We have already seen Al-Shabaab pull itself from the ashes once before, and it will continue to launch mass casualty events like the Westgate operation, especially after its recent ideological “return”, so to speak, to internationalist jihad...And without AMISOM, the current Somali government will very likely collapse, paving the way for Al-Shabaab’s resurgence.
Read MoreLast week, the Kenyan government officially declared an “offensive military agenda,” an action that many are calling Kenya's first war. Interestingly, this war is not with another nation, but with Al-Shabaab – an extremist militia splinter group of Al-Qaeda that has controlled large parts of Somalia for years.
Read MoreWhenever Americans recall Somalia, whether considering lofty foreign policy aims or simply reflecting upon the chance encounter with the name, our minds inevitably snap back to October 3, 1993 and the tragedy that was the Battle of Mogadishu. This is a memory of eighteen U.S. soldiers lying senselessly dead and desecrated, one even decapitated, in the streets of a hostile city. Given the striking clarity with which Black Hawk Down has memorialized the chaos and the horror of this battle, it is no surprise that the trauma remains fresh in our collective consciousness. At the time, the shock of this loss and the seemingly intractable and inhuman belligerence and disorder of the nation compelled the U.S. and all other foreign forces to withdraw. Somalia did not fit with the spirit of the times, the notions of how intervention and aid was to be conducted. After 1993, Somalia dropped off the map of U.S. foreign policy, relegated to a distasteful and repressed memory, and no one has been able to make a great case for a return.
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