What little authority President Abdullahi Yusuf has over Somalia is rapidly evaporating.
His director of security said yesterday that only about 20 per cent of the southern part of the country was under government control, and that a massive assault by the radical Council of Islamic Courts was imminent.
He appealed for further foreign support for an interim administration so weak that last year it was able to take possession of the capital, Mogadishu, only by force of Ethiopian arms.
In October, Mr Yusuf lost his prime minister, Ali Mohammed Ghedi, due to personal differences.
The president himself is in London, receiving medical attention.
The attempt to submit Somalia to a modicum of centralised control for the first time since 1991 seems doomed.
In considering how to respond, the outside world should reflect long and hard on the failure of its previous prognosis.
Mr Yusuf has proved a woeful head of state doubly hated by the inhabitants of Mogadishu, first because he is a Darod in a Hawiye city, second because he owes his presence there to a foreign army.
The Ethiopians have been hamfisted in their attempt to pacify the capital; by giving asylum to Islamists simply on the basis that my enemy\'s enemy is my friend, the Eritreans are open to charges of sponsoring terrorism.
A better approach would have been to sift the most radical of the courts from the less so, and to have gone for a deal with the latter.
That could still be possible, although, following their defeat last December, the Islamists may well be returning to the fray more radicalised than before. If so, the implications are ominous.
A Somalia run by the courts would afford a springboard for terrorist attacks on Europe.
Two of the four men convicted this summer for plotting to bomb London\'s transport system on July 21, 2005 were part of the large Somali community in this country.
Violent disorder in the Horn of Africa is nearer than we think.
