WASHINGTON: Just less than nine years ago, the first Bush administration deployed thousands of US troops to a war-torn, food-starved Muslim country with no power structure other than rival warlords. Once US forces had landed and undertaken their primary mission - guarding food convoys - the Bushes belatedly began to consider a thorny question: how to end their adventure in Somalia without leaving the country in chaos.

Bill Clinton succeeded George H. W. Bush before the problem was solved, and Clinton’s solution, an ambitious UN-led attempt to build a new Somali political order, ended in catastrophe. The result was the hardening of a smug, finger-pointing wisdom in the GOP about Somalia that has shaped the party’s thinking about military interventions ever since. ”Somalia,” said George W. Bush last year, “changed into a nation-building mission, and that is where the mission went wrong.”

That was a good slogan for the campaign trail. But now that the US finds itself launched on another military mission in another starving Muslim country ridden with warlords, it is worth revisiting the history of Somalia - before the catastrophe is repeated.

In Afghanistan, the Bushes once again are three weeks into a primary military mission, destroying the Taliban, but have as yet no clear answer to the follow-up problem of restoring political order. Some, like Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are clinging to the Bush position of 1992, insisting that creating a new Afghan authority is not part of the US mission - even though it is hard to imagine an end to the war without one. Others, especially at Colin Powell’s State Department, have embarked on an exercise in, well, nation building, complete with the Clintonesque gambit of a handoff to the UN, even though Secretary General Kofi Annan has made it clear that the post-Somalia UN will not be so easily had.

All of this is watched with a rueful sense of deja vu by the two Americans who did the most to shape the Somalia mission, former Bush envoy Robert Oakley and former UN commander Jonathan Howe. For years, veteran diplomat Oakley and Howe, a retired US admiral, have been cast as duelling representatives of the Bush and Clinton Somalia records. But a consensus emerged about why Somalia failed - and how its lessons apply to Afghanistan.

Oakley, a former ambassador to Somalia and Pakistan, had the tricky task in late 1992 of brokering political deals on behalf of an administration that kept insisting publicly, a la Rumsfeld today, that such work was not part of its mission. In the end, he managed to induce the country’s two biggest warlords to agree to a cease-fire and made them respect it - thanks to several aggressive interventions by US forces. The lesson, he now says, was that “the political side and the military side of an intervention are united. If you don’t get the political side right, you are going to get in military trouble.”

As Oakley sees it, the Somalia mission went wrong when the political and military objectives sharply diverged, along with the people running them. The UN decided to build a new political structure for the country, starting from the grass roots - an ambitious process that threatened the warlords. The Clinton administration stripped down the military forces, withdrawing most US troops and turning security over to a mixed bag of international soldiers. “The more ambitious the objective, the more deeply you have to be involved,” said Oakley. ”The mission was going in two different directions.”

Howe, whose job it was to carry out the UN mission, identifies the same root problem - a lack of US will to provide the resources or military clout needed to stabilize the country. Yes, he now says, the political plan was probably too ambitious - and it was developed by the same kind of broad consultative process now being organized for Afghanistan. But the real problem, he says, was that the US was unwilling to back the plan with enough funding to create a functioning government or the day-to-day troop presence that could have prevented the warlords from warring against the UN.

“You’ve got to be sure that in a rough neighbourhood with a whole lot of unruly warlords - and Afghanistan does sound a bit like Somalia - you have a force that can handle it, and you have the tools for nation building,” said Howe. “The UN is a well-meaning but weak organization, and it can’t succeed on its own.”

Today the US has the biggest ingredient missing in Somalia - strong domestic support for the mission and a willingness to accept sacrifices and casualties. But, as in Somalia, the Bush administration has let the political and military tracks diverge - the bombing may be precisely targeted on the Taliban, but it has no political endgame to guide it. The political talks that are under way are ambitious, seeking to include every faction and ethnic group under a UN umbrella, but already there is talk of turning security over to non-US foreign forces. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.