Thoroughly depressing account in the Guardian this weekend of what has happened in Somalia:

Mogadishu is now largely ruled by the Islamic Courts Union, a powerful movement that advocates a strict version of sharia law, including public executions, and has alleged ties to al-Qaida terrorists. The Horn of Africa, say some analysts, has just acquired its own Taliban. News of the takeover broke like a thunderclap over Washington. “This is worse than the worst-case scenarios – the exact opposite of what the US government strategy, if there was one, would have wanted,” said Ken Menkhaus, associate professor of political science and Somalia expert at Davidson College, North Carolina. It has emerged that the Bush administration bankrolled the warlords, who are secular, to gain access to al-Qaida suspects and block the rise of the Islamic militia. CIA operatives based in Nairobi funnelled $100,000 to $150,000 (£80,000) a month to their proxies, according to John Prendergast, an International Crisis Group expert on Somalia who has interviewed warlords. “This was counter-terrorism on the cheap. This is a backwater place that nobody really wants to get involved in, so [they] thought, let’s just do this and maybe we’ll get lucky.” Instead Washington got burned. Amid recriminations policymakers are asking how did the fiasco happen, and just how bad is it for US interests? Somalia has been without effective government since Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. Warlords control ports, airfields and roadblocks, gaining great wealth while offering little but trouble to the average Somali. In the vacuum of a failed state Islamic courts were established along clan lines to dispense justice where no other method existed. With financial support from local businessmen the courts, popular with Mogadishu residents for curbing some of the anarchy and providing basic services, built up a militia capable of taking on the warlords. In recent years radicals used the courts to promote the idea of an Islamic state. Cinemas accused of showing immoral western and Indian films were closed and celebrating new year was made a capital offence.

And, yes, this does sound like a rerun of the Taliban saga. Warlordism, whether it’s in Afghanistan, or, for that matter, pre-revolutionary China, inevitably offers ordinary people nothing but the prospect of chaos, uncertainty and danger, and in response they will opt for whoever will bring some sense of order into their lives–even if that means that they find themselves in a society where they can be executed for celebrating the new year. And, while similar considerations can help explain the rise of Hamas in Palestine, it’s a mistake to see this as a “Muslim” thing. The need for order and security will almost always trump the desire for liberty. Just ask Thomas Hobbes. He knew. Just ask those Yeltsin-era Russians who were so nostalgic for Stalin. They understood. The result, quite probably, is that the U.S. may well now be confronted with a new zone of terrorist opportunity (thoughts of Hercules and the Hydra come to mind), and the inevitable, appalling, grinding question reasserts itself. Given the unpalatable fact that, in our dangerously interconnected planet, leaving the Somalias of this world to their own problems is too risky a solution, is there any realistic alternative to nation-building? I wish there was. Yes, yes, with effort and imagination, we could, surely, win the intellectual argument against Islamic extremism in the Muslim sphere (I’m not always convinced that we try as hard as we could to do that), and we should try to do so. But winning arguments alone will not put bread on plates, or civility on the streets.