At issue is Somalia’s debt. According to the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, between 1991 and 2011, the United States spent $50 billion on Somalia. Over the past decade, the U.S. has given hundreds of millions of dollars more annually. Add into the mix the European Union, United Nations, and other aid agencies, and the money is even greater.

There are several problems with this, all of which should raise red flags in the White House and Congress.

When historians and academics consider Somalia’s collapse, they focus not only on mismanagement under dictator Siad Barre, whose reign of terror collapsed in 1991, but also on the wholesale looting of state assets. As the late historian John Drysdale noted, "Opportunism, being the ancient key to Somali survival in savannah conditions, could be readily turned by recent generations of urban dweller to the exploitation of alien moneybags.” Indeed, while the U.S. State Department seeks to concentrate all funds into Mogadishu in order to build patronage and loyalty to the central government, any honest assessment of recent Somali history will find insecurity an inverse relationship between aid and security. A new Stanford University Press book by Canadian scholar Jessica Darden Drisko finds direct linkages between greater humanitarian aid and state violence.