The New Somalia: A Grimly Familiar Rerun

But Mr. Dinari said help had been slow to arrive, partly because international organizations were spending millions of dollars on a staff based in Kenya, which is deemed a much safer place to work, instead of investing those resources in Somalia.

But many say that argument rings hollow. Security in Somalia does not depend on foreign troops or foreign aid. At least, it never has. In the early 1990s, the United States and the United Nations poured hundreds of millions of dollars into stabilizing Somalia and they failed notoriously, leaving the country as capriciously violent and hopeless as ever.

Then along came the Islamists, who during their six-month reign last year pacified the hornet’s nest of Mogadishu by persuading clans to voluntarily disarm their militias and persuading Somalis, most of whom are Sunni Muslims, to buy into their Islam-is-the-answer solution.

One Western diplomat laughed when asked if a modest force of peacekeepers ― the African Union is proposing around 8,000 ― could deliver the level of stability that the Islamists had delivered on their own.

“No way,” he said, speaking anonymously under diplomatic rules. “And the government’s urgency for peacekeepers shows you just how badly they’ve done with reconciliation.”