A civilian army of entrepreneurs and expatriates offers hope in this East African nation, bloodied by warring clans.

Somalia appears to be the very definition of what we call a failed state. The last time this desert country possessed anything approaching a "normal" government, with tax collection, social services, and law enforcement, was under a bloody dictator named Siad Barre. After Barre was driven out by a national rebellion early in 1991, political power over most of Somalia fell into the hands of feuding warlords, who, like grand dukes from the European Middle Ages, deployed their private armies to battle for power even as hundreds of thousands of other Somalis were dying of hunger. Outside intervention, often with good intentions, has done little to help—and has usually made things worse.

Draped around the Horn of Africa, its coasts washed by the Indian Ocean to the east and the Gulf of Aden to the north, Somalia is for the most part an arid land with only two permanent rivers, one of which dries up intermittently. The country is largely flat, except for the low but rugged mountain ranges of the north. Some of the salient features of the landscape and its inhabitants were enumerated a century ago by nationalist leader Mohamed Abdullah Hassan, known to his enemies as the Mad Mullah: "I like war, and you do not," he wrote in a threatening note to the British colonial authorities then occupying the northern part of the country (the Italians colonized the south). "The country . . . is no use to you. If you want wood and stone you can get them in plenty. There are also many ant heaps. The sun is very hot."