Al Qaeda About To Have New Home; Somalia

Santayana once wrote that those who failed to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The world is about to make the same fateful mistake by enabling al Qaeada to claim a safe haven of their own.

Last time, it was Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Now, it's the failed state of Somalia.

The world shrugs its shoulders as yet another failed African country that is most well known of late for being home to pirates that prey on Indian Ocean and Red Sea traffic to seek multi-million dollar ransoms (China is renewing its anti-piracy mission) and was previously best known for the Black Hawk Down incident and which directly led to al Qaeda believing that the US was ripe for the taking.

Rusty at the Jawa Report notes that this is a situation that has been developing for some time.

The Islamists are set to impose sharia across the country.

Ethiopia may have to once again deal with Somalia, but that's only an interim solution and the Somali terrorists and thugs have followed the Ethiopians home and are threatening civil war. Rusty thinks that using a proxy wont get the job done, and he may be right, but there are few options available. The UN and African Union are powerless to act, and refuse to engage in anything resembling peacemaking. They prefer to maintain the status quo, and call that peacekeeping. That is insufficient in a situation such as this.

The US doesn't look like it's going to deal with al Qaeda in Somalia anytime soon, even though it is in our - and the world's interest to put it to an end.

Terrorists like al Qaeda use failed states like Somalia as a safe haven from which to recruit, plot, and train terrorists for operations around the world. It's what they did in Afghanistan, and it's what they'll be doing in Somalia. It's what they have been doing in Somalia for years, with occasional interest from the US and the rest of the world.

The concern is that any significant operation in Somalia would result in nation-building and costs that the US and others would deem unnecessary or excessive. I believe the cost of doing nothing is far higher.

Rusty wonders what the US options are to be in this situation. Well, the start of a policy might be to draw lessons from the Obama strategy for Pakistan - UAV airstrikes early and often. If we can do that to a supposed ally, then we can most certainly do so with a terrorist safe haven. During the 2008 campaign, Obama claimed that he would send in troops to go after al Qaeda in Pakistan. If he thought that was appropriate when dealing with an ally, why not in a failed state regime where al Qaeda threatens to regroup and prepare for further conflict with the US.