In Somalia, shock and awe, followed by stalemate

Maybe it isn't "post-conflict" just because you say so ...

"Get it done quickly and get out." That, says a senior US diplomat in Addis Ababa, was the goal of the little-noticed war that Ethiopia has been fighting, with American support, against Islamic extremists in Somalia. But this in-and-out strategy encounters the same real-world obstacles that America is facing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Conflict is less the problem than post-conflict. That's the dilemma that America and its allies are discovering in a world where war-fighting and nation-building have become perversely mixed. It took the Ethiopians just a week to drive a Muslim radical movement known as the Islamic Courts from Mogadishu last December. The hard part wasn't chasing the enemy from the capital, but putting the country back together.

"The Ethiopians are looking for an opportunity to exit, but not until they are confident that the security environment will prevent a return to chaos," says a State Department official who helps oversee policy for the region. And in Somalia, a backward country that has seen 14 governments since 1991, that process of stabilization will be anything but easy.

The Somalia war comes up during every stop of a tour of the horn of Africa with Admiral William Fallon, the new head of US Central Command. In 2002, CENTCOM established a regional outpost in the dusty port city of Djibouti, at the entrance to the Red Sea. It now has about 1,500 US military personnel there. Some of them are out digging wells, building schools, vaccinating goats and otherwise "waging peace," as a spokesman there explains. That's the nation-building side.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=82197

It's not post-conflict, it's just another, longer, lower intensity phase. The conflict never ended for there to be a "post-" version. It's a built-in excuse for armies to show that they've won even though that their political leaders have lost.

:sarcasm:

The place has been without a national government for going on two decades, and these fools think they are going to fix it in two weeks and leave. It boggles the mind.