Somalia Asks America For $1 Billion in Aid

WASHINGTON — Somalia's transitional federal government is asking America for $1 billion to help build a national army, police force, Foreign Ministry, tax collection system, courts, and democratic structures.

In other words, the U.N.-recognized transitional government needs to start building its nation from scratch. That was the message the government's minister for international cooperation, Dahir Jibreel, brought to the corridors of power in Washington last week.

Speaking to journalists at the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Jibreel said bluntly that today he would need just $10 million to buy a private militia capable of taking over his hometown in Somalia. According to the Weekly Standard, the transitional federal government is so strapped for funding that the presidential palace had to raise $15,000 last week to cover food expenses.

"Whoever has the resources will capture the country," Mr. Jibreel said in Washington on Thursday. "It's either the warlords, the Islamists, or us."

The stakes in Somalia have a recent echo in American military history. After American troops left Somalia in 1994, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden claimed that his mujahedeen had proved that the American military was a paper tiger. In the wake of the military victory that drove out the Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Courts Union on December 28, the transitional government is bracing for an Afghan- or Iraqi-style insurgency.

So far, Mr. Jibreel's plea for more resources has not been answered. Last week, the State Department announced that initially America would donate just $40 million to reconstruction efforts. Mr. Jibreel said he was not sure how much of that sum would even reach the transitional federal government.

Mr. Jibreel also was critical of American foreign policy toward his country in the recent past. As an example, he cited the State Department's encouragement of members of the transitional federal government to side with the alleged moderates who remained in the new regime in Mogadishu after the most radical elements of the Islamic Courts Union took power on July 22, 2006. That regime not only has been accused by American officials of harboring and working closely with wanted Al Qaeda terrorists, but also began implementing Taliban-style Islamic laws soon after the takeover.

"The United States offered us money to side with so-called moderates. To us that was like giving us money to buy our own headstones," Mr. Jibreel said.

While he was critical of some of last summer's diplomacy, Mr. Jibreel had high praise for America's military intelligence. He said an attack earlier this month in Ras Kamboni — which initial reports said killed a Qaeda terrorist wanted for planning the 1998 bombing of two American embassies in East Africa — was an example of good cooperation between the transitional federal government's human intelligence and the greater technical capacities of the CIA and the American military.

The strike on Ras Kamboni was later found not to have killed Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who Mr. Jibreel said was hiding with other wanted Islamist fighters in a dense jungle area at the southern tip of Somalia that is about the size of Rhode Island. The British press reported earlier this month that the Ras Kamboni operation killed dozens of civilians, but Mr. Jibreel disputed that characterization.