But one thing no one in the United States is talking about is repeating the country's actions 20 years ago, when the overthrow of Mohamed Siad Barre's 21-year military rule and the ensuing civil war prompted a similarly dire famine crisis in southern Somalia. U.S. troops were dispatched to smooth the way for aid delivery, and the effort to alleviate the famine is mostly remembered in the United States today for how it ended: a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter shot down with a rocket-propelled grenade over Mogadishu and the body of a U.S. Army soldier* aboard dragged through the city's streets.
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As an advisor to the initial U.S. mission in Somalia, I remember the affair differently. "Black Hawk Down" may have been a disaster, but the U.S.-led relief effort that preceded this event was not; Operation Restore Hope, as it was called, saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives.
Many observers have drawn the wrong lesson from Somalia: that all interventions in anarchic places, no matter how well-intentioned, are riskier than they are worth. Today, faced with a new catastrophe in the Horn of Africa, we need to draw the better lesson. Another military intervention is not the answer, but by treating the famine as a political problem with potential solutions rather than a hopeless lost cause, the United States can help stop a tragic situation from becoming even more so.
Somalia had been deteriorating since the mid-1980s, but matters came to a head in January 1991, when a broad alliance of clan-based insurgents under the umbrella of the Somali National Alliance closed in on Mogadishu, finally forcing Siad Barre to flee the capital on Jan. 27. As the government collapsed, fighting broke out among clan factions -- led by rival generals Mohamed Farrah Aidid and Ali Mahdi Mohamed -- for local and regional control. Siad Barre's forces tried to fight their way back to the capital, and the battles that ensued forced virtually the entire civilian population to flee the "triangle of death" between Kismayo, Bardera, and Baidoa. The scorched-earth policy of the combatants destroyed the livelihoods of nomadic herders and sedentary farmers alike. More than half a million Somalis sought refuge in neighboring Kenya, and an equal number scattered farther from their homes. Many barely survived in camps on the outskirts of Mogadishu, where fighting broke out between the two warring factions for control of the port and airport.
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