Against All Flags

Questions and answers about pirates and Somalia

Jesse Walker | April 17, 2009

(Page 2 of 3)

The wise men in Washington are no better equipped at remolding Somali society than they are at remolding the auto industry. The aid we have sent there over the last few decades has almost invariably ended up boosting the power of one local faction or another.

Somalia is capable of producing for itself; it's just that poor governance and civil strife periodically get in the way. Unfortunately, the U.S. has done much more to foster that poor governance and fan that civil strife than to end them. The evidence of this goes all the way back to the 1970s, when, for reasons related to the Cold War, the Ford administration started sponsoring a brutal military regime run by a self-proclaimed Marxist, Siad Barre.

Hold on. If this was part of the Cold War, why were we siding with a Marxist?

Somalia's great rival was Ethiopia, and Ethiopia had just joined the Soviet bloc.

Did Barre change his ways when he started getting U.S. aid?

He and his representatives deployed a different set of platitudes when begging from their benefactors. But the basic structure of the Somali state stayed the same. It didn't have much to do with either socialism or capitalism as a set of principles: The regime was a kleptocracy in which those who had political pull stole from those who did not. The old tribal structure adjusted itself to the new political context. Now one subclan could expropriate a chunk of land from another, start a "project" on it, and present it to the international community as aid-worthy "economic development."

After Barre was overthrown in 1991, such interclan battles stopped being subsumed within the system and spilled out into the open. Figures once called bureaucrats were now called warlords. But the civil strife of the early 1990s was essentially the same process carried out in a bloodier way.

And that's when the United States and United Nations sent in soldiers?

Yes. As we all know, that didn't go well.

But when the troops pulled out, didn't everything go to pot?

You've got it backwards. The U.S./U.N. intervention made things worse: It undercut local farmers by dumping free food into circulation, herded self-reliant nomads into disease-ridden refugee camps, and disarmed civilians while leaving the warlords' stockpiles largely untouched. At every point during the country's crisis in the early to mid 1990s, the most constructive responses came from the Somalis themselves. (The local Red Crescent Society was responsible for more successful relief than all the foreign efforts combined.) When the outsiders left, the peacemaking elements of Somali society were able to reassert themselves, with elders arbitrating truces between the clans and entrepreneurs establishing a growing economy.

The results were hardly utopian—literacy rates were low, violence was down but was still fairly high, and the drinking water wasn't always clean—but conditions were improving, and by the region's standards they were pretty impressive. A 2004 study for the World Bank revealed that Somalia had as many roads per capita as its immediate neighbors, a better telecommunications infrastructure, and lower rates of extreme poverty; despite the absence of a central government, the country had reasonably effective systems of courts, credit, social insurance, and electric power. After 9/11, though, when the U.S. started channeling aid to the warlords, the fragile social peace started breaking down.

Wait. Back up. America aided the warlords?

Yes. The Bush administration worried that jihadists were seeking shelter in Somalia, so it allied itself with secular Somalis, who styled themselves the "Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism." They included some of the very same figures the U.S. had battled in the early '90s.

How did that work out?