Regional Outlook : Hanging by a Thread : Somalia’s slide into chaos is drawing international troops into action. And it’s notAfrica’s only sick child.

One evening last week, one of the United Nations’ armed Pakistani soldiers on duty in Somalia made a rare foray off his base inside Mogadishu’s ruined international airport and into town. Within minutes he was shot and wounded by snipers and his vehicle was stolen.

That was only one milepost on a bad stretch for the international relief effort in the war-torn Horn of Africa country. Around the same time, armed bands invaded a relief plane on the ground at the port of Kismayu, robbing the passengers. In Mogadishu the staff of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spent an afternoon pinned down in their quarters while members of two hostile clans shot it out in front of their building in a dispute over a stolen vehicle. A 10-truck convoy of relief food was attacked on its way to Baidoa, perhaps the worst famine spot in the country, and 40 members of its escort were killed. Another relief plane was shot at and damaged while it landed at the provincial town of Bardera.

With relief workers running for cover and supplies backed up on ships and in warehouses, the delivery of food to Somalia’s starving masses has “slowed to a trickle,” one U.N. official said.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Western relief officials, diplomats and politicians are beginning to argue that the only way to eradicate the daily violence of Somali life and clear the way for relief shipments is to send in the Marines.

Somalia’s tragedy may take 1.5 million lives because uncontrollable violence has crippled international efforts to relieve the country’s famine. But that is just one of several human calamities in Africa raising calls for the international community to develop new ways of dealing with regional wars and their civilian victims.

Increasingly, those calls urge military intervention in humanitarian crises, possibly through a standing force of troops drawn from U.N. member countries.

In a list of options he presented to the Security Council Monday, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said he saw “no alternative” but to use force if necessary to guarantee delivery of relief supplies to those in need in Somalia. Boutros-Ghali’s favored approach would be to inject a force under U.N. command, although he described an action by member states, authorized by the Security Council, as an acceptable alternative.

Last week, Washington offered to send up to 30,000 troops to anchor a multinational U.N. force designed to free the Somali relief operation of armed harassment.

“We can’t always look to the United Nations,” said Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.), a frequent critic of U.S. and world response to the Somali famine. “We have to be willing to pick up the cudgel ourselves on occasion.”

Such military intervention in humanitarian disasters could never have happened during the Cold War, when the sort of conflicts now raging in Africa were often proxies for U.S.-Soviet confrontation. But with that superpower brinkmanship a thing of the past, many relief experts believe that Africa’s deadly conflicts require the development of new ways to deliver international aid over obstacles erected by ruthless warlords.

Somalia is only the most prominent among a host of African test cases for the notion that the outside world has assumed a duty to assist the victims of violent regional leaders.

In Liberia, rebels have renewed their assault on the capital, Monrovia, which is held by a multinational West African peacekeeping force dominated by Nigeria. Refugees have increased Monrovia’s population by nearly 1 million, even as relief ships have been forced to turn away, still laden with food, because of looting and shelling.

In southern Sudan, starvation looms for more than 1 million rural Africans caught in the middle of a 10-year civil war waged by the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum against Christian and animist rebels. The Sudanese government has regularly refused permission for U.N. relief flights to deliver food to civilians, despite having signed an accord last year giving the United Nations the right to provide humanitarian aid. “Sudan will soon be the new Somalia,” warned a recent dispatch from the Christian relief organization World Vision International.

But Somalia may present the clearest case for foreign intervention. A two-year civil war there has condemned millions to starvation and death. Civil and political authority have disappeared, especially in the two major seaports of Mogadishu and Kismayu, where banditry and random violence make it impossible to distribute relief food brought in by ship.

Over the last few months the United Nations has taken halting steps toward greater involvement in such conflicts. In resolutions last summer authorizing the dispatch of peacekeeping troops to Somalia, the Security Council noted that the disorder in that country constituted a “threat to international peace and stability”--a finding that under the U.N. Charter is a prerequisite to armed intervention in a member country’s affairs.

