The worst country on Earth

That's what the Economist Intelligence Unit calls Somalia in The World in 2010, the Economist magazine's annual world survey and forecast for the coming year. Somalia takes the prize, they say, for "piracy, poverty and perdition".

Somalia is the world's most corrupt state, according to the World Bank. It has no effective government, no rule of law and virtually no infrastructure. Most of the country is controlled by one or the other of two radical Islamist factions, both of which demand the imposition of sharia law.

The Economist calls this "the Talibanisation of Somalia". Indeed the parallels with Afghanistan and Iraq are striking. You have radical and less-radical Muslims killing each other. You have the extreme xenophobia (and they don't like foreigners very much either). You have the corruption. You have the corrupt and incompetent "governments" whose writ does not run outside the capital city. And you have foreign armies of occupation trying to bring some order and "restore democracy".

But Somalia is different in that this "state" failed decades ago. The situation in Somalia today persists in spite of -- perhaps because of -- decades of foreign aid backed up by the armed intervention of the USA, Canada and other nations in the 80s and 90s.

Has the UN (really the US) debacle in Somalia been forgotten? Apparently so. As Patrick O'Bama [please check correct name, ed.] ponders the next move in Afghanistan, he would do well to read The Road to Hell, by Michael Maren (The Free Press, New York, 1997).

The book purports to be an examination of the ravaging effects of foreign aid and international charity. But the case study Maren uses is Somalia. He tells how CARE unwittingling assisted a Somali dictator in building a political and economic power base. He explains how the UN and Save the Children (and other NGOs) provided raw materials for the warring factions.

Above all, Maren exposes the political side of foreign aid and "humanitarian intervention". The money that you and I give to relieve the poverty and misery of Somalis, Sudanese, Senegalese or whatever is stolen by their own people and by the well-paid "administrators" of the charities themselves -- the "agents of virtue" (Paul Theroux's phrase) who do well out of doing good.

If you think your charitable giving is making the Third World a better place, think again! If you think our governments are trying to do good, think again!

If you think our interventions in Somalia, Iraq or Afghanistan were for humanitarian reasons, think again! If you think those interventions are doing any good for the people of those countries, think again!

But if sticking our noses and the muzzles of our guns into the affairs of failed states like Afghanistan is not the answer, what is the answer? I'm still thinking about that. More later.