The roots of strategic failure: The Somalia Syndrome and Al Qaeda’s path to 9/11

Abstract

This article locates the origins of 9/11 in the increasingly globalized security context of the early post-Cold War period. In particular, it seeks to illuminate the causal connection between the disastrous US-UN humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1992–1993 and the emergence of a permissive security environment that ultimately made the events of 11 September possible. It is argued here that the Somali crisis was a defining moment for US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. It generated the ‘Somalia Syndrome’ in Washington – a risk-averse approach to intervention in civil conflicts which, as the terrorist attack on the United States in September 2011 subsequently revealed, had unintended but far-reaching international consequences.