The shattered country, maimed by years of war, staggered through multiple plagues of anarchy, hunger, lawlessness and tribal hatred. No central government existed, no schools, no police, no electricity, no economy beyond barter and the black market, no safety from marauding thugs who roamed the pitted streets, firing from the back of pickup trucks.
Enter the United Nations, armed with sunny optimism that it could fashion a functioning democracy from this civic rubble. Two years later, the UN fled in defeat. Today, six years on, Somalia is still basically anarchic, a threat to its people and its neighbors, with a government that controls part of the capital city and not much more.
The world’s mistakes in Somalia hold lessons now for those who hope to quell Afghanistan’s conflict and create some form a “broad-based, multiethnic and fully representative government”–the goal of the UN-sponsored talks near Bonn between four Afghan factions united only in mutual loathing.
Here’s wishing them luck–bad luck. Neither self-sufficiency nor any representative government may be possible or even desirable in the near term. It is best just to end the fighting, impose order enforced by foreign troops and be prepared to wait a long, long time for a normal country to emerge.
This is not an argument against a UN presence. Indeed, the UN is vital to any solution. But it shouldn’t try to do too much too soon.
That’s what happened in Somalia, and the repercussions were terrible.
Decades of war
Somalia has been at war–either tribal fighting or an 11-year war with next-door Ethiopia–for most of its 41 years as an independent nation. Mohamed Siad Barre, the dictator who ran the country for 22 years, fled in early 1991. The government collapsed. Tribal battles increased. Bandits ruled the roads. A drought added to the agony, and mass starvation loomed.
In late 1992, a UN force led by American troops waded ashore at Mogadishu, the capital. Its mission: Restore order and end the famine.
This Somali adventure later gave all UN operations a bad name, so it is important to remember that this first effort–to end famine–succeeded brilliantly. The UN World Food Program brought tons of food. Relief organizations delivered it. UN forces patrolled the port, the airport, roads and refugee camps to make sure the food was delivered. Thousands–perhaps millions–of lives were saved.
If the UN had done no more than this, the mission would have been a humanitarian triumph to warm the world’s heart. Instead, it then tried to build a nation on the wreckage of war, not realizing that every building needs a foundation.
The chief UN civilian representative in Mogadishu was a retired American admiral named Jonathan Howe who had been deputy national security adviser to the first President Bush. A life at sea and in the bureaucracy of Washington left Howe unprepared for the hate-based realities of Mogadishu.
Howe decided he would create a Western-style democracy in Somalia, where no democracy had ever existed. He even set a timetable: two years.
“It’s very clear to me that this can be done successfully,” Howe told the Tribune in mid-1993 in an interview in his office inside the ransacked former U.S. Embassy, where the UN made its headquarters.
“We’ll be gone in two years, at the end of March of 1995,” Howe said. “By then, there will be a reasonably viable economy. The country will be restored politically, with a representative government and a national assembly. Our mission is the end product, which is that the Somali people will stand on their own feet.
“We’re facilitators of recovery, partners with the Somali people. The key is that the Somali people support us. “
Howe was wrong, except about one thing. The UN did leave in March 1995, in failure. The U.S. had left a year earlier, after the battle of Mogadishu that killed 18 Americans and hundreds of Somalis and ended all domestic U.S. support, not only for the mission to Somalia but for most UN missions.
Howe’s mission was doomed from the start.
Anarchy in the capital
Mogadishu in 1993 was as terrifying as Afghanistan’s capital is now. Pure anarchy reigned. Foreigners went nowhere without armed bodyguards. Reporters who flew in on UN planes got flak jackets at the airport. The only private flight was a daily plane from Kenya, bringing in fresh supplies of qat, the narcotic of choice for Somali men. There were no sewers, water pipes or electric lines: All had been stolen and sold on the black market. Many buildings had lost tin roofs the same way, to thieves who simply rolled them up like the lids of sardine cans and sold them abroad.
In short, civil society had collapsed. Tribes and warlords ruled their chunks of the country, killing indiscriminately to protect their turf. UN and American forces could protect food deliveries. But no sweet reason was going to persuade these warriors to lay down their guns after 30 years of fighting and cooperate in a democratic government, with free elections and honest courts.
These warlords, then, stood between Howe and his dream. One in particular, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, controlled half of Mogadishu and made it clear he intended to rule Somalia, no matter what the UN thought.
The UN’s goal of a democratic Somalia turned into a vendetta against Aidid. On Oct. 3, 1993, U.S. Rangers attacked a house in the heart of Mogadishu where some of Aidid’s aides were meeting. The attack led to the battle in which well-armed Somalis–the same people who “support us,” according to Howe–killed or wounded 91 Americans.
Photographers caught the unforgettable image of a Somali mob dragging the body of an American pilot through the streets. The political uproar at home led to the U.S. withdrawal five months later and the UN withdrawal a year after that. Worse, it led the U.S. and the UN to stay out of Rwanda when a timely intervention could have saved a half-million lives, and kept the Clinton administration on the sidelines through most of the conflict in Yugoslavia.
The similarities between Somalia and Afghanistan are too many to ignore–nearly 30 years of warfare, no central government, a country split into tribal fiefdoms, collapse of civil society, 80 percent illiteracy, widespread banditry, even roving thugs in pickup trucks.
There’s one other similarity. The UN and the West want to take the arid Afghan soil and turn it into a garden of democracy, with a government representing many factions.
What’s the rush? The world does not need a governmental experiment in Afghanistan; it needs a period of stability that ends the country’s traditional role as spark and kindling in one of the globe’s most combustible neighborhoods.
In the past, the UN’s successes have come in overseeing a return to civil society in postwar countries that either have a functioning government or have two or three main contenders for national control. In some countries, it has helped achieve a form of national unity, as in El Salvador. Elsewhere, it has overseen elections, as in Cambodia, or is helping bring sanity, as in Kosovo or Bosnia-Herzegovina, or simply keeping antagonists apart, as in Cyprus. None of these places is a Utopia, but in all the UN probably has done more good than harm.
In Afghanistan, as in Somalia, the existing government has vanished. Afghanistan, like Somalia, is not a duel between two sides but a tournament of competing warlords, many cheered on by neighbors like Iran and Pakistan. All these parties detest one another, with cause. It is ludicrous to think they will find the trust to join peacefully in a “broad-based government.”
The U.S. and the UN have a humanitarian obligation to help end fighting in Afghanistan–as they did in Somalia–to feed the hungry, deliver medical aid, help open schools and restore order. They have no obligation to act now to form a representative government where none existed, if only because the price of failure is too high.
A better plan
A UN protectorate would be better for everyone, including the Afghans. It could be protected by UN troops, mostly Muslim, with some U.S. logistical aid. Non-governmental organizations can provide humanitarian services, as they do in many crippled countries. Tribal warlords could be used to deliver services and keep the peace in their territories.
This is a sort of global colonialism, the imposition of a regime on a country considered too chronically unstable to govern itself. For democrats, this is distasteful, but not so distasteful as the alternative, which is continued turmoil.
The cost will be high, but nowhere near as high as that of the havoc wreaked on the United States by terrorists hiding out in lawless Afghanistan.
This country and the world have learned that government failure in countries like Afghanistan can wound us. The fighting going on now is not a war to make Afghanistan safe for democracy but to make the rest of the world safe from terror. If this war has any meaning, the rebuilding of Afghanistan, unlike the one in Somalia, must be done right.
