Since the Black Hawk debacle, U.S. policymakers have generally seen this sliver of sand along the extreme eastern edge of Africa, with its nine million inhabitants, less as a country than as a case study in anarchy and another failed front in the war on terror. “U.S. policy since the early nineties has been complete and total neglect,” U.S. Undersecretary for African Affairs, Jendayi Frazier said last week in the dwindling days of the Bush administration. But engagement has not worked either. Over the past two years, in the name of its ongoing war against al Qaeda, the United States has launched missile and gunship attacks that have killed civilians, “rendered” terrorist suspects from Somalia to Afghanistan, and supported Ethiopia’s brutal occupation. These tactics have succeeded mostly in giving Somalia’s hard-line Islamists greater credibility and fueled rabid anti-Americanism, since the U.S. is seen as intimately tied to the Ethiopians.

In fact, Washington’s “whack-a-mole” strategy, which aims at “plinking bad guys when they pop up,” is fueling the growing insurgency by enraging Somalis, according to Ken Menkhaus, a professor of political science at Davidson College. Somalis have no problem doing the math: for the one high-profile al Qaeda target that the U.S. claims to have killed or captured, more than 6,000 Somalis have been killed, and roughly 900,000 have been forced to flee the capital of Mogadishu: roughly three quarters of the city.

“We’ve helped create a self-fulfilling prophecy – now there is a new, home-grown terrorist threat in the form of the shabaab, that has the potential to become more dangerous to Somalis, the region, and the U.S. than the small number of East African Al Qaeda operatives ever were,” Menkhaus added. This policy, and its aftermath, has left the incoming Obama administration ill-prepared to engage on a nexus of questions with repercussions far beyond Somalia’s deadly coast: How do we handle a handful of terrorists hiding inside a famine? Do we need to mobilize behind an international peacekeeping force? Should we try to engage in a failed state politically, or should we walk away?

“Frankly, my greatest fear is that we are going to neglect Somalia,” Secretary Frazier said. This, she added, would not be the first time that the United States looked away from an internal political problem, only to regret that blindness later. Frazier said, “The United States turned its eyes away from Rwanda at a critical time.”

Last spring, I traveled to Somalia, Eritrea, and Kenya. Since my last visit to Mogadishu in June 2007, much had changed—and not for the better. Many of the people I’d met a year earlier and had hoped to see again were either gone or dead. Yet, as usual, most of the key players survived. In Mogadishu, Asmara, and Nairobi, I spent time with four of them: Hussein Farah Aideed, the U.S.-citizen son of arch-warlord Mohamad Farah Aideed; Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, spiritual leader of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and proud holder of a spot on the U.S. Terrorist List; Ibrahim Addou, the foreign minister of the ICU; and Mohammad Dheere, then mayor of Mogadishu. From my conversations with them, and with dozens of other Somalis I met, I hoped to understand Somalia’s seemingly ceaseless cycle of violence, to see why the old order repeatedly collapses and what a political solution might look like. And I wanted, of course, to hear from Somalis about what they hoped the United States would do, both to repair their country’s shattered fortunes and to recalibrate the war on terror so that it didn’t look like it was targeting all nine million of them.

Our Man in Asmara

On a chilly afternoon last spring, Hussein Farah Aideed lumbered down the stairs of the Great Mosque in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. Mussolini had the mosque built in the 1930s, hoping to win Muslim approval for his African empire, and its fluted minaret and Romanesque arches give it an incongruous Italianate air. At 42, Hussein Farah Aideed, sports his own incongruities. Dressed in a long white robe and a blue blazer, he looked like a kinder, fleshier version of his notorious father, Mohamad Farah Aideed, the Somali warlord of Black Hawk Down infamy, who died in 1996. A U.S. citizen who first came to America as a political refugee when he was 16, Hussein is waging his own proxy war of sorts with the United States: he’s a member of the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia, a coalition of ousted Islamist and secular groups with the common goal of kicking U.S. ally Ethiopia out of their country. He and the opposition leaders live in Eritrea on the Eritrean government’s dime. Separated by ethnic and religious divisions and bitter history, Eritrea and neighboring Ethiopia are the Hatfields and McCoys of East Africa, and Eritrea will do anything to undermine its enemy’s occupation of Somalia.