AMY EDDINGS:
Time for a little geopolitics quiz. Which country is the focus of the most aggressive U.S. military intervention after Iraq and Afghanistan? If you guessed Somalia, you're not only right but you're also a very close reader of the newspapers, because there's been very little in those papers, and on TV hardly anything, about what's been going on there.

Earlier this month, the Navy bombarded a remote section of Somalia with cruise missiles. It was the third U.S. strike there this year. The Pentagon says it's going after al Qaeda sympathizers, among them the 1998 embassy bombers who are apparently taking advantage of the power vacuum that has gripped Somalia for the past 16 years.

In that time, the country has been run by a succession of warlords and more recently by the Union of Islamic Courts, an Islamist group. It was swept from power last year by Ethiopian forces with U.S. backing.

Colin Thomas-Jensen is on staff at the International Crisis Group, an advocacy group in D.C. He says the lack of press attention is striking, especially considering the parallels with another major story.
COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN:
If you look at the strategy that we've pursued in Somalia, it looks a lot like the failed policy in Iraq. And we've overthrown the authority over the country, but we had no political plan for how to deal with the aftermath of the war. It was a lightning-swift seven-day Ethiopian incursion into Somalia. They routed out the courts. And yet the seeds were sown in that invasion for an insurgency, and that's what we have on our hands now.
AMY EDDINGS:
So it would seem there are a lot of great stories to tell here. We're talking about an oil-rich area without any central government and a bunch of alleged terrorists running around. How much would you say is trickling out into American newspapers and newscasts?

COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN:
Very little. It's really incredible. I mean, this is the type of story that has all of the hooks that news editors should look for. There's a link to terrorism. There's a national security link as well. And, as you said in your lead, it's a story of U.S. military involvement.

It's interesting. I mean, the comparison between the coverage it's getting in the U.S. and the coverage it's getting in Africa and in the Middle East is stark. Al-Jazeera is regularly reporting on what's going on in Somalia. For the Arab world this is simply another front in the War on Terror. This is the U.S. and its allies attacking a predominantly Muslim state in the name of counterterrorism objectives but leaving in their wake tremendous human suffering.

We've seen - 400,000 Somalis have fled Mogadishu just this year, the biggest population of newly-displaced persons in the world.
AMY EDDINGS:
Obviously, you can't get inside the minds of reporters and editors, but I wonder if you have any ideas as to why this story has received so little coverage here.
COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN:
Well, I think, you know, the biggest reason is simply a security issue, to provide security for journalists in Mogadishu. You're really talking about hiring hired guns, warlords, you know, who you pay by the day to escort you around in the back of a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted to secure you.

But I don't think that's an excuse. Somaliland is an autonomous area within Somalia that's relatively safe. Journalists can go there. Journalists can report the story from Djibouti, where there's 1,500 U.S. troops. We have troops based in Kenya as well.
AMY EDDINGS:
It's also a very complicated story to tell, and if we don't have enough journalistic boots on the ground I'm wondering if we also have enough experts to help analyze and put the story into context.
COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN:
Yeah, it's a very complicated story. The underlying societal structure is a latticework of clans and sub-clans that even Somali experts have a difficult time getting their hands around. And Africa seems to be, for many newspapers and wire services, a place where journalists really cut their teeth. It's their first assignment. They're learning the ropes. And that's not to say that they don't do excellent work, but the building up of knowledge of an area over many, many years is rare among Africa correspondents.
AMY EDDINGS:
Looking at the little coverage there has been about Somalia, do you think there's a tendency to simplify everything into black and white, or, in this case, Islamist and non-Islamist, and make the leap that Islamist equals disorder and vice versa?

Because in this case, it seems that, at least to a certain extent, the opposite has been true with the Union of Islamic Courts, right?
COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN:
That's correct. The Union of Islamic Courts, what they provided in Somalia over the six months that they really controlled Mogadishu and Southern Somalia was the first real sense of order and security that many Somalis had felt in 10 or 12 years. Schools were opening. People could walk the streets. The ports reopened.

And so with some of the restrictions on, say, individual freedoms that the courts might have imposed, there was a willingness among Somalis to accept those restrictions as a tradeoff for greater secure.

What's happened in the media and what's been exacerbated, I must say, by the United States is the notion that the courts themselves were simply a fig leaf for al Qaeda moving into the country. It's just not true. If the threat is real, we need to be honest about it, but not exaggerate it and create a bogeyman where there isn't one.
AMY EDDINGS:
Let's pretend for a moment you're a foreign editor at The New York Times or The Washington Post or CNN. What story or stories would you assign your reporters to cover in Somalia?
COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN:
Somalia is almost a test case. You know, 15 years after it became a test case for nation-building in the Clinton Administration, now it's a test case for the increasing involvement of the U.S. military in civil affairs and in combating terrorism in Africa. Telling that story and getting it right from the very beginning, I think, is important.
AMY EDDINGS:
Colin, thank you for your time. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN:
My pleasure, anytime.
AMY EDDINGS:
Colin Thomas-Jensen is on leave from the International Crisis Group in Washington, DC. He's currently a senior policy advisor for Enough: The Project to End Genocide and Mass Atrocities.
BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media from NPR.
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