Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain will convene a big international meeting on Somalia on Thursday. The tasks: stopping piracy in the Indian Ocean, uprooting terrorism, relieving a famine and ending a civil war. The approach: Western ships, U.S. drones, African soldiers and international money for the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu.

This is all very laudable, except for one thing: It won’t work.

The transitional government, established in 2004, has no credibility, in part because it could not exist without foreign backing. In fact, many Somalis don’t want a central government. Or, to be exact, they are so embittered by their experience of centralized power that they would rather have no government than the type that their African neighbors and the West have designed for them.

The international community’s insistence on establishing a government — almost any government — in Somalia is based on a faulty understanding of what has gone wrong there. Conventional wisdom has it that the collapse of the Somali state in 1991 led to civil war and anarchy, and then to a famine and a failed American intervention (“Black Hawk Down”). After that came piracy, infiltration by Al Qaeda and another famine, this one exacerbated by the hostility of the newly empowered Shabab fundamentalist militia toward Western aid agencies.

While broadly true, this account is incomplete. First forgotten fact: The most vicious and widespread wars in Somalia happened in 1988-90, before the government of President Mohammed