DAVID GREGORY: Let me ask you about another important issue facing you and your administration, and that is Afghanistan. We've now been in Afghanistan for eight years. The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan after ten years. Are we committed to this war for an indefinite period of time? Or do you think, in your mind, is there a deadline for withdrawal?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I don't have a deadline for withdrawal. But I'm certainly not somebody who believes in indefinite occupations of other countries. Keep in mind what happened when I came in. We had been adrift, I think, when it came to our Afghanistan strategy. And what I said was that we are going to do a top to bottom review of what's taking place there.

Not just a one time review, but we're gonna do a review before the election in Afghanistan, and then we're gonna do another review after the election. And we are gonna see how this is fitting what, I think, is our core goal. Which is to go after the folks who killed the 3,000 Americans during 9/11, and who are still plotting to kill us, al Qaeda. How do we dismantle them, disrupt them, destroy them?

Now, getting our strategy right in Afghanistan and in Pakistan are both important elements of that. But that's our goal. And I want to stay focused on that. And- and so, right now, what's happened is that we've had an election in Afghanistan. It did not go as smoothly as I think we would have hoped. And there are some serious issues in terms of how that- how the election was conducted in some parts of the country. But we've had that election. We now finally have the 21,000 troops in place that I had already ordered to go.

DAVID GREGORY: Are you skeptical about more troops? About sending more troops?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, can I just say this? I am- I have to exercise skepticism anytime I send a single young man or woman in uniform into harm's way. Because I'm the one who's answerable to their parents if they don't come home. So I have to ask some very hard questions anytime I send our troops in.

The question that I'm asking right now is to our military, to General McChrystal, to General Petraeus, to all our national security apparatus, is- whether it's troops who are already there, or any troop request in the future, how does this advance America's national security interests? How does it make sure that al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot attack the United States homeland, our allies, our troops who are based in Europe?

That's the question that I'm constantly asking because that's the primary threat that we went there to deal with. And if- if supporting the Afghan national government, and building capacity for their army, and securing certain provinces advances that strategy, then we'll move forward.

But, if it doesn't, then I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or, in some way- you know, sending a message that America- is here for- for the duration. I think it's important that we match strategy to resources.

What I'm not also gonna do, though, is put the resource question before the strategy question. Until I'm satisfied that we've got the right strategy I'm not gonna be sending some young man or woman over there- beyond what we already have.

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In mid-April Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a scathing report on the East African nation  of Eritrea accusing the government of President Issayas Afeworki of turning the strategically located country on the Red Sea into one giant prison complete with underground cells and metal shipping containers awaiting any dissenters. Indeed, Afeworki has been ranked as one of the world's top ten dictators, a dubious honour to say the least. That's disturbing enough but recently President Afewerki forced the United Nations Mission to Eritrea out of country by cutting off all supplies to the UN-mission. Fears among Horn of Africa watchers is that Eritrea might be preparing for another senseless war with Ethiopia with whom the country shares a long and ill-defined border.

Furthermore, Somalia's new government led by President Sharif Sheik Ahmed is accusing Eritrea of arming insurgent groups in Somalia. The allegation is a repeat of events two years ago, when the United Nations accused Eritrea of secretly sending weapons to Somalia's militant al-Shabaab group.

Now the BBC is reporting that US is concerned:

The US says it is seriously concerned by reports Eritrea is supplying arms to foreign fighters and Islamic hardliners fighting government forces in Somalia.

"This as a disturbing development," President Barack Obama's top official on Africa, Jonnie Carson, told the BBC.

Eritrea denies any involvement in arming or financing Islamist militants trying to overthrow the government.

Following a week of violence, 100 people are dead and 30,000 more have fled Somalia's capital, Mogadishu.

There have been a number of reports of foreign fighters, with possible links to al-Qaeda, fighting alongside hardline Islamists of al-Shabaab and Hisbul-Islam, said Mr Carson, the US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.

"We're extremely worried about the reports."

"There seem to be fairly serious and creditable reports that al Shabaab does have, amongst its fighters, a number of individuals of South Asian and Chechen origin," said Mr Carson.

"This is a very disturbing situation and reflects the seriousness of the problem in Somalia."

Mr Carson also expressed concern about flights from Eritrea were carrying weapons and ammunition to Somalia to supply al-Shabaab.

"There have been numerous reports that the government of Eritrea has, in fact, been supplying weapons and munitions to al-Shabaab.

"These are reports that we do find credible," he said.

Like its neighbour Sudan, Eritrea has too found a sponsor in China and it is about time the United States bring these matters to the attention of the Chinese. The arming of the Al Qaeda linked al-Shabaab serves no one, least of all the Somalis.

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African news gets little coverage in the United States or in the West for the matter so in case you missed it Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed on Wednesday signed into law a parliament-passed bill introducing the Islamic Sharia law in Somalia. The bill had been passed by Somalia's Parliament back in February and various opposition groups had been pressing for the President to sign the bill into law. Sharia law has been in use since 2006 in Puntland, a breakaway region in the northern part of the country. And in December, the Islamist armed group Almujahidin al-Shabaab had imposed their won rather brutal version of Sharia, in areas under their control in Somalia.

