In two decades, the international community sponsored eighteen Somali reconciliation conferences, an average of about a conference every year or so. Every time the same mantra is repeated about how this is the last chance, the best hope, or even the last best hope for Somalia to have a functioning government. And each time, either the talks fail and no government is formed or a government is patched together that is a government only in name. One would think that by the fifth, tenth or may be the fifteenth attempt, the international community would realize that they are barking up the wrong tree and need to re-direct their energies. As the saying goes to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results is a sign of insanity. But the international community pays no attention to the simple truth of this saying, and so like an insane person, it goes on sponsoring one conference after another, naming one government after another. And so now we have a so-called Somalia government whose very identity is in question: whether it is a Sharia-based religious theocracy or a secular government; whether its correct name is the Federal Transitional Government of Somalia (TFG) or the National Unity Government of Somalia, and so on.

After the Black Hawk disaster of Operation Restore Hope, the US stayed away from many of these Somalia reconciliation circuses, and rightly so. But with the rise of religious terrorism in Somalia, the US gradually became more and more involved. However, this renewed US involvement in Somali affairs did not bring with it any better understanding of the Somali situation. Instead of learning from its past failures in Somalia, the US allowed itself to be brow-beaten into accepting one of the results of those infamous circuses, the TFG, as the legitimate government of Somalia. And as if to make up for lost time, US diplomats went full blast about how the TFG under Abdillahi Yusuf is the legitimate government, how it offered a “window of opportunity”, how it is the best chance, the last hope, and the best last hope for Somalia.

When it became clear that no amount of propaganda is going to make Abdillahi Yusuf’s rickety show work, he was finally dropped, but not before another reconciliation conference was arranged outside the country, and Sheikh Sharif, the former head of the terrorist Islamic Courts Union was anointed as the new president of Somalia. And again the US propaganda machine, supplemented by that of the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and to a lesser extent the Arab League went into action, and exactly the same terms that were used to describe Abdillahi Yusuf’s government began to be recycled: how Sheikh Sharif’s government offers a “window of opportunity”, how it is the last chance, the best hope, and the last best hope for Somalia.

The latest events in Mogadishu makes clear that all that talk about last hope and best chance was just a bunch of baloney and that Sheikh Sharif’s government exists only in name, much like Abdillahi Yusuf’s. This is the reality and no amount of playing with words is going to change it. With most of southern Somalia, including most of Mogadishu, in the hands of terrorists, the question that should engage US policymakers is whether they would move before it is too late to prevent terrorists from extending their influence further north to Somaliland and Puntland or not? The answer to this question may decide the political fate of the Horn of Africa.

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