Word: mogadishu
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This much is made vividly clear in Mark Bowden's powerful best seller, Black Hawk Down, which is a virtually minute-by-minute reconstruction of the helicopter and humvee incursion into Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993, that resulted in unacceptable American casualties and geopolitical repercussions still rumbling today. Director Ridley Scott's terrific movie adaptation is only inferentially concerned with the motives and back story Bowden provided. It also lacks a movie-star hero--a Tom Cruise or a Mel Gibson--reassuring us, simply by showing up, that everything will come...
...Inside Somalia, locals doubt the terrorists are heading their way. Somalis tend to gossip too much for foreigners to feel secure, and few Somalis could resist the price on the heads of al-Qaeda leaders. "We would hand them over and claim the money to pay our men," says Mogadishu chief of police Hassan Awaale. "We have enough problems of our own without more [from them]." U.N. officials, Western diplomats and aid workers agree that al-Itihaad training camps of the '90s don't exist anymore and that the group was destroyed as a military force after Ethiopian forces entered...
...them there - not really the size that you?d expect to be a part of a vanguard assault on the city. As one official put it, "that?s enough to get into trouble, but not enough to get out." In other words, you don?t want to cross that Mogadishu line where you?ve got U.S. forces stuck in the middle of a disaster without sufficient support...
...Laden link to Somalia sidesteps the government, instead running through a local Islamist group called Al Itihad al Islamiya that may have established links with Al Qaeda in the early 1990s. U.S. officials also cite allegations that some of the Somali fighters that killed 18 U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu in 1993 may have been trained by bin Laden lieutenant Mohammed Atef. Atef had been an Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader before becoming Al Qaeda's operational chief and allegedly helping mastermind the September 11 attacks. He was reportedly killed two weeks ago during a U.S. bombing raid in Afghanistan...
...military certainly has ugly memories of Somalia. But if it did choose to strike at targets there, the Pentagon would be unlikely to repeat the mistakes of the 1993 Mogadishu fiasco. A more likely scenario would be the Afghanistan model of air power used in combination with local proxy forces - the Ethiopians come to mind, although there would be plenty of local warlords open to turning against any Al Qaeda elements for a small...