The World's Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia
Pundits, diplomats, and geopolitical strategists often speculate that Pakistan could become a failed state. If one wishes to see what such a state might look like, read this shocking and disturbing survey of the ravaged nation of Somalia located on the strategically important Horn of Africa. Fergusson, a freelance journalist and television commentator, has seen the carnage in Afghanistan, but he found the shattering of Somali civil society to be far worse. In a functional sense, Somalia has no national government. The Somali cabinet often has to meet in neighboring Kenya. Instead, power is exercised at the local level by competing clans and subclans, who rule by force of arms and terror. Often, the law is what the particular strongman in a locality says it is. One group, the ­al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab, tried enforcing Islamic fundamentalism through brutal methods often carried out by teenage boys. The result of this chaos has been mass emigration of the most talented and productive Somalis along with near total breakdown of health-care, educational, and law-enforcement institutions. This is a sobering but necessary examination of the process of national disintegration. --Jay Freeman