The propensity of Somalia and its miseries to make great mischief for the United States and the international community is endless. In October 1993, less than a year into a U.S.-led United Nations effort to rebuild the failed Somali state, 18 American soldiers were killed in the wake of an abortive attack on a particularly noxious Somali warlord.

Faced with an angry Congress and a questioning public, President Clinton withdrew the U.S. from the U.N. peacekeeping mission his administration had fostered and issued a “never-again” directive tightly circumscribing the circumstances in which American support for international peace operations would be forthcoming. “Somalia syndrome,” the phobia of U.N. peacekeeping that plagued such operations for years, was born.

The 9-11 attacks changed everything, including Washington’s attitude towards Somalia. American intelligence rightly considered the country a natural safe haven for al-Qaida operations, and with various warlords as its guide, the CIA has fished in roiled Somali waters. In the process, it had at least one operational success when a man alleged to be an al-Qaida operative was abducted in Somalia by non-American agents working for the CIA.

So far, more or less so good, but as usual in Somalia, the plot has thickened in three ways. First, in a striking parallel to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan during the 1990s, judges in Somalia’s Islamic courts formed a union in 2000 to challenge the country’s transitional government (the latest is the 14th set up since 1991). By mid-2006, the union had driven the transitional government out of the capital Mogadishu and established itself as the country’s de facto government. Like the Taliban, the Courts Union brought a measure of security to Mogadishu but along with a harsh legal system and aid and comfort to al-Qaida operatives, apparently including the alleged masterminds of the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. U.S. hostility to the Courts Union movement has understandably been implacable.

Second, the Ethiopian government, alarmed at the Courts Union’s territorial designs on Ethiopia, began actively backing the transitional government. In mid-December of this year, Ethiopian aircraft and Ethiopian-backed forces routed the Courts’ fighters and returned the transitional government to Mogadishu from its internal exile in the town of Baidoa. Courts Union fighters either melted into general population or fled south to seek refuge in Kenya. The U.S. has made no secret of its support for the Ethiopian operation.

Third, on Jan. 8, U.S. aircraft attacked a column of vehicles that was headed for the Kenyan border and that, in addition to Courts Union fighters, may have been carrying three al-Qaida operatives including two believed to have been behind the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The U.S. insisted, and the Somali transitional government confirmed, that the attack had been coordinated with the transitional authorities and the cooperation of the Ethiopian government. On Jan. 11, it was reported that some 50 people had been killed in the strike but that the al-Qaida operatives were not among them.

The post-9-11 chapters of the Somalia story highlight dilemmas facing the U.S. At first glance, what American policy should be seems clear. The affairs of the failed Somali state should be placed in the hands of a secular, moderate government; whatever its faults, the transitional government is the only political force beginning to meet that description. The clerics running the Courts Union are seen as cut from the same cloth as the Taliban before them and should be driven from power; the Ethiopian attack is therefore to be welcomed and supported. Above all, when there is intelligence that major al-Qaida figures are in a particular location, they should be attacked; missing them, and “collateral damage” in the form of killing the wrong people, are part of the cost of doing business.

It ain’t necessarily so. First, the 14th Somali transitional government has 13 bad precedents to overcome; its chances of success would seem to depend on being able to reach out to parts of the Somali body politic less tainted by corruption and past failure than itself. In this connection, a serious effort to work with elements within the Courts Union that might put national unity above religious zealotry and support for al-Qaida and its objectives would seem to be in order. The two U.N. Security Council resolutions on Somalia adopted in December call for such an approach. The U.S. was in favor, or at least allowed adoption, of those resolutions, but its policies on the ground seem to undermine them.

Perhaps most important, the long-term consequences of apparently “no-brainer” strikes on known al-Qaida operatives need to be thought through. Three days later, the Jan. 8 attack has been a catalyst in returning Mogadishu to the state of dangerous anarchy that the Islamic Courts had ended. Somalis, and Muslims beyond Somalia’s border, have been quick to see collusion by two “Christian” states – Ethiopia and the U.S. – not popular in Somalia against a Muslim regime that seemed to have brought order to the country. The U.S. is also seen as having strengthened Ethiopia’s hand in its stalemated border war with Muslim Eritrea. In short, U.S. policy in Somalia and the Jan. 8 attack are grist for the Islamist assertions of a worldwide American campaign against Islam and Muslims.

It is too early to know whether an opportunity for ending the failure of the Somali state has been lost or indeed whether one even existed. Should the prospects for diplomacy appear still to exist, the U.S. would be well advised to explore and as necessary support them and to weigh carefully the cost of operations such as the Jan. 8 attack.

Charles Dunbar of Brunswick was American ambassador to Qatar and to Yemen and now teaches international relations at Boston University.