Failed State Establishing law and feeding the hungry in Somalia are vital for Western security

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Dean Rusk, the former US Secretary of State, observed that power tends to corrupt, but loss of power corrupts absolutely. The recent history of Somalia is the proof. The country epitomises the concept of a failed state. Since the US and UN abandoned a humanitarian mission in 1995, Somalia has been locked in lawlessness and penury.

Somalia now risks becoming a haven for radical Islamists. Its condition matters for its people, and for Western security too. As reported on page 34 and for the next two days, Somalia’s problems are destabilising the region, particularly at sea, and are causing new problems for the Somali diaspora in the UK.

Western policy towards Somalia has a chequered history. Somalia’s location in the Horn of Africa made it a site of superpower rivalry. America gave aid to the wretched regime of General Siad Barre, but abandoned support when the Cold War ended. The US Embassy was evacuated in 1991, as rebels launched an assault on Mogadishu, the capital. For two years Somalia was in anarchy as warlords battled for control. About 300,000 people perished from famine.

The US and the UN mounted a noble rescue mission. US troops entered the country to open transport routes for the distribution of food. Tragically, both were then drawn into the warlords’ conflicts. Bandits killed 24 Pakistani soldiers serving under UN command. The US withdrew after 18 of its troops were killed in what became known as Black Hawk Down.

After the bombing by al-Qaeda of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, three of the terrorists found sanctuary with Islamist groups in Somalia. But in the decade succeeding those outrages, a not-so-benign neglect has characterised Western diplomacy towards the country — save for one ill-fated decision.

The Islamic Courts Union, with a radical Islamist wing called al-Shabaab (the Youth), emerged in 2006. The Courts rebuffed the warlords; the radicals imposed repression. The perceived similarities to the Taleban were too close for the US to countenance. The Bush Administration supported the warlords and then conspicuously failed to distance itself from an intervention by Ethiopia to establish a transitional government.

That was a misreading of the politics of Somalia. Ethiopia’s invasion merely stimulated fresh violence. Al-Shabaab presented itself as a nationalist force rather than a ferocious theocratic one. President Bush later implicitly acknowledged the mistakes of US policy when he supported a Transitional Federal Government headed by President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, one of the Islamic Court leaders whom the US had opposed.

The tragic error lay not in opposing radical Islam but in assuming that Somalia was more like Afghanistan than Iraq. Jihadism in Iraq was rebuffed when US strategy belatedly set about splitting Islamic movements. In Somalia, Islamist militancy has by contrast been strengthened.

Lawlessness has intensified, not least in piracy in the surrounding sea lanes. Somalis inside the country and in refugee populations outside it are the victims of nearly two decades of anarchy and banditry. Western policy rightly focuses on the threats to security in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet Somalia is a failed state that is breeding terrorism, violence and banditry that pose a real threat far beyond its border