Mohamed Siad Barre

September 10, 2012 | Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Gunpowder & Lead

LIFG and Al Qaeda: A Response to Zelin

On Friday, I had a post at G&L questioning the field’s conve...

June 14, 2011 | World Defense Review

Somalia Still Sinking as Eritrea Entertains Enemies

September has not been a good month in the sometime Somali capital of Mogadishu, even by the relative standards of a failed state that has not had an effective central government in the sixteen y...

February 1, 2011 | J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Somalia in Need of New Approach Two Decades after State Collapse

Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of the night when Mohamed Siyad Barre, president of the last entity that could plausibly be described as the government of Somalia, fled Mogadishu in hi...

October 18, 2010 | World Defense Review

Somalia’s New Prime Minister: Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered

Just when it seems things can get no worse for Somalia's dubiously legitimate, utterly ineffective, and wholly self-serving "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG), the embattled clique pull...

September 30, 2010 | World Defense Review

A Subtle, But Significant, Shift in U.S. Somali Policy Opens the Door to Realism

Last Friday, speaking in New York to reporters one day after attending a major meeting on Somalia chaired by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the margins of the 65th session the Un...

May 27, 2010 | J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Ballots and Bullets: The Tale of the Two Somalias

Last week, Somalis marked the fiftieth anniversary of their achievement of independence from colonial rule. The contrasting manner in which two parts of the onetime Somali Democratic Republic obs...

January 29, 2010 | American Bar Association

Amici Curiae Brief for Samantar v. Yousuf

Dr. j. Peter Pham Former Somali General Mohamed Ali Samantar was defense minister and vice president (1980-1986) and, once the post was revived, prime minister (1987-1990) under Somalia&...

November 4, 2009 | CTR Vantage

Understanding al-Shabaab

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Madeleine Gruen The advance of Islamist groups in Somalia is seen as a cause for concern by Western law enforcement and...

October 22, 2009 | Middle East Quarterly

The Strategic Challenge of Somalia’s Al-Shabaab

Since emerging from an era of colonialism under Italy and Britain, Somalia has passed through military dictatorship, famine, and civil war to regional fragmentation. In the modern period, America...

September 24, 2009 | World Defense Review

Putting Puntland’s Potential into Play

By Dr. J. Peter Pham In last week's column, I noted that the United States military and intelligence communitie...

July 25, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Mired in Mogadishu

Two weeks ago a "national reconciliation congress" that Somalia's ineffectual "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG), under pressure from international donors who are its only means of supp...

April 11, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Peacekeepers with No Peace to Keep

Somewhere along the crooked path that runs from the collapse of the Soviet Union that signaled the emergence of the United States as the world's lone superpower to the seemingly intractable...

March 28, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Salvaging Security in Somalia

Two weeks ago in this space, I reported that the supporters of Somalia's defeated Islamic Courts Union (ICU) were reconstituting themselves as the "Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of...

January 17, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Somalia May Save the War on Terrorism

In my last column in this series, I argued that while “Ethiopia may not have been the ideal intervener in Somalia, better it than no one and perhaps the one thing worse than Ethiopia interv...

January 8, 2007 |

Strikes in Somalia

On Sunday, a United States Air Force AC-130 gunship launched a strike against what Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman on Tuesday called “principal al-Qaeda leadership” operating in sout...

January 4, 2007 | World Defense Review

Sweeping Up in Somalia

The reports continue to stream in of the hasty retreat of the militants of Somalia's Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in the face of an unexpectedly heavy offensive by Ethiopian air and land force...

December 14, 2006 | World Defense Review

Not Being Had by Al-Itihaad

The news from the Horn of Africa continues to be worrisome. The recent catastrophic floods that swept through the region have not slowed the advance of the radical Islamists, who in June seized c...

October 26, 2006 | World Defense Review

Update: Islamist Radicals Still on the March in Somalia

While recent crises in other parts of the world have pushed them even farther from the headlines, the Islamist radicals who took control of the sometime Somali capital of Mogadishu in early June...

July 19, 2006 | World Defense Review

Dangerous Fiction: A Tale of Two Cities, Part II

Last week, I began this "Tale of Two Cities" by pointing to the danger inherent in confusing real effectiveness for the juridical fiction of international diplomatic recognition. Specifically, I...

July 12, 2006 | World Defense Review

Dangerous Fiction: A Tale of Two Cities, Part I

Like Cassandra after Agamemnon's Greeks emerged from the Trojan Horse, I have had little time to derive any satisfaction from being justified in my longstanding warnings about the risks to i...