For more than two decades, the United States has waged a quiet, little-noticed air and special operations war across the Horn of Africa. If most Americans are unaware of this fact, that is no accident. The campaign in Somalia has been conducted so far from public view, and with so little meaningful debate in Washington, that its continuation today is treated almost as a bureaucratic inevitability—a policy in search of a justification, defended out of habit rather than necessity. For there is no rational reason for the United States to be bombing Somalia at all. The entire enterprise stands as a textbook example of how inertia, institutional self-interest, and the perverse incentives of the national security bureaucracy combine to produce destructive policies that accomplish nothing for the American people.

To begin with, the origins of the current conflict lie not in ancient hatreds or some inevitable African power struggle but in Washington’s own actions. Al-Shabaab—the very group the United States claims to be fighting—emerged directly from U.S. policy. In the early 2000s, Somalia had a measure of stability under the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a loose coalition of local authorities that managed to reduce violence and impose a workable degree of order in a country wrecked by decades of civil conflict. Because the ICU included Islamist elements, obviously, Washington—fresh from its Manichean post-9/11 worldview—perceived it as a threat. The George W. Bush administration encouraged and supported Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of Somalia to overthrow the ICU. The result was predictable to anyone familiar with basic insurgency dynamics: the relatively moderate ICU was shattered, and the more extreme elements coalesced into a new, hardened militant group—Al-Shabaab.