20060526
    Somalia is an often unremarked corner in the ever-expanding conflict with Islamic fundamentalism. Yet, in the recent months, a growing fundamentalist insurgency in Somalia has made significant headway in securing Mogadishu for Islamic fundamentalism, the necessary step in making Somalia into the next Islamic state.
    The threat posed by this expansion of Islamic fundamentalism in Eastern Africa is profound because if the current insurgency is successful, Somalia could represent the next of the world’s persistent Islamic theocracies. Such a theocracy could easily become another state like Afghanistan under the Taliban, a potential harbor for terrorism and the further spread of the same fundamentalism to other unstable regions of Africa.
    It is remarkable that this threat is so much ignored on the world stage, as the same mistake was made in Afghanistan after the end of the Soviet occupation. That withdrawal left a civil war and a power vacuum that allowed the Taliban to come to power and set the stage for the events that led to 9-11.
    Perhaps more important than the parallel comparison to Afghanistan is the fact that the region around Somalia already has a reputation for involvement in Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism. Consider that Osama bin Laden was based in Sudan before he eventually moved to Afghanistan, and one of the earliest acts of terrorism by al-Qaeda was the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.
    Further, there is some evidence that the fight in Somalia might be attracting the same foreign fighters that fueled the terrorist camps in Afghanistan, add effectiveness to the ongoing rebellion in Chechnya, and continue to plague Coalition forces in Iraq. All of these facts combine together to create the potential for a radical new state of affairs in Somalia and East Africa and a potential new enemy in the ongoing War on Terror.
    The current state of affairs in Somalia is further proof of the rapid and unchecked spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the wider Muslim world. To a certain extent, the current state of affairs in Somalia is mirrored in the ongoing expansion of Islamic fundamentalism in dozens of other countries like Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.
    Yet, the success of the Islamic fundamentalist insurgency in Somalia is not guaranteed. In fact, the insurgency could be defeated by a simple and sustained focus by the international community on helping more moderate- and more pro-Western- forces in Somalia successfully stabilize the country by ending the ongoing civil war and establishing an effective central government. This same model, to one extent or another, can be applied to wherever Islamic fundamentalism is spreading.
    Unfortunately, such a solution requires the international community to acknowledge that the spread of Islamic fundamentalism is actually a threat and then develop the will to do something about that threat. Until such conditions exist, the potential future threat of an Islamic fundamentalist Somalia continues to exist and the war that such fundamentalism fuels threatens to be than much longer.
DLH
