Somalia: Quicksand, or Vital Interests?

Matthew Yglesias recently argued at The American Prospect:
The Somali situation was, in many ways, improving as of two years ago. At which point the Bush administration initiated a new adventure that, like most Bush administration deeds, was ill-conceived and worked out poorly. In this case, it destroyed the country, has been responsible for the deaths of untold thousands of people, has created the pirate problem, and is breeding a new generation of anti-American jihadists. And nobody in the United States seems to have noticed.
This is almost certainly an exaggeration—The New York Times was writing almost weekly dispatches from the country and about Somali politics; widely-read academic bloggers such as Foreign Policy’s Daniel Drezner were writing at length about the invasion and aftermath; think tanks were writing love letters to an anarchy they won’t visit for fear of their lives; and independent operations like Bill Roggio’s Long War Journal were covering the conflict and its implications since before the invasion. Yglesias’s assertion that the invasion was an ignored “adventure” by the Bush administration is almost laughably false, yet it seems to form one of the two pillars of his critique of the conflict.
Yglesias’ other argument about the Somali conflict was that the U.S. picked the wrong side. Whether the Islamic Courts Union, a hardline Islamist movement that nearly conquered Somalia in late 2006, was a legitimate group is a more complex argument, one with which Bill Roggio certainly disagrees. But unpacking what the conflict might really be about requires a step back from a typical left-right divide, in which Bush is either the delirious warmonger boxing at Islamist shadows or the noble defender of all that is good and radical Islam’s worst enemy.
David Axe has spent a lot of time reporting from both inside Somalia and from neighboring Kenya. In 2007, he reported that the U.S. was displaying some strategic confusion over who exactly was the “enemy,” and that it probably didn’t have sufficient intelligence to determine which sites to attack from the air (the U.S. never committed ground troops in any noticeable way). More recently, he has reported that Somalia actually faces a bigger threat from piracy interrupting food aid than from the rise of extremist Islamic political movements.
In this month’s Atlantic, Eliza Griswold writes that the situation is actually far more complex than either “side” seems to admit—it’s neither a simple case of al Qaeda-loving terrorists on the warpath nor of the U.S. mistakenly pursuing one interest at the fatal expense of another. Indeed, Griswold notes that many of the Islamist movement leaders are full American citizens, and are conversant in American culture. Almost as importantly, al Qaeda, despite its bluster, never found a very welcoming home in Somalia (in The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright relates that the few operatives in Mogadishu during the Black Hawk Down incident were terrified and ran away, while still claiming responsibility for the death of eighteen U.S. servicemen).
Indeed, any realistic take on the problems facing Somalia must consider more than just the American perspective. Somalia plays host to Islamists and at least one known al Qaeda terrorist. Somalia is the homebase of a massive and lucrative piracy in the Gulf of Aden. Somalia does not have a functioning central government, and probably won’t for a long time. But none of this is America’s fault—and examining the country only in terms America seems to care about will badly miss the point. One angle frequently ignored in the heated sniping over the piracy is the role of .. more..http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/somalia_quicksand_or_vital_int.php
Pentagon America Intervenes in Somalia,
Quietly and with baby steps, the Pentagon's newest combatant command the U.S. is intervening in one of the world's most tenacious conflicts. Two-year-old Africa Command The Bush Administration has pledged $5 million to help build a new police force in Somalia that combines troops from the U.S.-backed Transitional Federal Government and -- get this -- former insurgents from an alliance of moderate Islamic groups.
Somalia hasn't had a functional central government in 18 years. Clan conflict, starvation and anarchy have contributed to what the U.S. Army's top intel agent for Africa called a "vortex of violence" where the fighting at times escapes any rational motivation. That vortex of violence is a hallmark of so-called "Fifth-Generation Warfare." more..http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/africoms-quie-2.html