"Can somebody remind me how my tax dollars wound up going to pay 12-year-old Somali boys to walk around with rifles and, when circumstances seem to warrant it, kill people?

Oh, wait, it's all coming back — which is good, because the lessons go well beyond Somalia, and help explain why the war on terrorism hasn't gone well lately.

A guy my tax dollars were devoted to killing, back in 2006, is now the guy my tax dollars are devoted to arming as he fights guys we inadvertently helped empower.

Back in 2006, President George W. Bush supported and helped finance Ethiopia's military intervention in Somalia. The idea was to prop up a faltering Somali government and fend off an insurgent force called the Islamic Courts Union — even though observers warned that a) the I.C.U., by bringing order to long-chaotic parts of Somalia, had become more popular than the government we were backing; b) there were I.C.U. leaders who, by local Islamist standards, were moderate, so maybe we should try to work with them instead of kill them; c) backing a Christian government's armed intervention in a Muslim country wasn't the best way to win hearts and minds in the war on terrorism, and indeed might weaken those moderates within the I.C.U. and empower their radical rivals.

Sure enough, the American-Ethiopian intervention backfired. It wound up strengthening a radical wing of the I.C.U., which, under the name al-Shabaab, became the dominant insurgent group. In retrospect, the moderates in the I.C.U. looked pretty good, and the United States helped one of them, Sharif Sheik Ahmed, become head of the government that we continued to try to resuscitate.

So a guy my tax dollars were devoted to killing, back in 2006, is now the guy my tax dollars are devoted to arming as he fights guys we inadvertently helped empower. (And his operations seem not to be going very well.)"

R. Wright, NYT