By Mark Bowden | The Washington Post

In 1999, when I was touring the United States to promote my book “Black Hawk Down,” the story of an ill-fated U.S raid against a rebel warlord in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, I was often invited to college campuses, where I was fond of asking audiences whether there were any anarchists among them. Occasionally a scruffy student or two would raise a hand.

“Good news,” I’d tell them. “You don’t have to wait. Go to Somalia. Check it out.”

When I was last there in 1997, Somalia had already been rudderless for six years. During the lengthy civil war that followed the downfall of longtime dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, the country had been sacked. Mogadishu lay in rubble, like a city hit by a natural disaster. Telephone poles stripped of wires leaned at eerie angles. Every wall was pockmarked with holes from bullets and cannon blasts. Makeshift tents crowded open spaces. The few tall buildings still standing were windowless and had been stripped of all metal. At night, squatter campfires glowed from every rooftop and floor. Flimsy bags of translucent blue plastic floated in the breeze and clung in indestructible clumps to bushes, stunted trees and jagged heaps of refuse. Gunmen in pickup trucks terrorized the streets.

Unbelievably, in the decade since then, it has only gotten worse. While the world has largely stood by, the Horn of Africa has served as a laboratory for anarchy — and the results aren’t pretty. Somalia today is teetering on the edge of becoming an Islamist state while harboring terrorists who export its chaos to its neighbors. [The biggest and most destructive terrorist group in the Horn of Africa is the U.S.-financed Tigrean People Liberation Front (Woyanne).] When I recently talked to a number of aid workers and international officials who work there, they offered the country’s fate as a cautionary tale for those who believe that a single collapsed nation can be left to stew safely in its own pot.

“Here we have a country that has been in crisis for nearly twenty years,” Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. special representative for Somalia, said to me by phone from Nairobi. “And we say, well okay, we’ll chase down some pirates and send some bags of rice. It is not enough.”

Today 3 million Somalis, half the country’s population, rely on food handouts from the United States and Europe, delivered by increasingly harassed humanitarian organizations. Somalia has one of the highest infant-mortality rates in the world. Millions who could afford to have fled.

Meanwhile, Islamist terrorist groups train and hatch plots against targets in neighboring countries: The al-Qaeda cell that bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 was and still is based in Somalia. Since then, the same group and another have successfully bombed a Mumbai resort, attempted to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet and carried out a number of assassinations and other killings, including that of an Italian nun in the town of Elwak, near the border with Kenya. Local mullahs enforce horribly brutal penalties for acts that most of the world doesn’t even consider criminal.

And now, pirates — nothing more than the general criminal chaos spilled from land to sea — ply the waters off Somalia’s thousand-mile coastline, so threatening international shipping that they have driven up the price of food and other products throughout the region.

A flimsy “transitional” authority, a coalition of warlords supported by the United Nations, ostensibly governs the country, but it spends most of its time arguing from the safety of neighboring capitals over power it doesn’t have. The warlords banded together after Islamist forces chased them from Mogadishu in 2005, and with the help of Ethiopian Woyanne troops (backed by the United States), chased the Islamists out in turn the next year. But there is little popular support for the warlords or their Ethiopian Woyanne allies, who are no doubt counting the days until their promised withdrawal at the end of this month. And it appears likely that when the Ethiopians Woyannes leave, the transitional authority will collapse and the armed Islamist insurgents who now control most of the country will move back in to Mogadishu.

The Islamists were already running schools in the capital when I was there in 1997. One Western-educated lawyer, who made a few pennies sweeping floors at local hospitals, told me that he sent his children to the madrassa in the mornings — “because they are the only schools here” — and then spent the afternoons “unteaching most of the things my children were taught.”

Back then, few Somalis believed that the world’s cold shoulder would endure. People would line up in the street outside the gates of the compound where I stayed while researching my book to see me. Sightings of Americans were then so rare that most people refused to believe that I was just a writer. Many preferred to believe that I was on a secret mission for the United Nations or the United States, that I was laying the groundwork for the return of nation-building, for the restoration of law and order, basic services and sanity.

They are still waiting for that. More than $900 million will be needed next year just to avoid famine and disease, according to Mark Bowden (no relation), the U.N. humanitarian and resident coordinator for Somalia. The European Union and the United States have begun to chase pirates more aggressively, but that’s like swatting at bees while ignoring the hive.

