ETHIOPIAN troops, with Washington's tacit approval, have routed the Islamists who seized power in Somalia last June. The official Government forged by the international community in 2004 can take power. Good news, surely?
Far from restoring stability to Somalia, this week's developments could plunge the country back into the protracted anarchy from which it only recently emerged.
There is a huge gulf between the White House's view of the Council of Islamic Courts and that of the Somali people.
To Washington, the council is - or was - a new Taliban: al-Qa'ida sympathisers who were turning Somalia into a haven for terrorists including those responsible for the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
That may or may not be true, but most Somalis welcomed the rise of the council because it banished the warlords who had reduced their country to chaos during 15 years of civil war. For the first time in a generation, people could walk the streets in safety.
Gone were the ubiquitous checkpoints where the warlords' militias extorted and killed. Guns were banned. The Somalis who had fled the violence were returning from abroad. The council did reintroduce public executions, ban the narcotic qat, and discourage Western music, films and dancing, but that seemed a small price to pay.
Most Somalis detested the official Government, which was created after two years of tortuous negotiations in Kenya between rival Somali factions, but was stranded in the town of Baidoa until this week because it dared not return to Mogadishu. The so-called Transitional Federal Government contains some of the warlords the Islamists drove out in June. It has relied for its survival on thousands of troops from US-backed Ethiopia, Somalia's most bitter enemy, whose Christian Government feared the Islamists would foment trouble among its own sizeable Muslim minority.
Washington backed the warlords in their losing battle against the Islamists. And it tacitly approved Ethiopia's military intervention to support the TFG. It has even been passing aerial surveillance reports to Addis Ababa.
Preoccupied with the spectre of Islamic terrorism, the White House is thus party to an attempt by a repressive regime in Ethiopia to replace a popular de facto government in Somalia with a widely reviled official one. It is a dangerous gamble.
The best - but least likely - outcome is that the TFG offers some sort of power-sharing deal to the leaders of Somalia's powerful Abgal and Habar Gidir clans. A more likely scenario is that the TFG fails to impose its authority, and Somalia returns to the clan warfare that has plagued it since 1991.
Equally possibly, the Islamists may have made a tactical retreat before launching a long and bloody guerilla war against the TFG and the Ethiopian troops that back it.
There are plenty of jihadists from Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the Islamic world eager to open another front in their holy war.
Some regional experts believe Washington should have encouraged any regime that brought stability to Somalia, even an Islamic one. Their fear now is that if Somalia is not already the terrorist breeding ground Washington claims it is, it will quickly become one if reduced once more to lawlessness.
Far from restoring stability to Somalia, this week's developments could plunge the country back into the protracted anarchy from which it only recently emerged.
There is a huge gulf between the White House's view of the Council of Islamic Courts and that of the Somali people.
To Washington, the council is - or was - a new Taliban: al-Qa'ida sympathisers who were turning Somalia into a haven for terrorists including those responsible for the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
That may or may not be true, but most Somalis welcomed the rise of the council because it banished the warlords who had reduced their country to chaos during 15 years of civil war. For the first time in a generation, people could walk the streets in safety.
Gone were the ubiquitous checkpoints where the warlords' militias extorted and killed. Guns were banned. The Somalis who had fled the violence were returning from abroad. The council did reintroduce public executions, ban the narcotic qat, and discourage Western music, films and dancing, but that seemed a small price to pay.
Most Somalis detested the official Government, which was created after two years of tortuous negotiations in Kenya between rival Somali factions, but was stranded in the town of Baidoa until this week because it dared not return to Mogadishu. The so-called Transitional Federal Government contains some of the warlords the Islamists drove out in June. It has relied for its survival on thousands of troops from US-backed Ethiopia, Somalia's most bitter enemy, whose Christian Government feared the Islamists would foment trouble among its own sizeable Muslim minority.
Washington backed the warlords in their losing battle against the Islamists. And it tacitly approved Ethiopia's military intervention to support the TFG. It has even been passing aerial surveillance reports to Addis Ababa.
Preoccupied with the spectre of Islamic terrorism, the White House is thus party to an attempt by a repressive regime in Ethiopia to replace a popular de facto government in Somalia with a widely reviled official one. It is a dangerous gamble.
The best - but least likely - outcome is that the TFG offers some sort of power-sharing deal to the leaders of Somalia's powerful Abgal and Habar Gidir clans. A more likely scenario is that the TFG fails to impose its authority, and Somalia returns to the clan warfare that has plagued it since 1991.
Equally possibly, the Islamists may have made a tactical retreat before launching a long and bloody guerilla war against the TFG and the Ethiopian troops that back it.
There are plenty of jihadists from Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the Islamic world eager to open another front in their holy war.
Some regional experts believe Washington should have encouraged any regime that brought stability to Somalia, even an Islamic one. Their fear now is that if Somalia is not already the terrorist breeding ground Washington claims it is, it will quickly become one if reduced once more to lawlessness.
