Of course, very few of these diplomats had ever been to Somalia, but I was new and impressionable and eagerly jotted down their comments as if they were facts. So I was surprised when I started exploring Mogadishu to find boys — and girls — in school. One of the first things the Taliban had done when they seized power in Afghanistan was to close girls’ schools, believing that half of humanity deserves to be shuttered in ignorance. But in Mogadishu I saw young couples strolling by the seaside, and men and women working together to lift garbage from the streets. It didn’t seem like window dressing. There were no other foreign journalists in town. This was just normal Somali life, finally resuming.

The peace was secured by young men with struggling beards and green prayer caps. They talked little but carried enormous guns. They succeeded at something no one else had managed to accomplish, including 25,000 American soldiers sent to Somalia in the early 1990s by the first President Bush in a humanitarian operation that ended in ignominy. For the first time in 15 years — and sadly the only time since then — Mogadishu wasn’t an abattoir. The killing had stopped, and the populace seemed indebted to the young men who had stopped it. They simply called them the Youth, but they used the Arabic word, al-Shabaab.

The point of all this isn’t to airbrush the Shabaab and the later horrible things they did. I’ve covered those, too — attacks in Kenya that maimed friends and suicide bombings that smeared children across walls. Even from those earliest days, known Qaeda terrorists were hiding within the Islamist ranks, and I’m not saying it would have been easy sifting out the moderates from the messianic killers. But the American government didn’t even try.

In December that same year, the Pentagon helped the army of Ethiopia, Somalia’s historic enemy, invade. That decision set off a chain reaction that continues to plague us: The Islamists were pushed underground; the Shabaab became an insurgency, then a terrorist group; pirates hit the high seas; famines broke out across the land. The American government keeps getting sucked deeper in, and just this month, a Navy SEAL was killed near Mogadishu, the first known American combat casualty in Somalia in more than 20 years. I can’t help wondering whether his death could have been avoided.

I WAS RELIEVED that evening when Abu Mansoor came up not with a pistol but with a black plastic bag.

“I got this for you in the Bakara market.”

I reached in and pulled out something relatively slender but as heavy as a brick.

“It’s in English,” he said. “Will you read it?”

I didn’t know what to say. It was the most beautiful Quran I had ever seen. He leaned toward me and grabbed my hand.