Meanwhile, because there is no government, there are no public schools, no universities, no courts, no trash collection, no electrical grid (Mogadishu nights are filled with the steady hammering of generators) — none of the basic services of a civil society. This means that there is no employment for most educated Somalis — lawyers, teachers, administrators, etc. The only professionals with steady jobs in Mogadishu when I was there were doctors, because there’s no shortage of fighting along the perimeters of turf claimed by competing groups.

Owning anything of value in Somalia means having to arm yourself, because someone more powerful will eventually try to take it away. Small armies form around businessmen who deal in the mild narcotic khat or import guns or clothing or fuel or electronics to sell in Mogadishu’s thriving markets. You can tell a person’s relative importance by the length of his armed entourage as he moves through the streets. Young men with nothing else to do are lured into these private armies by promises of food, money, shelter and a steady supply of khat. For an ambitious young man in Somalia, there’s little else in the way of opportunity, and there’s no shortage of demand for gunmen. The pirates and mullahs and warlords are always hiring.

So is the United Nations. “We have to employ Somali contractors to protect our people and food shipments,” said Bowden.

Right now, the religious zealots appear to have the most guns. Most Somalis so devoutly desire law and order that even secular citizens supported the Islamist courts when they seized power in 2005. Many, albeit with mixed feelings, will undoubtedly welcome them back from the hinterlands, where they never really lost power after the Ethiopian Woyanne invasion. Even harsh religious government, it seems, is preferable to no government at all.

Ould-Abdallah was still hopeful when we spoke that some sort of meaningful power-sharing arrangement will be worked out among the warlords and moderate Islamists before the Ethiopians Woyanne leave. He said that he had been heartened by the participation in ongoing talks of Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the former commander of the Islamist courts, though the sheikh’s willingness to talk has been denounced by many who once followed his lead. Ould-Abdullah said that although the compromise he is trying to reach will probably bear the label “Islamist,” it doesn’t necessarily mean the imposition of radical fundamentalism.

“The excesses that you hear about, like the 13-year-old girl who was stoned to death [she was accused of adultery], do not reflect the more moderate, better-educated leaders that we are dealing with,” he said. “Without any central authority, decisions are made at the local level by uneducated imams who in some cases, as we have seen, can be quite harsh. These are accidents.”

“Of course, what we cannot have are Islamist leaders who show one face to a foreign diplomat or U.N. representative, one of reassuring moderation, and then turn around to their own people and talk tough. They cannot have it both ways.”

There is hope in the fact that whatever sort of central authority emerges, whether it is strictly Islamist or some U.N.-brokered coalition, will need substantial international help. The problems of food, shelter and basic health care are so pressing that without enormous humanitarian investment, Somalia will slip further into crisis.

When President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he can help greatly simply by putting a stop to U.S. missile attacks on suspected Islamist terrorists. Whatever is gained by eliminating one murderous zealot is lost by turning entire Somali communities against Western aid efforts.

“One missile attack turns an entire area of the country into a no-go zone for us,” said Bowden. “All aid workers are viewed as spies for the U.S. anyway, and managing this humanitarian operation is fragile in the best of situations. If America would stop shooting missiles it would be the biggest single thing it could do to help.”

One of the most surprising things about Somalia is that despite its broken-down state, some things do seem to work. Most people are not starving. Markets thrive. Ould-Abdallah told me he’s always surprised that his cellphone works better there than [in Ethiopia] in some far more stable and prosperous neighboring countries.

“In some ways they are doing better than Rwanda, Ethiopia and the Sudan,” he said. [Because Ethiopia is being ruled by far worse blood-sucking vampires than Somalia.] “Maybe the question isn’t so much how that is so, but how much better would things be if there was a functioning government, law and order, basic services and a civil society?”

Somalia has a lesson for the rest of the world. It’s an old lesson, but one that we have yet to learn: Ignoring a problem does not kill it or contain it. A lawless zone soon enough becomes a danger to more than those trapped in its borders. We will have to engage with whoever comes to power in Somalia next, both for humanitarian reasons and in the best interests of the region and the world.

(Mark Bowden is an author and national correspondent for the Atlantic. Email: [email protected])