The United Nations has also agreed to send a special representative to Liberia, where the regional peacekeeping force has been overmatched by rebels. That could presage further U.N. support for the Africans or even an assumption of their role.

But the continuing tragedies also highlight the shortcomings of the U.N. approach. The 500 Pakistani troops sent to Somalia under the July resolutions have not yet been fully deployed, nearly two months after their arrival.

While the troops have been bivouacked at the side of a Mogadishu runway, the airport has been closed to relief flights because of continuing violence. And food shipments out of the neighboring seaport to famine centers in the interior have almost entirely ceased because of unchecked banditry.

Although the troops were brought in under an agreement with Somalia’s most important warlord, Gen. Mohammed Farrah Aidid, he has since reneged and threatened a frontal assault on the Pakistanis. The prospect of being outgunned in a pitched battle has kept the U.N. troops in their tents.

Many analysts take the standoff in Mogadishu as a reminder that military action in humanitarian crises--just as in all-out war--can be a morass of unpredictable reactions and counter-reactions.

To military and political theorists, Somalia, Sudan and Liberia “represent a mixture of phenomena we’re not well-equipped to deal with militarily, legally and politically: civil war and human calamity,” said David Scheffer, a senior associate in international law at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for Peace.

“We got good during the Cold War at a military system of deterrence and repelling large armed attacks,” Scheffer said. “We simply have not developed the capability to use military force to alleviate human misery and disaster, nor the military capability to stop civil wars.”

Uncertainty over how to intercede in internal conflicts is among the factors impeding an international response to the crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example.

Opinions on the sheer feasibility of a military assault on Somalia differ. Many military theorists view the typical Somali fighter as an untrained, undisciplined teen-ager with a contraband weapon and no field support or political allegiance. By contrast, the ethnic militias of Yugoslavia are crack troops.

It is true that the cause of Somalia’s gunplay is almost exclusively economic: armed bands fighting over the only valued commodity entering the country--relief food. But it may be unwise to dismiss the fighting abilities of the Somalis.

“You shouldn’t underestimate these people,” said Brig. Gen. Imtiaz Shaheen, the Pakistani commander of the 500 U.N. troops in Mogadishu. “You may think they’re just herds boys, but they are people with nothing to lose, and that makes them very dangerous.”

That appraisal is echoed by Col. Michael Houghton, director of peacekeeping operations for the Canada Department of National Defense, which will provide 750 troops to protect relief shipments in the breakaway region of northern Somalia beginning around the end of this month.

“You’re dealing with an extremely proud people, who are in an extremely desperate situation,” said Houghton, who has made two fact-finding trips to Somalia this year. “I don’t know how they will react.”

Houghton said last week that his troops would function under standard U.N. rules of engagement in effect in Somalia: They may fire to protect themselves, their fellows and their convoys from an attack that could cause injury or death, but they are not expected to provoke an engagement.

Some estimates say that a full-scale military occupation of the country would require tens of thousands of men and cause inestimable casualties. The injection of foreign troops could raise the level of violence by giving the fractious clan armies a single enemy to unite against.

One option is to use troops to create a cordon sanitaire within which people could be fed.

“Terrain is not difficult, there’s no jungle cover,” said Barry Blechman, chairman of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonprofit think tank in Washington. “If you bring in troops by an amphibious operation and airlift and secure an area, you could feed people safely for quite some time. I don’t think the troops would be opposed by bandits, who are lightly armed and not supported militarily. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be casualties, and it would be expensive.”

Some who doubt that Somalia’s warlords would choose to directly confront a foreign force acknowledge that they might simply retreat into the bush, awaiting the eventual withdrawal of foreign troops to emerge and resume preying on the innocents.

Particularly risky is sending a force without a clear mandate for combat and thus the potential for military quagmire. One need go no further than Liberia for a demonstration of how disaster can ensue.

That country’s civil war began on Christmas Eve, 1989, when rebel Charles Taylor crossed the border from Ivory Coast determined to oust President Samuel Doe. The following August, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) dispatched a seven-nation force to secure the capital at Monrovia. The Nigerian-led force managed to eject Taylor from the city and establish an interim government under a fragile cease-fire.

