Somalia: Do It Right but Don’t Stay Forever : Restoring a government will demand a multinational effort

Advance elements of a U.S. expeditionary force expected ultimately to total at least 28,000 are now ashore in Somalia and moving to secure the sites needed to support their primary task of famine relief. The initial landings met no opposition. The anarchic country’s two leading and competing warlords, who bear an enormous responsibility for preventing the distribution of food, say they have ordered their gunmen to make no trouble.

That doesn’t guarantee quiet days and calm nights--virtually every Somali male, warlord-employed or not, is armed and many are desperate--but it could help ease the job of building up the infrastructure to move food to the starving, and so speed the day when the U.S. mission can be considered accomplished.

What for now is the apparent open-endedness of that mission gives pause. The U.N. Security Council resolution under which the American forces entered Somalia is vague in its mandate, while the public statements from Bush Administration officials about the nature and probable duration of the military operation have been less than precise. On Tuesday, President-elect Bill Clinton noted, quite accurately, that it will take some time before anything approaching a functioning political system can be built in Somalia, and he seemed to suggest that this might require the prolonged presence of “a multinational peacekeeping force.” Left unclear was whether Clinton thought that force should include or be led by Americans.

Our own view is that the United States is doing the right thing in taking the lead to halt the appalling loss of lives brought on by what is largely a man-made famine. The means to end the starvation that so far has taken 300,000 lives have in fact long been available; plenty of food has been shipped to Somalia over the last few years. The problem is the food isn’t allowed to reach the starving: Up to 90% of it is stolen by the thugs who flourish in a climate where no law is respected.

This bleak fact casts a long shadow over the future. The humanitarian effort that the United States now spearheads certainly is doable; whether it will prove durable depends on whether order can be imposed on a land ripped apart by violent clannish rivalries. Restoring order and civil government first of all demands a large level of disarmament in a country weighed down by weapons. There is no need to commit U.S. forces long-term to this task. Let it instead become a regional or multinational responsibility, under U.N. auspices. Many countries are able--and morally obligated--to help.

U.S. intervention in Somalia is a needed response to a tragedy. In its initial phase, however, it unhappily took on elements of farce. The international television crews that met the first troops ashore were doing their jobs, if not necessarily in a manner that invites admiration. Those with long memories might recall the Marines sent to Lebanon in 1958 to help stabilize that country, another venture into the unknown where the most dangerous presence on the beach during the landing proved to be press photographers and sunbathing tourists. That intervention was brief and low-cost. We hope for the same in Somalia.