This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 17, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's not much appreciated by the public, but the United States has deployed troops to several dozen countries

over very short time frames very recently.

In the case of Somalia's essentially invisible war, the U.S. intervention there has done

little to secure any kind of peace. So says Bronwyn Bruton,

deputy director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, she spoke of the Cato Institute in March.

In a brief period of time, I would like very quickly to tell you the story of Somalia in the last 15 years.

And it's a story, as our invitation pointed out, that is very little understood.

It's little talked about in the United States, but it's nevertheless, I think, one of the most terrible tragedies of our time.

And I want to start by telling you about Somalia on September 10, 2001, one day before the terrible terror strikes that changed all of our lives.

Somalia in 2001 was not a terrible place.

There was an awful breakdown of Somali society in 1991,

a military dictatorship that had lasted for many years collapsed.

And there was a vicious civil war and a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

But by the beginning of this century, all of those things had pretty much

ended. The war had played itself out. Everything that could be stolen had been stolen. There were terrible

bandit militias that were roaming the country, but for the most part it was

low-level violence and people were living peaceful lives. Most importantly for the U.S. There wasn't a lot of radical Islamist

activity. There had been in the 90s. It failed horrifically. Al Qaeda had

done its best to import some fighters and some ideologues.

They had basically retreated from the country cursing under their breath about everything

...