Word: somalia
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...SOMALIA: The failed state in the Horn of Africa looks tailor-made for a hangout for al-Qaeda. The country has no central government to speak of. Like Afghanistan, it's divided into fiefdoms presided over by competing clan leaders and warlords whose temporary loyalties can readily be bought. Muslim by faith, most Somalis are impoverished nomads who move between temporary huts. And Somalia has a homegrown militant group called al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (Unity of Islam) that the U.S. says is linked to al-Qaeda. The group was once host to a few training camps near the Kenyan border...
...Laden and those around him. Instead, it evolved out of bin Laden's own core of Arab veterans of the Afghan anti-Soviet war merging with elements of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and other groups, engaging with local Islamic struggles from Bosnia and Chechnya to the Philippines and Somalia by providing trained fighters and funding, gradually building up an international movement with al Qaeda at its core. Islamist terrorism predated bin Laden; his unique contribution was to turn it, through a series of mergers and alliances, into a single movement with global reach...
...Where would he go? Well, Pakistan may be a necessary port of call, but he would have wanted to move through it quickly. Countries on the U.S. watch-list such as Somalia, Yemen and the Philippines may be too "hot" for a fish as big as bin Laden. He might be more inclined to go where he's least expected - countries where the government would never dream of offering him sanctuary, but where he may nonetheless have a few powerful friends capable of hiding him. Free advice from an uninformed amateur: If he's not found in Tora Bora...
...psywar schemes have worked. During the 1993 intervention in Somalia, a leaflet urging support for peacekeepers mistranslated "United Nations" so Somalis thought it said "Slave Nations." A Pentagon study concluded that Commando Solo's broadcasts during NATO's 1999 air war over Kosovo were largely ineffective. In Desert Storm, psyops soldiers held focus groups among Iraqi POWs to determine what messages resonated. Afghanistan is still too unsettled for the 4th Group to survey prisoners or civilians on whether they've been swayed by the pitch. "I think we're making a difference," says Treadwell. The proof will...
...Needless to say, the prospect of being at ground zero of a new phase of the anti-terror war prompts dread on the part of Somalia's fledgling government. And European coalition partners such as Germany have also expressed reluctance to extend the military campaign beyond Afghanistan. But the challenge in Somalia and elsewhere right now may be quite different from Afghanistan - to prevent the emergence of a new hub of terrorist sanctuaries, rather than destroying an existing one. A mission, in other words, with heavy emphasis on intelligence and building the capacity and incentive for locals to stop...