Somalia is a graveyard for bungled foreign interventions. A succession of US, UN and regional attempts to engineer an outcome to the civil war raging since 1991 have exacerbated problems they aimed to solve.

Global leaders have been forced to weigh their options once again by an epidemic of piracy off the Somali coast. This has brought an age-old scourge to the heart of one of the world’s busiest trading corridors. The Somali pirates must be stopped. But policymakers must also ensure the way they go about this does not backfire onshore.