Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge

[RickSp]

NY Times

A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from American government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize. The criticism was expressed privately by United States government officials with direct knowledge of the debate. And the comments flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias in the country dealt a sharp setback to American policy in the region and broke the warlords' hold on the capital, Mogadishu. The officials said the C.I.A. effort, run from the agency's station in Nairobi, Kenya, had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of Al Qaeda believed to be hiding there. Officials say the decision to use warlords as proxies was born in part from fears of committing large numbers of American personnel to counterterrorism efforts in Somalia, a country that the United States hastily left in 1994 after attempts to capture the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his aides ended in disaster and the death of 18 American troops. The American effort of the last year has occasionally included trips to Somalia by Nairobi-based C.I.A. case officers, who landed on warlord-controlled airstrips in Mogadishu with large amounts of money for distribution to Somali militias, according to American officials involved in Africa policy making and to outside experts.

What a surprise. Meddling in the affairs of another country by supporting petty warlords has backfired once again. Will we ever learn?

[m3talsmith_redu]

No it won't ever end. We need to stop looking at the federal level and stop the local meddling.

'How much do you know about what your city does? How often do you go to city meetings? Is there any local problems that could be solved through private ingenuity?'

These are all questions we need to start asking ourselves. We shouldn't ever stop asking ourselves these questions either.

Wake up America and get active. Local things grow into federal things; not the other way around. So if you see wide spread corruption, it came , more than likely, from your very back yard.