Break it up!

The southern third of Somalia is a wasteland fought over by rival gangs of tribalist Islamists. The middle third, Puntland, is the base for the pirates that have been plaguing international shipping. And the upper third, Somaliland, is a stable, peaceful proto-state with semi-free elections...so stable, in fact, that we use it as our base to fight piracy.

Somaliland wants, and deserves, its independence. Why haven't we given it to them? The answer is that we don't want to redraw the national boundaries left by the retreating European empires in the mid-20th century. The implicit reason, I suppose, is that redrawing borders would spark a bunch of territorial wars all over the world, because countries would see land as once more being up for grabs.

But it seems to me that, sometimes, the tribal and ethnic divisions ignored by the 19th-century European colonists are just too severe to allow some of these big post-colonial mishmash countries to remain intact. I mean - Congo? Who really thinks that tribal patchwork should be a country? It's not as if our neo-Westphalian insistence that King Leopold of Belgium's personal colonial plaything maintain its exact borders until the end of time has done any favors for the people who actually live there.

Somaliland has the opportunity to be a real African success story - ethnically united, stable, and orderly with good access to the sea. I say tear up the old British maps and let it be a nation!

Also, as an aside, I think we should break up Afghanistan...