As one political scientist recently noted, a "fundamental difficulty" for counterterrorist operations in collapsed states like Somalia is the ever-shifting landscape of loyalties:
Local authorities collaborate with the insurgents that they fight. Armed groups unify and then suddenly split.
This is a treacherous environment for outsiders to navigate, particularly someone who poses as a humanitarian do-gooder/ intelligence operative. But if you are someone also looking to profit off of the instability of a place like Somalia, then you are accustomed to a duplicitous world of murky alliances. Michele Ballarin, a Virginia businesswoman who is the subject of my Washington Post magazine profile, comfortably inhabits all these roles. As I wrote in my piece, in the late 2000s Ballarin became a confidant of Somali pirates, warlords and politicians, who refer to her as Amira (which means princess in Arabic). In 2009 she became friendly with Somalia's then-incoming President, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh ...
