Beyond Black Hawk Down: Intervention, Nation-Building, and Insurgency in Somalia, 1992-1995

Summary

The story of Black Hawk Down is a familiar one. On 3 October 1993 two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and in the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis were killed. But very few appreciate that this was one day in a two-and-a-half-year operation; the most ambitious attempt in history to rebuild a nation. The United States sought to show the world that the UN could rebuild a country, but in a dire foreshadowing of the failed efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later, the intervention in Somalia was plagued with political infighting, policy mismatch, confusion, and fatal assumptions.

In 1992 Somalia saw the largest ever deployment of American troops to the continent of Africa, and 1993 brought the first UN-led peace enforcement mission and the most ambitious experiment in nation-building. In Beyond Black Hawk Down, Jonathan Carroll provides the first scholarly military history of the intervention, from its early and largely successful humanitarian phase in 1992 through to the ultimate withdrawal of UN forces in 1995. Carroll dispels the myths and misunderstandings surrounding one of the most infamous episodes of the 1990s to present a new interpretation, most notably by including the Somali perspective, to argue what went wrong in Somalia, and more importantly, why.

Understanding the intervention in Somalia, its successes, and the roots of its failures, is invaluable to contemporary debates on nation-building and counterinsurgency. Moreover, the increasing regularity of inter-state and intra-state conflicts across the world means the international community will continue to be called upon to intervene in other failed or failing states. Beyond Black Hawk Down is an important history that will inform future military interventions.