Saving Somalia

By Alex Perry / Mogadishu

The center of Mogadishu is an awesome, ghostly monument to war. The streets are lined with rows of crumbling, freestanding Italianate fac,ades sprayed with bullets, splashed by rocket-propelled grenades and showing clear blue sky where their roofs and walls used to be. Somalia's capital is less a city than a collection of tribal neighborhoods. Its back alleys lie under several feet of dirt and plastic bags, traffic is regularly held up by armed privateers demanding payments, and the air is thick with gunfire.

That's the sound of normality in Somalia. Nearly two decades of war have reduced this country of 9 million to chaotic destitution, making it less a failed state than no state at all. (The U.S. State Department lists the country's government type as "none.") The Bush Administration has long suspected that Somalia's lawlessness has made it fertile ground for terrorists, which is one reason the U.S. has stationed 1,700 troops in nearby Djibouti since 2003. On Jan. 8, a U.S. AC-130 gunship struck a suspected al-Qaeda target in southern Somalia, where the U.S. believes a number of operatives, including three men accused of carrying out the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, have been hiding. On Wednesday, a Somali official said Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a top al-Qaeda official, had been killed. "Somalia is one of those troublesome ungoverned areas--perhaps the worst in the world," a senior Pentagon official told TIME. "The U.S. has the authority to strike where it needs to there, and we did."

The U.S. raid came three weeks after several thousand Ethiopian troops, tacitly backed by the U.S., invaded the country to oust the Islamist forces that had seized control of Mogadishu six months earlier. Outgunned by the superior Ethiopian army, the Islamists deserted en masse, with a core group attempting to retreat into the thick forests near the Kenyan border. The Islamists' flight left them exposed, which may have helped the U.S. track their whereabouts and move in for the kill. Approval for the raid came from Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, which had held power for all of 11 days at the time of the Jan. 8 strike. "It's one of those places where even the State Department, which is usually very cautious about us acting, said, Hey, go ahead," said the Pentagon official.

But nailing terrorists is one thing; building a nation where none exists is another. "We are starting from scratch," the head of Somalia's new government, Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Gedi, told me in an interview in Mogadishu. Given Somalia's penchant for clan warfare and inhospitableness toward foreign armies--just go out and rent a copy of Black Hawk Down--it's tempting for Western policymakers to wash their hands and wish Gedi luck. But Somalia's strife has repercussions beyond its borders. The country is victim to the worst ravages of man and nature. Instability there has the potential to engulf the entire Horn of Africa in war, with neighboring countries Ethiopia and Eritrea jockeying for influence and pirates using the lawless coast as a base to launch attacks on the freighter traffic headed for the Suez Canal. Some of the Islamists have vowed a guerrilla war against the new government, which they deride as a puppet of Ethiopia and the U.S. On top of all that, a double disaster of summer drought followed by December floods has left more than 500,000 Somalis dependent on foreign aid for their livelihoods.

If any government is to succeed, it's going to need help. During my seven-day stay in Mogadishu this month, I caught a glimpse of the country's dysfunction. Somalia has atomized into its ancient form--a collection of hundreds of clans. Taxation has been replaced by protection rackets ranging from clan gangsters who collect weekly "rent" to garbage collectors who dump rubbish in a street and demand money to remove it.

Most Somalis have grown accustomed to such anarchic conditions. But what's ironic is that before the Islamists were expelled by the Ethiopians, they had managed to impose a semblance of law and order on the capital. During its six-month tenure, the Islamic Courts Union (I.C.U.), an alliance run by Muslim clerics and several warlords, with the backing of key clans, had lifted roadblocks and cracked down on crime. Even Gedi admits that the I.C.U.'s restoration of security "attracted the support of the people."

Many Somalis fear that when the Ethiopians kicked out the Islamic Courts, they threw out any hope of security too. The new government counts several warlords in its ranks, and their rivals are rearming. I visited one, Mohamed Qanyere, at a villa on the southern outskirts of Mogadishu. In the forecourt were parked a collection of artillery and pickups mounted with heavy-caliber machine guns. Qanyere claimed to have 1,500 men. Asked about a government decree ordering national disarmament, he scoffed, "If you have two people and you take a weapon from one and I keep mine, what will happen? I will kill you."

Just as worrying is the growing prospect of an anti-Ethiopian, antigovernment Islamist insurgency. Anonymous leaflets have appeared on the streets of Mogadishu advising Somalis to stay away from Ethiopians and "traitors," as "they will be our targets." Said Ali, a volunteer for the I.C.U.'s elite unit, Shabab (meaning Youth), told me he was among 5,000 fighters in Mogadishu preparing for guerrilla war. Sporadic attacks on Ethiopian troops across Somalia are killing one or two a day. Ali told me, "People think our group is something else--al-Qaeda. We're not. We fight for the people. We fight for Somalia." That could change, however--especially if the U.S. is seen to be turning the country into another front in the war on terrorism. Iraq shows how labeling an insurgency as linked to al-Qaeda can become self-fulfilling: conflict pushes extremists to the fore and is a magnet for itinerant foreign jihadis.

Can Somalia be saved? Washington has signaled an interest in re-establishing a diplomatic presence in Mogadishu, but so far its involvement in Somalia has been limited to military action. World donors have pledged a paltry $40 million to the transitional government and 8,000 African Union troops. Preventing Somalia from sliding back into violent anarchy would require a quick withdrawal by Ethiopia--a vacuum that would need to be filled immediately by international peacekeepers--and reconciliation among the government, the Islamists and Somalia's myriad clans.

In short, Somalia needs a strategy that goes beyond the narrow focus on chasing terrorists, a short-term goal that often comes at the expense of long-term stability. Gedi, 54, is trying to do his part: in his first week in office, he opened Mogadishu's municipal courts, inaugurated a new national army and convened Somalia's new parliament. "We are working trust and faith to bring forward reconciliation and stabilization," he says, "so we can recover from all the disasters of the past." He still has a long way to go.

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly / Washington