Afghanistan experience to be replicated in Somalia

The Taliban’s swift capture of power in Afghanistan took the world by surprise and triggered much controversy on whether Somalia could be the next Afghanistan.

A suicide car bomb killed at least eight people in the Somali capital on Saturday at a street junction near the president's palace, police said, and al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab said it was behind the attack which targeted a convoy going into the palace.

With a similar rapid collapse of state institutions, the nation-building experiment in Somalia will collapse, just like in Afghanistan, unless a different approach is taken.

Somalia bears many similarities to Afghanistan. In both countries, an Islamist governance project took root after a lengthy period of conflict, only to be dislodged by outside powers within the context of the global war on terrorism.

What ensued were externally driven state-building projects to replace the previous governance structures, as well as burgeoning insurgencies against those interventions (led by the Taliban and al-Shabab, respectively).

The new governments were sustained by external security assistance but struggled to generate the required levels of local legitimacy to succeed. In fact, the Somali government’s own survival is heavily dependent on external troops, as it is unable to pay the salaries of its own police and military.

With limited capacity in manpower, protective equipment, and training, the Somali national army is facing modern guerrilla-style warfare and enemy fighters hellbent on risking their lives at any cost.

This experience has ramifications well beyond Afghanistan, but perhaps nowhere are the parallels as striking as in Somalia.