Help Wanted Now is no time for the world to go wobbly on Somalia. BY OMAR ABDIRASHID ALI SHARMARKE | JUNE 21, 2010

June 25, 2010 by admin
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“Shabab enforcers flog women for failing to wear head-to-toe garments, even though many families simply cannot afford them”

The world has seen this kind of savagery before, when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan”

“Shabab enforcers flog women for failing to wear head-to-toe garments, even though many families simply cannot afford them”

Our government is closely watching the events unfolding in Afghanistan, where U.S. and British soldiers are fighting bravely in a war we consider a distant front of our own. Somalis are eager to do their part in pushing back against the menace of Islamist extremism, but they lack the resources to do so.”

In recent months, many in the United States seem to have given up on Somalia. In March, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations issued a special report calling for a “new” policy of “constructive disengagement” from our country — in other words, the withdrawal of international support for the Somali government. That idea is undoubtedly tempting to many in Washington, as well as in London and other Western capitals, given the difficulty of the problems we face as a government working to restore order across a hostile land. But this supposedly new approach would be as disastrous today as it has been in the past, both for Somalia and the international community.

In fact, “constructive disengagement” is a nice euphemism for the same very old and thoroughly failed policies that Western countries have used for years to wrongly argue that Somalia’s problems can remain in Somalia. This was the prevailing attitude of much of the international community during most of the past two decades — until rampant piracy drew navies from around the world toward Somali waters. The presence offshore of a flotilla of warships from the navies of more than two dozen countries illustrates vividly how our country’s internal problems are a pressing international issue.

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