbook that greeted American soldiers there in 1993. That may explain why the world is so hesitant to send any troops there: The same week that Somalia's anarchy seemed to explore new depths, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon announced that a UN peacekeeping mission in Somalia was out of the question. But to say that the Americans are not intervening would be inaccurate.
As in so many places in the world, the Bush administration is playing a dicey game in Somalia. It can’t very well send troops there, not after the first Bush’s and Bill Clinton's unhappy experience with Operation Restore Hope. The administration is nevertheless making Somalia one of the fronts in Bush’s “war on terror,” and hoping other countries, namely members of the African Union, will do the dirty work (is it any wonder those countries are balking?).
Somalia is one of the most lawless countries in the world, and therefore rife, the administration argues, as an al-Qaeda breeding ground. Somalia is almost exclusively Sunni, its long and special relationship with Saudi Arabia — dating back to the Prophet Muhammad’s day, when Somalia was like Plymouth Rock to early Muslims escaping persecution on the Arab peninsula — makes it a favorite of Muslim fundamentalists with an eye on spiritual nostalgia. Or, as the case may be, with Muslim militants with a bend for terrorism.
The Bush administration isn’t entirely wrong to fear that Somalia could be the next Afghanistan, but to compare Somalia with Afghanistan invites misconceptions. Afghanistan after the Taliban take-over in 1996 quieted down. As Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan author of “The Kite Runner,” daringly noted in a Wall Street Journal interview, “The only thing the Taliban brought was stability, they brought security.” It’s that stability and security, meshed with Afghanistan’s isolation, that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda sought out. Anarchy wouldn’t have suited them. Why would it suit them in Somalia?
The more immediate problem in Somalia is utter fracture. It’s not a functioning country. The northern part doesn’t even consider itself part of the country anymore. (Think of Somalia in this case as Africa’s Florida: the northern panhandle doesn’t even want to know what the southern region is doing.) Somaliland in the northern-western part of the country declared itself autonomous from Somalia 1991, and thrives as a result. Thrives, that is, relative to the rest of the country.
Not a single country has recognized Somaliland as an independent nation. And lately it’s been warring with Puntland, the next-largest province to the east (a region rich in oil. Understand why the United States is meddling now? And occasionally bombing the place? It’s not just a fear of al-Qaeda.)
Meanwhile Mogadishu, seared in American memory as the site of the Pentagon’s “Black Hawk Down” incident, remains a deadly capital. Violence and famine are endemic. No one is safe. The head of the United Nations’ food agency providing some relief was seized in October by government officers, the morning after a night of heavy fighting between government forces and Islamic insurgents. More than 1 million Somalis are dependent on humanitarian assistance, but few among them are actually receiving assistance. The outlook is bleak.