The news didn't calm things in Mogadishu where eight people were killed and fifteen others were wounded in fresh fighting that erupted between government forces and Islamist fighters of the aforementioned Al-Shabaab, a group that reportedly has ties to Al-Qaeda. I doubt the enactment of Sharia will change much in tormented Somalia.

Since his election in January, Sheikh Ahmed, a former rebel leader and a moderate Islamist, has been painstakingly trying to court Al-Shabaab without much success. There is little reason for them to negotiate since Al-Shabaab holds sway over more territory than the official government. The Islamists now control most of southern Somalia except for a few pockets in Mogadishu protected by African Union-backed government forces and fighters loyal to the president's former rebel faction.

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For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish with McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

The above is a candid Thomas Friedman gracing the op-ed pages of the nation's paper of record back in March 1998. My one quibble with Friedman is that the fist isn't so hidden. Those of us who are from the developing world have felt it at one time or another. I am always perplexed at moments such as this as to why the so many of the American people are so prone to jingoism and why so many fail to see to the threat of American militarism to American democracy. Reading the US press today was a horrifying affair. Here's one of the most jingoistic, that of Fred C. Iklé of the Washington Post whose op-ed is entitled Kill the Pirates which leaves little doubt as to his ultimate solution happens to be.

With the rescue of American Richard Phillips from the hands of pirates yesterday, there was a blip of good news from the Indian Ocean, but it remains a scandal that Somali pirates continue to routinely defeat the world's naval powers. And worse than this ongoing demonstration of cowardice is the financing of terrorists that results from the huge ransom payments these pirates are allowed to collect.

What's scandalous in my mind is that the Reagan Administration dropped a half billion dollars' worth of weapons on the country to arm a notorious butcher, Siad Barre. Then again, the US keeps on doing this the world over in the face of disaster after disaster. I might suggest the strategy isn't working.

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Somalia has an ethnic homogeneity unusual in Africa, with Somalis constituting 85% of the population. Most of its citizens share a common language, religion and culture. Yet it has never achieved lasting stability as a nation. Since the early 1990s its civil war has been one of the most destructive in recent African history. European colonization resulted in the division of Somali territory into five different colonies.

Reunification preoccupied successive elites at the cost of addressing more concrete issues. National issues remained undebated while the cultivation of clan and subclan interests accentuated the demise of kinship and the rise of clannism, the politicisation of the clan structure for personal gain.

Various possibilities have been proposed in seeking to explain why one of the few nations on the continent with predominantly one ethnic group, one religion, culture and language should have become overcome by a devastating civil war. Some scholars relate this political instability to the Somali clan system, in which retaliation for offences committed by rival clans can easily escalate into warfare. Others argue that Somalia's recent turmoil reflects efforts by elites to manipulate clan loyalties in the hope of increasing their own wealth. Still other contend that Somalia's homogeneity is in fact a myth that obscures long -standing tensions between nomadic groups and the descendants of Bantu-speaking slaves. Moreover, some analysts trace the roots of conflict to the colonial period, when access to power and pastoral resources - long regulated by Somalia's many widely dispersed clan leaders - came under the control of the centralized colonial and later post colonial - state.

Look at any map of Africa and there on the Horn of Africa you'll find a geographic entity labeled Somalia. But the country of Somalia doesn't exist and hasn't existed since the government of Siad Barre collapsed in 1991 in the wake of the Cold War. Somalia today remains a state of mind and not much more. It is a dream unfulfilled and yet Western governments persist on continuing the Somali nightmare.

The tragedy of Somalia is ever more harder to comprehend since the Somali are one of the largest and most homogeneous ethnic groups in Africa that live in a relatively contiguous territory unlike the Peul, Tuareg or the Hausa who are spread out across the Sahel. More than eight million Somalis live in a territory stretching north from northern Kenya to Djibouti and west from the Indian Ocean into the scrubland desert of the Ogaden in Ethiopia. An unified Somali homeland is in the realm of possibilities but for the fact the West won't allow borders carved out in Berlin in 1885 to be altered. European maps and American ones by extension, it seems, are sacrosanct.

For over a century, the Horn of Africa has seen foreign powers play their imperial games on this distant shore. Colonialism was not kind to the Somalis, who were largely nomadic. By the end of the 19th century, European powers had partitioned the Somali home territory into the British Somaliland Protectorate, French Somaliland, Italian Somalia, northern Kenya and the Ogaden in Ethiopia. Independence would come in 1960 with a fusion of the British and Italian zones into the Republic of Somalia with the two territories facing the daunting challenge of integration that in truth were never breached but rather unity was achieved through authoritarianism. And with 40% of Somalis living outside Somalia, the government in Mogadishu quickly became an irrendentist one laying claims to the Ogaden, Haud and parts of northeastern Kenya and the whole French Somaliland, present day Djibouti.

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