But the city was never secure enough for ECOWAS to withdraw, and on Oct. 15 Taylor renewed the fighting. In the six weeks since then, the ECOWAS force has been strengthened to 15,000 men, but it has not succeeded in breaking Taylor’s siege.

No less daunting are the political, diplomatic, military and financial questions of this kind of intervention.

First, there is the issue of sovereignty--the principle that a nation’s domestic affairs are its own concern and that its borders can be breached only under the most extreme provocation.

This question is perhaps least important in Somalia, which has had no functioning government since former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre fled in January, 1991. But Sudan, where an established government--albeit an unsavory, unpopular and unelected one--rules in the capital, would be a very different situation. Although some relief officials have argued that the Khartoum regime cannot demonstrate effective political control over much of the hungry south, foreign intervention over Khartoum’s objection would raise serious international issues.

“There’s a functioning central government in that country (Sudan), which is recognized by the world community even though relations are strained,” a leading Western diplomat in Africa said.

Another question is how to generate the grass-roots fervor necessary to get Western voters to support military incursions into foreign lands, possibly at the risk of heavy casualties.

In lining up popular support for the Persian Gulf War, the Bush Administration was helped by the familiarity of American and European voters with the Middle East’s geopolitical significance. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s access to nuclear and chemical technology made him seem more of a global threat, and his quest for oil fields made him an economic menace.

Generating the political will for military action could be much harder when the enemy is a tin-pot warlord fighting with cast-off weaponry in a place with no natural resources valued by anyone.

Most relief professionals also agree that military intervention would be pointless if not accompanied by a plan for longer-term development and reconstruction in the famine and war-torn countries. And that is an open-ended responsibility.

“No one wants to play the colonial power for five years,” a prominent diplomat in Africa said. “The costs are really significant. In Somalia you would have a country of 9 million as a dependent.”

For all that, feeling has clearly grown that the scale of the human disaster in Somalia is so great that some sort of military-supported relief operation, short of a full-scale invasion, is necessary.

“You can do an intervention without getting involved” in a country’s politics, said Frederick C. Cuny, an American relief specialist who is now consulting on Somalia for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In a study he wrote for the Center for Naval Analysis in August, Cuny envisioned using the Marines to establish sea landing sites for food along Somalia’s long coastline, entirely bypassing the trouble spots of Mogadishu and Kismayu.

U.S. aircraft could then ferry supplies into the interior. Deliveries would be made simultaneously to as many separate clan areas as possible, minimizing the chance that any clan would feel shortchanged and thus inclined to rectify the perceived imbalance through violence. All faction leaders in the area would be warned clearly and in writing not to interfere with the U.S. operation or those of private relief agencies, at risk of drawing an armed response.

“They should be specifically instructed to withdraw any armed forces near the site and warned that if any cargo or personnel are threatened during the operation that U.S. forces will be used to protect the cargoes the next time,” Cuny wrote.

Cuny argued that the largely disorganized Somali fighting units would respect the dominant firepower of the United States, especially “if U.S. intentions to remain neutral are expressed forcefully.”

A carefully designed, limited program like this would be preferable, he said, to waiting for an incident in which American relief workers or U.N. personnel are killed in a Somali attack.

“When that happens, there will be tremendous pressure on the U.S. to commit troops,” he said. “It would be far better to use them now, in a well-planned, carefully executed, supportive and deterrent mode, than to be forced into a hastily defined operation dictated by public opinion in the aftermath of a major incident.”

Others say that over the long term, the developed world will have to come to terms with its responsibility for offering succor to the innocent victims of regional warfare--particularly insofar as so many of the combatants were originally armed by the West during the Cold War.

“There are several emerging doctrines for humanitarian interventions,” Scheffer of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace said. “One is where the casualty rate accruing in a place like Somalia or Sudan gives rise to a new presumption of a threat to multinational peace and security.”

“As we enter the 1990s, the principle of nonintervention in civil wars will collapse,” he added, “because the necessity of responding to humanitarian consequences is unavoidable.”