The intersection of two international events – in Somalia and in Iraq - reminds us not to claim too much after taking out an anti-American leader; maybe it will contribute to reducing serious local conflicts; probably it won’t. Eliminating the brutal warlord Aideed didn’t reverse the savage trends in Somalia - remember the movie “Blackhawk Down”. It is unlikely that eliminating Zakawi will slow the civil war in Iraq. Or that stopping the man called Osama bin Laden will stop al-Qaeda terrorism.

America loves a leader - whether it’s the John Wayne good guy or the evil outlaw. He stands chiseled out from the messy background, as individual hero or anti-hero. It’s good that American troops brought Zakawi to final, fatal justice. But let’s not confuse the death of one leader with the death of an insurgency deeply embedded in its local society.

One of the last acts of Bush the Senior was to launch an unexpected strike against the Somali warlords, a particularly nasty group of thugs who were lording it over the local populations, putting an estimated 300,000 people at risk of starvation. One of the poorest places on earth, the great traditional strengths of the Somali people lay in their clans, local institutions that provide social support and cultural identity. But once societal conditions badly deteriorated ambitious and selfish clan leaders mobilized the clans as quasi-tribes that enhanced their top-down power.

In 1993 the NSC Directorate I worked for was tasked to develop strategies to reduce or eliminate the wrenching conflict that was putting 300,000 Somalis at risk of starvation. In the beginning a small part of the thinking was to ‘get Aideed’, the most powerful warlord. But over time capturing the leader took on greater and greater urgency in the strategy. Eventually the top leadership was neutralized. But whacking the leaders didn’t answer all our prayers. The violence continued and turned into a perpetual state of war as the state itself collapsed. There’s been no government to speak of for more than a decade, and an apparently Islamicist putsch recently intervened and has driven out other leaders, creating a potentially worrisome scenario.

It’s a good thing to capture or kill a rebel leader, but one shouldn’t be naive about its consequences. It’s all too easy to concentrate on one bad guy - al Zakawi, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hitler - at the expense of understanding the gritty contradictory realities on the ground in faraway places. Religious affiliations, old political enmities, patron-client relationships, and culture all shape local interests and deeply affect our capacity to shape local outcomes. To know the fundamentals requires skills of cultural competence. Refusing the requirements of cultural competence is not smart. Concentrating on single leaders instead of local complexities is not smart. America needs more cultural competence to get smarter, so we can learn to design foreign policies that actually advance America’s national interests.