The U.S. Gets a Strategy in Somalia

Earlier this month, Kenya invaded its war-torn and famine-weakened neighbor Somalia. Don’t get what’s going on there? Neither did the U.S. government, write Daveed Garterstein-Ross and Daniel Trombly at the Atlantic. American interest in Somalia dramatically increased after the emergence of the Islamic Courts Union as a force in 2006, but the U.S. had no plan for checking the group’s influence. Now, belatedly, a strategy is emerging. And it looks a lot like the counterinsurgency strategy being used in other parts of the world. “As long as the country lacks long-term stability, it will be difficult to prevent the reemergence of another potent insurgency—if the current one can even be quelled in the first place. Still, at least the U.S. has a strategy now, a fact that is in itself significant.”